The Mana World Forums

Guilds are around but what if players wanted to create a different vision? Where individuals or small groups volunteer to coordinate other players instead of partisan styled guilds? Examples:

House of Languages: a player group that makes lists of players based on the languages they speak. Helps connect players based on language.

Party Register: Maintains a list that links people up into large parties based on level brackets and time playing. They would keep track of party leaders and slots available.

Gladiator Register: Registers pvp players and coordinates individual battles and party wars. Keeps a win/loss record for participants.

• House of languages: Forum contributors have asked many times for it; and to Language based channels as well. The main argument that was developed against them a part of the developments team was the moderation. In my opinion it shouldn't be, if practice shows that moderation is necessary to find players who accept to moderate the channels.
  The actual guild chat substitute increases the confusion between the guild concept and language channels
• Party Register: TMW has hosted guilds which had level requirements: Aurora Society was such one for some time. Parties have a different goals in my opinion: they are intended to facilitate player cooperation for specific occasions such as a quest (V0id's Illia sisters one is the perfect example), but for a limited time, let's say a session. the actual system, a long with the abscence of guild system, makes tiny guilds from parties and finally they are not employed as they should be.
• Gladiator Register: I would prefer to add to player DB, (and to guild wars), a flag that each player could set or not, in order to indicate if he/she practices pvp by default. players could fight where they want without disturbing those who didn't set this flag. This would come in addition to specific pvp zones, quests, arenas (see TMW-br) ... personally I don't appreciate that much role playing context of Terranite cave, which was designed , as I see it, as a way to oblige players to practice pvp.

I think that it is better for the role play, that guild founders choose themselves the citerions upon which their organization will be based on, rather than a game restriction. The GvG and war of emporium possibility is fairly enough though; there is no consistent content to them at the moment. I don't think the other Crew of Red Corsair's members and leaders will disagree with me if I say that CRC is happy to welcome different languages, different cultures, different levels and different World vision. Our experience with differences is rather a good one. CRC has rules though, mostly based on the game ones.
As a matter of conclusion, my opinion is that it is undoubtedly necessary to do something, in short term, on the first point you raised. I disagree with the second one: game need both guilds and parties. The third one is closely content related and needs a long term reflection about the game, the fruit is not mature enough at the moment.

I'm personally against divinding people based on their language (because that's essentially what happens). I think it's a lot better for people to be pushed to connect with other people from different countries that speak different languages and sometimes have different cultures. A lot of young people play this game, and by pushing them to speak English you're doing them an immense favour, because speaking a language, even just writing, in a social environment is the best way to learn that language. I learned about 90% of my English on the internet, 5% from personal experiences IRL and 5% or less from school.
I honestly don't see the point of german/portoguese/spanish communities when you have the possibility to interact with people from all over the world. If you want to speak your own language just go outside and meet people near you (now I'm sounding like a dating website ad)!

There's also the problem of moderation and the fact that the "English in public" rule would be even harder to enforce if people are allowed to speak their own language most of the time in other chats.

Nard wrote: I don't think the other Crew of Red Corsair's members and leaders will disagree with me if I say that CRC is happy to welcome different languages, different cultures, different levels and different World vision.

Yes, absolutely true.

I hate to agree with anyone, but in that case i NEED to agree with Nard and WildX

Isn't o11c works on adding chat channels to the game?
if he does then it is quite similar vision, no?

I think that a house of languages can help alot, mostly to the new players, I knowed some of them who had some difficulties in the game because they don't speak english very good !And leaved the game because that!. I think that, that can make easy the colaboration between players.

Wombat wrote:Guilds are around but what if players wanted to create a different vision? Where individuals or small groups volunteer to coordinate other players instead of partisan styled guilds?

1) Guilds are not partisan styled, actually. Some are easy to join, some are not. That's okay for me.
2) In fact there is no proper guilds support in server code. So "guilds" are merely some chats implemented in hackish ways via 3rd-party bot.
3) It's a matter of individuals will to join some player group and take a part in it.
So, overall it looks like players decided to keep it this way, even ignoring lack of technical abilities to do it.

House of Languages: a player group that makes lists of players based on the languages they speak. Helps connect players based on language.

To be honest I don't like idea to divide small community to even smaller groups on language basis. This can make players to feel they're almost alone in game world. Quite many players are unable to find someone to play with. Also it's really shameful thing to make humans to do some routine job like keeping some lists. That's what computers for. Idea to help to find some players speaking on certain language is not bad, but speaking for myself, I'm out: it's not like if I want to deal with someone "just because he/she speaks that language". After all English is international in internet and all ingame content is English anyway. So learning English sounds like a plan.

Party Register: Maintains a list that links people up into large parties based on level brackets and time playing. They would keep track of party leaders and slots available.

And again, putting routine work on humans instead of machines isn't good idea IMHO. And then since there is no proper guilds support, people tend to use parties to keep long-term relationships. Newbies are not welcome here most of time and in fact it's rather like some limited "guild replacement". Hopefully this explains why I dislike removal of guild code without providing replacement.

Gladiator Register: Registers pvp players and coordinates individual battles and party wars. Keeps a win/loss record for participants.

To be I think automated table with PvP ranking could do it better, because computers do not sleep. Though idea when someone conducting tournaments could work I guess.

SriNitayanda wrote:Isn't o11c works on adding chat channels to the game?
if he does then it is quite similar vision, no?

As far as I remember, o11c (nor any TMWC, nor GHP member) never said that it was a bad idea. o11c just said that he had other priorities though removing guild code with no replacement was obviously one of his. We could have both guilds and languages channel in game now.
The only opinions that was exposed against the idea were:

• who will moderate those channels?
• guild bot is good for that.

No comment, I already answered to both points.

Nard wrote:

• guild bot is good for that.

I believe I said that at some point in the past, but now that I have to maintain guildbot ... I want it to die.

Maybe once chat channels with persistent permissions are added, we can kill guildbot? (I expect that the first release of chat channels will only last until the server restarts, or maybe only while you're logged in).

o11c wrote:Maybe once chat channels with persistent permissions are added, we can kill guildbot? (I expect that the first release of chat channels will only last until the server restarts, or maybe only while you're logged in).

Only when guild code is ready and bug free now: guild chat, Guild storage, member ranking and permissions, interface with scripting and GM commands...
A guild is not only a chat tab.

o11c wrote:I believe I said that at some point in the past, but now that I have to maintain guildbot ... I want it to die.

Hopefully it would die with some replacement, at least.

Maybe once chat channels with persistent permissions are added, we can kill guildbot?

As for me it sounds like good idea overall. Relaying messages via some player-like bot is sooooooo hackish that it leads to zillions of strange issues. Though it also needs some client support I guess. Hopefully you've seen how ManaPlus works with guilds and "fake guilds". In fact guilds are a bit more than "just chat".

Nard wrote:Only when guild code is ready and bug free now: guild chat, Guild storage, member ranking and permissions, interface with scripting and GM commands...

But wait, bot does not provides these facilities either . Even just integration to server alone can at least fix a load of logical inconsistencies. For example it's possible to have server started but no bot connected. Client then faces some really dumb issues. Ignore/nuke does not really works on guildbot chat either, due to ways it implemented. If it's integrated to server, such scenarios would be mostly impossible, hence less bugs and overall idiocy/hacks around. The only issue this should be supported by client and it could require some cooperation.

Chat channels v1 will not be persistent and will not have any concept of permissions or bans (you can only leave the channel - may need to rely on security by obscurity since /ignore won't work).
Chat channels v2 will allow permission levels: owner, moderator, member/voice (only for invite-only channels or when channel is muted), no level, silenced, banned.

Permissions and join/part will be controlled by GM commands. The first restart of chat channels v2 will not allow ordinary users to create moderated channels, so that we can guarantee existing guilds the right to own their channels, but in subsequent restarts, anyone will be able to create one.

Moderators will have the right to ban from the channel and grant voice ... should they also have the right to grant moderators? I can see arguments both ways. Only owners can grant owner; they can also do anything else.

The #global and #newbies channels will be owned by the TMWC ... we'll need to accept applications for community moderators though.

None of this is implemented yet, but it's on the top 5 priority list, less important but easier (at least for v1) than magic and databases.


Shared storage is not feasible until a lot more infrastructure is done.

t3st3r wrote:

o11c wrote:I believe I said that at some point in the past, but now that I have to maintain guildbot ... I want it to die.

Hopefully it would die with some replacement, at least.

Maybe once chat channels with persistent permissions are added, we can kill guildbot?

As for me it sounds like good idea overall. Relaying messages via some player-like bot is sooooooo hackish that it leads to zillions of strange issues. Though it also needs some client support I guess. Hopefully you've seen how ManaPlus works with guilds and "fake guilds". In fact guilds are a bit more than "just chat".

Nard wrote:Only when guild code is ready and bug free now: guild chat, Guild storage, member ranking and permissions, interface with scripting and GM commands...

But wait, bot does not provides these facilities either . [...]

You are totally right t3st3r but previous guild code allowed all those features, and they worked quite good (I am not sure about ignore because I didn't try it yet, I will).
What I mean, is that suppressing an useful service or feature, without technical or economical reason an without and with no immediate replacement solution is a mistake in project management, whatever the kind of the project is. The obvious result is user frustration even if long term planned goals are far better than the existing service or feature. This remark is not specific to guild management, it could also have applied to the way Nivalis upgrade was managed in 2010 (Noone complained about the result), and I made a similar remark about the recent GY mods. In fact, guild bot should have never existed, as there was better guild support in server code; it would have avoided it's logs to be spied, and consecutive dramas... :s

o11c wrote:Chat channels v1 will not be persistent and will not have any concept of permissions or bans (you can only leave the channel - may need to rely on security by obscurity since /ignore won't work).

Well, clients could use client-side ignore. There is already ignore system so it would be logical if it works here as well in universal way. Though all this is really up to 4144.

Chat channels v2 will allow permission levels: owner, moderator, member/voice (only for invite-only channels or when channel is muted), no level, silenced, banned.

Really sane and reasonable views to my taste.

Moderators will have the right to ban from the channel and grant voice ... should they also have the right to grant moderators? I can see arguments both ways. Only owners can grant owner; they can also do anything else.

I think owners should be able to grant "owner" status to several most trusted persons, and then "usual" moderators should be unable to harm "owners", grant rights except "voice" and be unable to completely destroy channel. This way it is possible to "hire" new moderators to see how they perform without getting everything screwed up in fatal ways if new moderator goes mad. After all most of advanced IRC implementations came to something like this, so if you're not lazy to implement such thing, it could be really nice to have for sure.

The #global and #newbies channels will be owned by the TMWC ... we'll need to accept applications for community moderators though.

As for me it sounds reasonable as well.

Nard wrote:You are totally right t3st3r but previous guild code allowed all those features, and they worked quite good

That's what I don't like about "o11c-style project management" .