Housewarming!

StrikesBrain

Several house related ideas here, bear with me.

I was thinking about good ol' /chanserv, you know, the old mainstay of many IRC servers that keeps your channels secure.  And consdering it's system for access lists it dawned one me for a system on customizing rankings in a house.

First off, this can be done in a way, that all new guilds have a simple default init, guardian, ruler lineup with all the basic rankings.  This way, those who don't want to tweak their heirarchy can stay with a nice and simple tried and true default.

Here's the way this works, rank is based off of a scale of 1 to 10.  All new members start at 1 and rank 1 is called initiate, all they gain is access to rooms if the guild has a house and storage.  All guardians are rank 5, they have the mission board access more room access and the fun stuff.  Rulers, are always 10 and they have the highest access save for lyra operated house players who have total access.  A new guild by default starts with 2 rulers, 2 guardians and 6 initiates, under this system by default it'd be 2 rank 10 which would be running under the default name "ruler" and 2 rank 10's running under the default name "guardian" and 6 rank 1 initiates.

Now, let's say you want to tweak your house.  The rulers gain access to the "access" panel.  It bring up all the ranks, with any names assigned to them next to them.  A ruler can rename any rank, tie a new name to a rank, not only that, there could be a whole list of features in a house, and you can tie a min rank for each privilege.  A lot of these features are useless without a house.

• Base room access - Gives access to all member rooms, by default assigned to initiates.
• Secure room access - Gives access to guardian areas, by default assigned to guardians.
• Top Security access - Gives access to Ruler areas, by default assigned ot rulers.
• Storage access - Gives the member storage area in the prime, by default assigned ot initiates.
• Mission board access - Allows the dreamer to access and read missions normally inits have this.
• High Mission access - Allows dreamer to access what would normally be called the guardian missions, normally guardians have this.
• Mission, no exp - Allows the member to post a mission on the mission board but not reward experience, any missions posted will be flagged so all the posts to it will be readable by those who can reward experience, in the off chance the person wants someone to reward experience for them. Normally this isn't used and assigned to guardians.
• Mission, experience - Allows the member to start a mission and reward experience with the basic guardian pool.  In order to put a stop to cheesiness, i'd suggest making experience rewards a drain on the prime.  This privilege supercedes Mission, no exp
• Mission, high exp - Same as above but with a ruler mission exp pool. 
• Mission, High missions - Allows you to write missions for what's normally the guardian missions, normally reserved for rulers.  As usual everyone with the ability needs to ok any upcomming mission.
• Initiate - Normally assigned to guardians, allows the dreamer to initiate people.
• Prime access - Allows access to any of the more advanced prime features, normally a guardian level ability.
• Full Prime access - Any house secrets are now yours, generally reserved for rulers.
• Declare War - Normally reserved for rulers, does as the name says.

That's just to name a few.  Now, from this, if you don't touch ANYTHING you are good and golden, the defaults stick close to the UL original and you can play a guild happily without tweaking it.  Yet, if you want to go a bit more advanced, you can now make up ranks and chang privileges around.  Some things are ONLY avalaible to rank 10 and can not be changed, such as changing this stuff around.

Let's a guild wants to create an aspirant rank.  A rank that is not quite initiate but the person is with the house in name only.  You could set rank 1 so it has practically NO privileges.  You can then up all the normal rank 1 privileges to rank 2 and name rank 2 "initiate" and name rank 1 "apsirant", the person could wear the emblem until you decide they have proven themselves. 

Let's say a guild wants a rank for a "speaker" an initiate charged with voicing the complaints of the initiates to the higher ups.  You could set that to rank 2, and give it privileges to write missions with no exp and give the rank access to secure areas so he or she an keep a place open where initiates could voice complaints and the person could slip into guardian areas to speak to them as needed.

Let's say, you trust your guardians with ALL those abilities and you want to break it up, you could name rank 6 "Guardian First Class" and move the initiate and prime access abilities to rank 6.

If someone has WAY too much time on their hands and likes making up ranks, they can have 10 total, there is a limit, only a ruler can propose changes, when that's done, all other rulers logging in are notified of the proposed changes and they must go to the access panel where it lists the proposed changes and gives them 2 buttons to either accept or decline, it requires a majority vote to pass.

This allows people to really have those fun different rank names like what some houses did.  Also, it would be nice to add in an option to select the emblem colors for any ranks, if there is no emblem defined for a rank, it uses the next lowest emblem colors.   When you try to promote someone, it'll just by default have the next named rank selected for you to ok, that way, if someone doesn't fiddle with ranks, they aren't bothered with remember which one is guardian, it'll be highlighted by default.

The whole idea of this system is to allow a large degree of customizability, yet at the same time not make things more complicated for those who want nothing of it.

Now for something completely different.

How about allowing rulers to change the access levels of portals, and renaming rooms?  Then agian, I think I mentioned this before, and then even allow them to make more rooms vault rooms at the cost of a higher upkeep pay.  This would allow houses higher mutabliilty, the most extreme, and possibly unfeasible idea is to even rewire where portals lead to within the house!

Of course something else:

It would be a funky idea if house's had a syster that the rulers could turn on that would allow the little men to elect people!  Yo uset a term, and how much of a majority needed to elect someone, then when the term comes up, on the mission board the initiates get a warning that thye can now nominate someone for guardian.  By nominating someone, a special mission is put on the board that everyone can review and vote yes or no to.  And at that time the guardians get to do the same for prospective rulers.  You could even give guardians and rulers bigger votes.  And even, one could give the ruler the option to allow people to challenge officials.  A challenge puts a special mission on the board that everyone can vote on, if the vote passes by the majority margin specified when this was enabled, then the official is demoted.  All of that would be optional, yet, somehow I think it is too crazy and complicated.  I put this up though because it's in my head and I may as well get it out of my head.

JMandrake

The ideology behind this is great!

I remember bringing this up also but in a different manner where their would be ranking between initiates and guardians and also rulers their would be bars around your crest and once one is fill up then by default you be next in line to become either a guardian or ruler. If i remmeber right i said 5 bars. and only Rulers can grant a bar for great service to the house.

One thing tho from your ideology struck me as kind of off.

you mention

Prime access - Allows access to any of the more advanced prime features, normally a guardian level ability.

Since the prime can't leave any room anymore in Reclamation wouldn't this be useless?

 

one more thing ( Democracy is dead!!!!! Bring on Anarchy!! only the strongest survive!! )) heheh

Don't think there will be much of a democratic view at the begining of Reclamation but i suspect it will be out there at some point.

StrikesBrain

Well I'm not too sure exactly HOW many fuctions are avaliable at the prime or who can do what with it.  I know anyone can dump essences in, and I know anyone can access storage in it, but it DOES make me wonder if there's other little features, like making power tokens.  If making power tokens is say, a guardian task, you could give that to someone else.  i was just trying to cover any uncharted ground and second guess lyra.

PoloJoe

When first reading this post, I was a bit of a skeptic about more than three rankings. One of the highlights I thought about Underlight's structure was its simplicity. Three ranks seemed perfect: it didn't overcomplicate things, each position had its clear duty, and it had a minimal understanding and learning curve for folks new or in other houses. Imagine someone calling themself Major Soandso from DoL, and another dreamer being Priest Whomever of KoES. People would be like, who? What does that mean? Each house having their own system of ranking would be confusing, and left be to think that UL's simple ranking made everything uniform and easy to understand. Especially if there were up to ten different ones.

But after thinking about it, and understanding that thousands of dreamers were expected per server, leaving possibly hundreds of dreamers per house, that three ranks may not be enough. Assigning custom privledges really would be a great idea, but I believe there should still be some kind of uniformity to it. Like 1-3 have Initiate crest and status, 4-6 Guardian, 7-9 Ruler. Kind of like having custom rankings, but with a farmiliar 'parent' name for lack of a better word. 1 could be Aspirant, 2 Initiate, 3 Veteran Initiate...just for example, customizable for each house. And to keep uniformity, keep the same white/red/blue coloring for the crests, and not have someone from some house pop out of the woodwork with some orange crest; just to keep the simplicity and prevent any confusion of which I stated in the last paragraph about different ranking systems in every house.

I think back to the old Calenturian days when a third of the house were Rulers, a third Guardians, and a third Initiates (seemingly) with like twenty or so in each position. With hundreds of potential active dreamers in a house, a more defining structure may be a good idea. But could you imagine, a ceremony for each bump up? Maybe we'll save the oaths for the 'major' Knightings and Ascentions to Rulership.

StrikesBrain

That's why it's set up by default so you got the basic init guardian ruler setup with a few blank slots between each with this system's default.  If you dump 10+ ranks on a house right off the bat you'll confuse and overwhelm everyone.

The idea is this would be an advanced feature for someone who is finding the default setting for their house not enough.

And the ranks by default would have the default emblems, for simplicity agian.  If a house wants to tweak their coloration though, they can do that on their own volition.  I mean sure it would be funky to have suddenly someone with orange pop out of the woodwork, but if a house wants to be freaky with emblems for all 10 ranks at once, then they can go ahead and go the convoluted way. 

The general idea, is to give more ranks then you think they'll need with a lot of room between each.  That way people will never run out of room.  It's like getting a box to store stuff, you try to go bigger then your target number.

Of course you could start it all at rank 1 2 and 3 by default with an open ended number of ranks, but unless there's a copy & paste function to copy over ranks, then inserting new ranks between each other would become a very tedious job.

Malamenz

I like it the idea, what popped into my mind was you have dreamer who's been around forever and you can use this sytem to honor them.  example: Valouran and the "advisor" role he had at DoL torwards the end of his time, under this system DoL could have given him either another color for his crest, or at least give him acsess to certain areas even though he still had the white initiate crest.

StrikesBrain

I finally realized a way to make the whole idea completely transparent, for each rank, have a checkbox labled "allow".  If the rank's not allowed, nobody can be promoted to it.

This would be a lot convenient since it would make the system totally invisible if you do not tamper with it, yet it still allows for power user features.

I liken it to an installation of Windows (let us not discuss stability here).  Some users get it, and just use it as is, they have the default colors and schemes and settings.  Some users get it and go RIGHT into the settings and reset every sound color and option until you get to the point where unfamiliar useres find the computer awkward and hard to navigate for them, but for the user of that PC it's just right because it's their setup.

With this, the gold old fashioned classic UL system would stay in place for those who don't like to tweak, but if you got the elbow grease and the creativity, a whole new world of options is open for you to make your guild a totally unique one.