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Comments
Throughout Achaea's history the good houses (and cities) have always had one ultra dedicated and intelligent person pushing their progress, or a small group of highly dedicated people (2-3 people). There might be exceptions to this, but it is true most of the time.
I'm not saying Achaea doesn't have dedicated or intelligent players right now, but the people who made particular houses great in the past are not around right now, and the people around now are not filling their shoes (in most cases. I don't have experience currently with every house).
Dude, when I was in the Mojushai, I learned combat from a Mhaldorian.
The weakness of the old house system was that it's nearly impossible to try and fit every playstyle into one house and have them all be well supported. The weakness to the new system is that it's hard to fit every character archetype that might be interested into a playstyle into one house and create any sort of focused identity. The goals of the new houses and the old are simply fundamentally different.
However, while the Somatikos seems to be doing well, pulling the more combat oriented players, the more scholarly house, the Krymenian Academy seems to be struggling a bit. Although I faded from the scene after its founding, like a dead-beat dad, I can see some of the same symptoms other have described in this thread. The Academy has been given an amazing platform to launch off in the Wellspring and its legacy from the Crown Institute, but it seems to still lack a firm direction anyway. Not because it does not have a mission, but because it is not exactly sure how to execute it. I would surmise this is for two main reasons:
1) As has been said, despite looking really cool on paper, there is so much that goes into the culture and atmosphere of a house that make it cohesive and engrossing. A lot of the Houses are just not there yet. Leaders specifically, but all members, need to be intently developing customs and traditions that will build unity and common identity among its members. This is not something that happens over night, nor should it. Likewise, as Cooper said, I think the Houses do need more visionaries than bureaucrats. Yes, you need a good(but flexible) structure early on, but you need a charismatic leader ushering players forward in it.
2) More specifically for my House, I think when losing all that history behind the old Houses, many expected the new to have the same weight, authority, and prestige instantaneously that the old had. While the house has some old, wise, and experienced members, we should not expect to open our doors claiming to be experts in every field. What's the fun in "Welcome to the Krymenian Academy, we opened last year, but we already know everything about everything."? There needs to be room for development, growth, and investment!
"Oh, you're a magi? Great! We need to train someone up in our ways who can study elemental forces for our ends!"
"But I am only a novice! What can I do?"
"So very much! With the rigorous education you will gain here, and your latent elemental powers, we can learn much about the Wellspring! Your research will be foundational to our work here!"
"Wow that's an amazing opportunity! When can I start?"
at Elowin.
/derail
I have the unique perspective of having left the game a few months before the house renaissance and returning about a year after its implementation. The effect its had on the cities I've played in is surprisingly deep, with more aimless players than I'd ever seen in the past. Not a single one of my former house members play enough that I would consider them active, and I don't really blame them after the house was dissolved. I, myself, don't have the time, energy, or really the desire to try to recreate anything from before the renaissance - at least not in the current atmosphere and culture. Nor do I think we should try to cling to anything from the past, having already embarked on our attempt to try something new. Having said that, I'm not really in a position to criticize, as I'm also not doing anything to help. I relinquished all leadership roles a long time ago, and it seems like there is a new generation working on the issue, so I wish them the best of luck.
Of course, part of my own reaction could also be attributed to the fact that with one or two exceptions, none of my friends still play this game and I've returned to a city full of strangers.
On the other hand, most of the Hashani I communicate with OOCly have said that they totally love the new Houses.
In the end, there's pretty much no reason that a House can't have a great sense of purpose allowing lots of classes into them and all, but in practice it doesn't seem to work that way. It definitely helped a lot in the Naga that the shadow assassin is a pretty universal archetype. People could fall into character very easily and derive some identity from it. It worked similarly in the Maldaathi I think -- you had to learn simple stuff like the Seven Truths, but people have a rough idea of how evil knights act intuitively.
It sounds like(for the most part) the Houses that benefited most from the deletion were the ones that (it sounds like) totally sucked anyway or were otherwise bogged down with ineffective leadership and awful historical grievances within the House. For all the negative stuff though, Targossas fortunately has some really driven people pushing for progress right now. It sounds like Hashan does too, and Mhaldor always will as long as Jurixe is breathing. I just think a lot of stuff was lost that didn't need to be lost.
*pouts*
More seriously, I haven't had too much experience with the new Mhaldorian houses aside from the initial impressions, but even at their best it seems like the loss of the old houses is still pretty devastating. I think Mhaldor especially benefitted from smaller rp groups that one could be a part of (as many people have pointed out, finding good groups to be a part of is pretty essential to enjoying Mhaldor). The new houses may just be too big/unfocused to really foster the same sort of close-knit atmosphere, or maybe that'll just take longer to come together.
And while I've only experienced Hashan second hand from a friend who started up there, it feels like the biggest difference there was that there were just fewer houses period in the end. The Black Lotus and Spiritwalkers (and their alchemy institute, really) seemed like neat rp groups, but they clearly didn't appeal to everyone, and led to a large number of houseless citizens or citizens that were a part of non-hashani houses. That, and Mhaldor had house and city culture interacting in really solid ways, where Hashan seems to have had more trouble then not with houses feeling independent from the city. So I'm not surprised people there love the new houses, though I suspect it's not because the losses of the old houses were less significant, rather that the new houses were much better for the city on a fundamental level.
I as a player don't know what some of them are supposed to be, even after I've spoken directly to the leadership.
With only one exception, I have never interacted with a single person since the renaissance who was even remotely enthusiastic about their House. Most are in the House they are in either by default or because they flipped a coin between two equally bland options.
I was never really a "lore" person, but I will say that the loss of the old Houses has made about 80% of Achaea's player-driven history completely irrelevant. That sure doesn't inspire me to want to throw my creative juices into building a new House from the ground up. Especially when many of the archetypes that serve as their foundations are so weak and poorly defined, and the Gods that serve as their patrons are totally inactive.
I began playing right at the start of the renaissance so I really only got a small taste of what the old system was like. For that reason I can't make a fair comparison. I can only say that I as a player have zero interest in the system as it is currently, and I sincerely hope that changes in the future. I would really like to find a group on the game that I can actually become invested in. I suspect however that it will take many real world years before these new Houses attain the level of immersive depth necessary for that, and I doubt I'll still be playing by the time it happens. Hope I'm wrong.
What I'm finding the problem is with the transitioning is the "good ol' days" mindset. It was extremely hard for me during my newbiedom days to "click" in Cyrene, because it felt like the "older" players were dreary 75% of the time. My excitement for Cyrene and its houses plummeted within two RL months of me joining. Any starry-eyed newbie is going to get worn down with that attitude. They have no idea what the houses were like before, they are focused on the present.
I love my current house and rocked through the requirements extremely quickly because it was so fascinating and I had a mentor that was OPTIMISTIC. She always had something good to say about the house and put a lot of effort in showing me ways to help after I became a full member. She engaged me in the cause, which is so so important.
If the house is not something you -love-, ask yourself why you're still doing it? Do you just need a break? Then take one! Hell, I've had to just to renew my interests. Noone should willingly be draining their souls for a game. The new people will thank you for it!
The biggest losses from the rennaissance came from the uniquely focused and well-defined houses like the naga, maldaathi, dawnstriders, occultists, and (I dread saying this) the ashura. If we're honest, few other houses were more than just a glorified clan, which is what the new houses are accused of being. You can't honestly tell me some of the houses that allowed every class and had no real lore were a loss to the game.
The problem, of course, is that people can grow attached even to glorified clans. I understand why the renn happened, but the way it was handled was maybe not entirely ideal because of people's attachments. A lot of people are going to just feel devastated about their old houses disappearing, and I've noticed a lot of players from the houses I mentioned earlier just basically seem to have stopped playing entirely.
Right now, most of the new houses are fine as a starting block. I think Targossas has too many houses for its population, but otherwise most cities came out well with their new houses it seems. A bigger problem has been the execution, in that a lot of people just abandoned ship as soon as the new houses were made, and obviously that's going to leave a lack of culture for each house.
I think you can boil it down to people enjoying having a foundation to build an identity on versus being responsible for building that foundation. I find it refreshing, and from what I've read the end-game events for the old houses was a lot of fun. That said, I don't envy the job this generation of house leaders have before them. I expect to see high turnover in those positions until someone with a passion and the time to implement that passion swoops in.
Growing pains are always a thing during a renaissance.
Hashan. Yes, it's brought the city together, instead of houses enemying each other (BL and SL) there does seem to be a common goal now and a sense of player unity.
People have already said it and the more I look back on Grom's time in the Occultists it's the people that made it worth while, and that its just a matter of encouragement of the new and younger folk who are doing good things along with some guidance from the older members and the lore will develop.
So they have literally been wiped off the map in Ashtan.
For the last about 5 years of playing Achaea, I argued until I was blue in the face in game and on the forums that arbitrary beaurocratic requirements and following procedures just because they're procedures is bad for everyone when populations are small enough that that isn't necessary. I argued that lists of requirements don't create lasting engagement - that they don't teach people how to motivate themselves when they run out of explicit goals and they're not necessary once people learn to do that. I argued that probably the biggest benefit of the small size of Achaea and its orgs is that there is absolutely no reason not to allow for a huge amount of discretion in almost everything. When I had the authority to do so, I tried as hard as I could to cut these things out of the Naga and provide more discretionary power to everyone I could, and most of what I did was well-received.
And I think the houses, at least the Mhaldorian house I ended up in post-Renaissance, at least before I went dormant, even though it ended up with some of the concepts I designed for the Naga to help cut down on that sort of thing, still showed the ill effects of that pretty clearly.
I think a lot of other new houses do (or at least did) too. Houses that exist primarily as a list of requirements run into serious problems as soon as people complete the requirements - you either end up with endless lists of more and more requirements (yuck) or you end up with what I saw a ton of before leaving - tons of house contests, which fill a similar role in providing an external motivation to do things. And that's what most houses focused on - instead of trying to create a base by designing a theme and working to design and propagate a distinct house subculture with signs and artifacts that made people feel like they belonged together...they designed lists of requirements.
Worse, forcing people to go through the requirements when they're already self-motivating was just robbing houses of what could have been enthusiastic elders helping to forge that culture. When your company scores a CFO from another company, you don't start them off in the mail room. While I mean no offense to her and she did her best, I ended up with a "mentor" who I'm pretty sure I had myself mentored the mentor of. It was pointedly ridiculous. Granted, I was rejoining Mhaldor from the ashes of the almost completely inactive Occultists and that absolutely warranted some struggles and trust-building, but putting me through novicehood because "those are the rules" was the most boring form of that imaginable. I was ready and enthusiastic to help mold the house, and I would have loved to have done so, but instead I was put into a novice program (fast-tracked through the first bit of it, but still with a ton left to do). Could I have gone through the program and helped like I wanted? Probably, but I'm not going to spend hours and hours on satisfying a beaurocracy, completing a list of requirements I've essentially completed about a dozen times now, many of which I literally wrote, first. My time is a lot more precious to me than it was back in those days when I would have just gritted my teeth and got through it, and my schedule doesn't allow for the endless "check-ins" with particular people to progress through most novice programs.
So, when I finally ended up staring down the barrel of that beaurocratic hell myself, that was the main thing that drove me away from the game. And from the sound of it (and from newsposts I still read), a lot of houses are still struggling under this same yoke - they're glorified storehouses for checklists and contests without any real idea how to be more than that. A lot of this is probably attributable to the "visionary" problem, and I think to the loss of a lot of older leaders who had grown to discover how unnecessary so much of the beaurocracy was.
(Edit: I found this all extremely disappointing too because the primary reason I was so enthusiastic about the Renaissance was that it was supposed to relegate the checklists and training and all that to the city. I hoped this would mean houses would be run more like high clans. There's nothing wrong with houses being high clans. In fact, that's what they should be - ideological groups with common interests and goals and lore, only with more ties to existing orgs, more members, a more "official" status, and more real estate in the world. In particular, post-Renaissance houses should have had a more fluid structure with discretionary promotion and meritocracy rather than rote completion of requirements - more like a high clan than the old houses. Instead, we got cities with their own lists of initial requirements and, as is typical of Achaean orgs, with no players ever willing to relinquish any modicum of authority or jurisdiction, all the houses strapped their own sets of further requirements on. Instead of making things better, it largely made them worse.)
Also yes, Targossas needs two houses. I had a Targossan alt back right after the city got its houses and that was pretty clear from the start with how awkward the thematic and philosophical division between the Luminai and the Harbingers is, and it only became more apparent after seeing the later two-house cities and how they were set up and how they worked.