[CF List] castles and guilds

[Todd Mitchell]

I am surprised no one has commented on ongoing costs for guilds.  I think this is a good idea, not so much for taking money out of the game as for building community.  The need for a shared semi-permanent space is obvious by the rousing commentary about castles - and as in real life every one wants to carve out their own place and show it off.  Guilds are nice but I expect they are a bit too communal to satisfy that territory urge.  I think if you have castles people will forgo the guilds pretty quickly. Especially if the castles have all sorts of perks like charging rooms and banks and smithies.  I would like to see this sort of thing avoided for castles and have them stick to more homey kind of perks to obtain like display cases and servants and extra levels (perhaps even a random dungeon below?) and portals.  I can invision a variety of houses from a small keep to a large castle with creators for things like servants and guards, display cases, additional levels, guardian beasts (for show), portals and other permanent furniture.

I am not too keen on having these structures available to thieves - it seems like that idea might look good but I expect it would be pretty unpopular in practice, not to mention throw the game out.  I suspect that some thieving will occur at any rate as people are always looking for exploitable 'features' in the game.

Now guilds with the charging room and other perks such as discount smithies, private money exhange, discount item repair shops they do/could become more like a private club.  Of course for these things it would be good to have an ongoing costs to belong.  The best way to do this AND grow a guild mentality is to have ongoing costs for the founders.  Leave it up to them to come up with the cash - and they will organize membership drives and chase down debtors.  The current price for a guild is not enough to make it more than an exclusive club.  If the costs had to be defrayed however there would be incentive to get more members.   Perhaps a guild bank account could be created and guild founders could have some way to add or remove players from the member list and allow or bar access.  You could also skim off the top for services so that the more people use them the less the overall cost becomes.

I have almost finished a template for a mid sized keep and look forward to making some other similar structures and improvements to the guild houses (some of those names are a bit fluffy for my taste).   Finding the java editor was fantastic - and humbling when I found out how long it took to build something that worked properly (not just looked nice) - even with this powerful tool.  One of the first things I made on my server was a 'club house' - before guilds were available - so I know it is a popular idea.  I just think it would be simpler and faster to use the tools already available for designing these structures and perhaps spend the effort on other system enhancements to make them work well in the game (like guild banks and castle taxes).

I can see the attraction for building (I was enthralled by the Post Modern MOO a long time ago) but think it a bit excessive for crossfire when there is such a good tool for creating maps and such a derth of new maps being made and submitted.  Also, there is a huge need for cataloging and automating the documentation of the existing items in the game, that an ingame editor would just make huge problems right now.  I think that improvements to the arch collection and the documentation (in game as books and out game as documentation) would be a good first step in the direction (I mean dm's can create lots of stuff, but you still need to know how specify what to create.)  I can even see a 'deed' that will create a pre-made structure somewhere on the map - but to have people digging out maps all over seems to be somewhere way way way over the horizon.

I seem to have exceeded my two cents here...
-tm
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