Do you like playing in clans?

b

Yes I enjoy playing in tribes or the Circle which is a 'family'. I believe it offers good RP opportunities but that is offset by clans meaning more staff interaction and the ability of staff to forcestore you.

For me, clans have almost always been a joke. 80% of the time, the clans I joined didn't have enough members to sustain the activities that the clan was supposed to carry out. Either that or the clan was designed around an aspect of the game that just didn't really exist. That was almost always the case when I tried to play a soldier, for instance -- no criminals, no military conflict, just a prohibitive training schedule and an utter dearth of anything to do.

The times I've enjoyed playing in clans, it hasn't really been related to that clan but rather the fact that there happened to be a group of players who were cool. Then it doesn't matter which clan it is, and the nature of the clan has almost never been important in that context. The clans themselves, in my experience, are almost always absolute failures as the game lacks features and content for almost all the shit that every clan is supposed to do.

I've brought it up elsewhere, but if you look at each clan, very nearly all of them are designed around things that simply aren't in the game for one reason or another. The biggest clan in the game revolves around mercenary contracts in a game where there's almost no reason for anyone to ever hire mercenaries. The game's design simply doesn't create a demand. And criminal roleplay or military conflict is nowhere near common enough to sustain militaries, tribes have to use their imagination for most of the things that would support tribal roleplay, and nobles have no active political venue to give them purpose.

It's all just bullshit with a thin veneer of documentation on top. The things that make Armageddon fun (when it is fun; it rarely is anymore) is the interaction and conflict between players, but you usually have to make this up as the game itself doesn't foster it in any serious way, and clans are rarely instrumental to it in any but the most basic way -- e.g. interplay between criminals and soldiers is technically a product of the fact that there is a soldier clan, but that clan really does nothing to further that interplay as its design, in both cities, is completely out of touch with the gameplay.

And the same then goes for merchant houses; there's no real demand for most of what they can do, nor much real gameplay to be had in the process. Take the act of obtaining gems, for instance; what really is there other than going somewhere and spam-foraging? The various men-at-arms clans for the noble houses are also hilariously pointless as their purposes range from literally impossible to attempt (slavery) to simply bereft of any need at all (Tor Scorpions, Tuluki equivalents).

And the list goes on like that. So, I've almost never enjoyed playing in clans. I have enjoyed playing with various generations of characters, and sometimes they have happened to be in the same clan as me, but that has practically never been a defining feature of the roleplay other than a reason for them to meet in the first place. It could have happened in any clan, and usually the nature of the clan I've been in has been completely inconsequential for the aforementioned reasons.

Where was this?

I think the byn restriction came in right after Wilem. If anyone ever peeks at my Wilem character log, you'll see he and one of the Byn sarges were tight and he'd basically employ the byn to get gemstones and slate for him along with other things like taints. 2000 sid an ooc week and they were happy to do it because it meant regular commute between the north and south... Also he would randomly dump Oashi booze on them for their work.

They have given up on trying to enforce that, I think.

Because it's completely fucking stupid. Holy shit, the game's management sucks.

Also. Steinal's post was great, and shows that much of what we bitch about are not obscure or arcane problems that we couldn't do anything better at. There is no shortage of good ideas. There's some *great* ideas on this board. There is however, a shortage of good people to implement them.



There is so, so much truth in this post.