Problems with Arm

Aside from all the bigger issues that tend to get brought up repeatedly around here, this is one of the ones that fly under the radar:



Over two weeks to have an item order filled. This should take a matter of seconds for clan staff to do. You order something that already exists in the database and it takes half a month on average for someone to look the item up and load it in a storeroom. That's a third of an in-game year to get your silk pantaloons. It might then take another week for the PC merchant to deliver it to you, depending on playtimes and whether or not they're in your area at the time. What possible justification is there for such a delay?

And a literal month for a custom craft. You already have to submit the description and crafting recipe yourself, it's not like staff has to come up with the text. They have to paste it into an editor and maybe do a quick check to make sure it doesn't overlap too much with another similar item. I've staffed and built on MUDs, this task is something that takes two minutes. But here it takes longer to get someone to copy-paste your customcraft information than it takes to apply for college. What the hell is taking a month?

Looking back through the updates section, there's 2-4 item orders and customcrafts per week. It's not like there's some massive backlog that people can't keep up with. More importantly, what does it say about this game that there are three GMHs and about ten items being ordered per month? What exactly is the purpose of so much clanspace and so many characters devoted to this? Kurac has other stuff going on as well, but as far as Kadius and Salarr go, they basically exist to sell shit--and there's two or three orders per week between them?

It's downright mysterious.

I just glanced back at a month and a half period for when I was overseeing GMH with Nergal and our averages were:

3.5
4.5
6.2
2.5
0.67
1.29

2 weeks is not the standard and is unacceptable. Any repercussions from not getting those silky braies to the templars and nobles quick enough should be neutralized by staff, since it's their fault it's taking that long.

Our policy was, when I staffed, that all requests went through the request tool. There was a log purely for accountability's sake. I don't know if staff are, these days, entertaining requests through Discord DMs, though it wouldn't surprise me, but that'd be a bad idea ... if only because the actual, official requests, as seen above, suffer, and your numbers start to look poopy.

Without naming names, there were definitely some GMH players who would take orders and pigeonhole them, never submit them to staff, then turn around and tell the PC ordering the item that "the seniors" (IC-speak for the staff) haven't responded yet, sometimes stretching this for weeks. This effectively was a way dunk on a PC the GMH PC disliked while making the staff look like lazy assholes for not being able to close a request.

Not entirely related to the above, but in similar vein:

Are, or were, staff bothered by master/custom crafts and, as others suggested, "putting off as long as possible" or "until the pcs died", or are there reasonable reasons for new items taking as long as they do?

I don't remember any items being restricted by rank within a clan, but some items were definitely restricted by social status. The rare spice kemen, for example, was only available to the people most likely to be able to pay for it (nobles, templars, merchants), because it was sort of a status symbol. There are also some clan-specific items that can only be ordered by a certain clan - I can't think of any examples that matter anymore, but Kurac made a kenku-embroidered cloak that was for House Winrothol only.

The main disconnect between what staff can actually load up, and what GMH PCs request that staff load up, is what actually exists in the database. If you order a pair of pink-dyed salt worm hide leggings from Kadius, and the only things staff can find are armored salt worm hide leggings from Salarr and a pink silk hat from Kadius, then staff are likely going to say the item is not available. That leaves it on the table for GMH PCs to mastercraft.


Some staff members were bothered by custom crafts and suggested ways to make custom crafting more restrictive. Some had mixed feelings on custom crafts: I preferred custom crafts that:
1) were craftable by everyone, when appropriate, as opposed to being clan-restricted for no real reason (e.g. if you're in a noble house and you're custom crafting something without the House sigil, there's probably no reason for it to be specific to that House)
2) in a similar vein to #1, didn't use five obscure items in the recipe simply to obscure the recipe from other players, so that the player custom-crafting the item could make the same item repeatedly across different characters
3) were a thematic net positive to the game world, rather than an implant of a modern idea into Zalanthas

Some staff were even more open to custom crafting than that. On the subject of putting custom crafts off, some staff procrastinate on custom crafts up until about a month, because that's when the player would be able to submit a new custom craft, and that back-loaded all of the wait time a player had to do until they could submit a new craft. Personally, I was in favor of resolving them as quickly as possible, and letting the player have their item while they came up with a new idea. As far as I know, there was never any intent to wait until PCs died to just close the request because of it. But I don't think there's a good reason for these requests to take a month to resolve, simply because I think the player should just have the item they're making ASAP and not have to roleplay designing, say, a slightly different type of hat for 2 IC months. The design RP usually happens before the custom craft request anyway. I also think builders should be able to help with custom crafts as long as they can get access to the request, and they didn't have access to the request tool by default, so that would require communication between builders and other staff.

Not really. They're expected to be active and sell stuff, participate in plots in a way that might be profitable to their House, etc. But it's tricky holding members to any kind of standard. You could impose a quota for sales and expect they make a profit of X coins a month, but that would penalize them for any slow periods in their play area.