These hilarious rules for warehouse/shop/clan creation

You sound fun to play with. What mud are you in now?

Boom? Oh okay, you got me man, I don't know how I will recover from that.

True, but you seem to have omitted the fact that most of the principles in the company left their parents farm at the age of 12 for an apprenticeship at Lloyd's, or a cabin boy position in Her Majesty's Navy. They were unlikely much below 50 years of age at time that they received the Charter you were mentioning. Plus they had like 200+ other dudes.  You're leaving out about 30 years of career climbing.

But I'll concede your point, that it's way too hard to get anything done in Arm.

I'll apologize for this, because the Clan Formation system that you're lampooning is at least partially my fault. My fault, you wonder? Mr. Ibusoe is a fairly anonymous fellow, how can it be my fault?

But first, some backstory. About 15 years ago I was staff on another MUD. Actually, I was running the MUD. In what I'm about to write, I'll make another apology because it's at least 15% speculation, and no more than 40% facts, but unless some Arm Staff member or other comes forward I suppose we'll never know the truth.

There was some indication that Arm had a plant on my staff, as even during my tenure there some of the ideas I was using to push my MUD along began to appear under increasingly unlikely conditions in Arm herself. I'm not necessarily accusing anyone of foul play here, since most of my playbook was largely based upon taking everything that was broken in Arm and pretty much doing the opposite. Basic reforms made sense, then as now.

One of tenants of my administration was that game conflict between (OOC) friends was good or necessary, and then when push came to shove staff should stay out of it and the chips should fall where they may. Pursuant to this, I deigned that most of the munitions of game conflict, things like spies, intel, weapons, spellbooks, mercenaries, slaves, hirelings, mounts, territories, forts, fields, equipment and siege engines should pretty much all be for sale from NPC at market prices. That way no one could accuse the staff of favoritism, and the results of conflict would prevent petty jerk-faces from accumulating power and bullying other players. If you ticked off too many players, nobody would be willing to work with you, I theorized, and so the balance of power in game would favor popular, competent, organized and shrewd players. You'd have a lot fewer Pearls.

One of the cornerstones of this axiom was that clans should be deemphasized in the power structures, and anyways any player could start a clan if they simply forked over enough gold to buy a fort. If you had a fort, at the least NPCs would want to flock to your offering of safety. Unless you were completely horrible, NPC would try to help maintain and protect their dwelling. Most of the rules I implemented weren't too far off of Nyr's clan creation format.

Just in case anyone thinks that all of this is stupid, keep in mind that the rules prior to this were downright awful. This is what people call a memory hole, if you think the current rules are stupid either you're new, or you've forgotten that they're now far more liberal/achievable than they used to be.

Before that, there was pretty much no way to start a clan, because no two staff members could agree on a canonical process, and regardless any proposed process would have required items/accomplishments themselves that weren't tenable.

The nice thing about gold, is that nearly anyone can get their hands on it.

Still think the idea sucks? I sincerely apologize, but it made sense at the time. Any Nyr? Don't worry about borrowing my idea without attribution. You're welcome.