Howdy, Stranger!
Categories
- 6.2K All Categories
- 3.1K Everything Achaea
- 1.5K North of Thera
- 26 Archives of the Terraformer
- 257 The Matsuhama Arena
- 885 The Golden Dais of Creation
- 299 The Scarlattan Theatre
- 149 The Blank Canvas
- 2K Getting Help
- 412 General Questions
- 258 Quick Class Questions
- 1.3K Tech Support
- 313 Client Help
- 486 Curing Systems and Scripts
- 841 Off-Topic
- 255 The Wander Inn
- 586 The Universal Membrane
- 298 Class Discussions
- 298 Individual Class Sections
- 20 Alchemist
- 9 Apostate
- 30 Blademaster
- 9 Depthswalker
- 14 Druid
- 4 Infernal
- 20 Jester
- 19 Magi
- 34 Monk
- 11 Occultist
- 8 Paladin
- 7 Priest
- 29 Runewarden
- 18 Sentinel
- 26 Serpent
- 20 Shaman
- 9 Sylvan
The old House promotion rules
Hey all!
Just wanted to get some thoughts on the way House promotions currently work.
I like it a lot better for the most part in comparison to the old system. But just now, I have a HR 3 member as far as requirements go, who has earned so many House favours that they are now HR5. From a HoN perspective, this is confusing as hell.
In the old system, once a HR 3 had been Housefavoured to four, there was a * next to their name, meaning they could not advance until promoted (full sponsorship).
I'm all for House favours and recognizing those under House rank 4, but it would be nice if perhaps they didn't actually count towards a promotion once you are HR 4.
Thoughts on this? Would this conflict with your House rank structure?
Just wanted to get some thoughts on the way House promotions currently work.
I like it a lot better for the most part in comparison to the old system. But just now, I have a HR 3 member as far as requirements go, who has earned so many House favours that they are now HR5. From a HoN perspective, this is confusing as hell.
In the old system, once a HR 3 had been Housefavoured to four, there was a * next to their name, meaning they could not advance until promoted (full sponsorship).
I'm all for House favours and recognizing those under House rank 4, but it would be nice if perhaps they didn't actually count towards a promotion once you are HR 4.
Thoughts on this? Would this conflict with your House rank structure?
1
Comments
When it first changed my house tried a few ideas, like abandoning the whole lesson-plan-for-novices thing and just going by house rank and probation until the initiation, but someone objected to that. Tried keeping the lesson plan and being determined not to favour anyone under hr5, which was deemed acceptable by everyone, but then when you want to favour someone you must feel they deserve a favour and so screw the policy this person is special... soooo that didn't work either. It didn't work multiple times. Right now we're at individually restricting getfavoursoff on every single person who joins the house, and sending them a message or tell explaining why this is happening and no it isn't personal or punishment or anything like that, and this is how to get past this stage. I really hate starting them off with a potentially negative feeling though.
Sounds like you're attempting to hold people back unnecessarily!
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
It would be nice if they could get the favours below HR 5, just wouldnt count towards rank.
Sure, they should get recognized for it, but sometimes they are HF'd for stuff not related to the House.
Because they haven't done an essay or their paperwork isn't in order? They're not lvl 80?
I'm not a fan of arbitrary requirements. Show motivation and initiative, get rewarded. Shouldn't be held back over something small when they obviously are doing good things.
If anything this is more of a "passing HF out like candy" issue more than a mechanical one.
Why are you HF for something that is part of recqs, etc.
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
On the other hand, she's worked hard and earned them. We wouldn't want to not reward her.
"Arbitrary requirements", as many people that want to be hipsters and go against them, serve a purpose.
It comes down to RP, understanding House culture, and what is expected of you.
Its up to you to make the requirements interesting and not just there for the sake of requirements.
What I've found House rank to be most useful for, in all Houses I've been in, is to judge how far along someone is in House advancement tasks, prior to reaching HR5. Once they reach 5, they're full members, so sure, go nuts, race to 15 via favours. But given most Houses have specific tasks they want you to complete to advance to full member, I find it extremely convenient to be able to check HW, see an HR2, HR3, and HR5 and say "Okay, I have a novice, a member, and a full member online right now," and be confident about where those individuals are in their training.
I'd honestly like an option, as a House, to choose whether HR3 and HR5 are gated or not. I loved the implementation of HOUSE PROMOTE so we can move people up at will, but removing those HR3 and HR5 gates at the same time was a pretty big inconvenience given how both of my Houses have used rank to track member progress.
Sounds counter productive.
Arbitrary requirements for the sake of having something set in stone does not have a place, imo. But keep holding people back over essays or whatever it is, you probably won't get what you want out of your newbies!
Penwize has cowardly forfeited the challenge to mortal combat issued by Atalkez.
Each house is different, I'm sure there are Houses that could do well with a list of good things to do, and advancement based wholly around doing those good things and getting favoured for it. Unfortunately, my House is not one of those. We have a purpose, and that purpose is combat readiness. That is our only purpose and only focus, and so we enforce a set of very reasonable standards with regard to combat readiness to progress through the House. That's both for the individual's good, (They learn basic combat mechanics and how to fight) and the House's good. (We'd suck as a House if folks could "advance" without learning about combat.)
I absolutely love favoring folks for raid defenses, duels at Thera, pirate hunting, and even non-combat-related "atta boys", etc, but if someone racks up favors and becomes a "full member" via non-combat means, or even by participating in raid defenses without actually learning how to be effective in raid defenses, then suddenly we have an HR5 "full member" who can vote in elections and is expected to teach younger members, except they don't really understand combat or how to teach it. That's bad for them, that's bad for the House, and it's honestly bad for the city in our case, since our whole purpose is to train soldiers to defend the city.
My point is that each House should have the tools and options to custom-tailor the House system to them, instead of having a one-size-fits-all system that different Houses end up having to work around or even against, depending on their setup.
As I tried to express in that thread about leadership, it's usually more or less obvious whether someone is "ready" for a given rank. You rarely have problems, they're rarely dire when they pop up, and the cost of tons of specific requirements is much worse than the collective cost of those problems.
I think what must be stressed is that expectations are different than requirements. If your house's mission requires that full members be able to teach basic combat to new members, then that's a reasonable expectation. What's not reasonable is to hold people back when they're clearly knowledgable combatants because HELP PROBATES says that the strict requirement is to participate and record a duel against every class - if the person clearly knows what they're doing and is having trouble finding an appropriate opponent of one or two classes, you're killing their engagement over a bureaucratic quibble. "Participate meaningfully in five raids" works as a good suggestion if your expectation is for your members to have some raid capability, but if someone participates really meaningfully in two and clearly has that capability, there's no point holding them to the requirement - at that point it's not really a question of their capability, it's just a gussied-up waiting period for advancement.
What you want are general expectations and a list of suggestions for how someone could acquire those skills and demonstrate that knowledge - not a list of strict requirements.
Strict requirements lead to boredom when the person is already clearly capable and is just going through the motions to check off each box and they don't really work in a lot of cases - it's totally possible for someone to duel every class and come out of it having learned essentially nothing: if you want the duels to be an effective requirement, you're going to have to evaluate performance and learning subjectively anyway.
All that said, house favours for people under HR5 are clearly problematic.
You can (and should!) use other incentives for participation - house items are fun and in the past I've gone out of my way to get both tailored designs and jewelery made, and to even get house tutor-sold items normally reserved for purchase by full members into the hands of novices as rewards. But HFs should be able to serve as rewards too, and without the potential for significant interference in the novice training program.
They cause ugly - and very legitimate - problems like Aerek is describing, where people end up as mechanical full members without fulfilling the expectations of the house (and while HR might not be tied to authority in the general sense, I don't know a single org that doesn't tie "full membership" to HR5 and any house that didn't tie those together would have to do yet more record-keeping, with no real benefit to just having HR5 be full membership).
The system has also lead some houses to actually require that someone receive favours as part of their novice requirements, leading to a situation where basic advancement to full member becomes dependent on being online at the same times as the people who do most of the favour granting, doing the things they tend to grant favours for, and doing those things conspicuously enough to be noticed. When houses try to ameliorate this issue by providing lists of "favourable" activities, this is just a disguise for a list of requirements that requires more roundabout bookkeeping and forces novices to awkwardly ask for favours because they're doing "favourable" things, but not getting favours for them.
The other issue is that, unless I'm mistaken, because promotion to HR5 (and the ranks below) is done via a single command that just sets the rank rather than incrementing it, the favours you give to people prior to HR5 are actually wasted. They're fake rewards. If Alfred gets 5 HFs before HR5 and Bettina gets none, once they hit HR5 their rank is identical.
What would be really nice is if HFs prior to HR5 were just sort of "saved up" and applied as soon as someone actually gets HR5. That way novices can still be rewarded with HFs, they actually have more meaning in the long run, and this problem of HFs interfering with novice programs is totally eliminated.
Or at least we will have house items, once we put Lorielan back in our sweatshop. She's earned a vacation for now because she does fucking fantastic work.
That all being said, try to use other alternative rewards to acknowledge their efforts if HFs and ranking up messes with your house promotion system!
The former because the checklisted thing feels terribly inorganic and the latter because it's bad enough when some Houses grind to a halt when the Patron goes dormant, but also bad when everything waits on a HoN to be rubberstamped. If two (or three) secretaries (or even full members depending on the size of the House) can collectively agree that a particular novice shows accomplishment by their activity and involvement, there's no real reason to not promote them.
This is especially for smaller (but not tiny) Houses that aren't combat focused. In a community where the bulk of activities involve giving sermons (which, apparently you get favoured for anyway) and performing rituals etc, it's a bit difficult to not acknowledge when a person has transitioned from newbiehood to full membership. The only real quibble you could possibly have is that their sermons/rituals/whatever are rubbish (which they wouldn't be favoured for if they were).
Of course such a thing would require people to be more involved with their newbies instead of just fobbing it off entirely on the novice aides, and pay attention to their House related activities.
If you want them to complete their requirements to advance, don't HF people in those ranks, it's really simple to convey appreciation without using the HF system.
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
I just IDEAd this in case anyone is interested:
You submit the idea #293 'When you housefavour any house member below HR5, their houserank shouldn't be immediately affected. Instead, any housefavours acquired before HR5 should be "saved up" and applied as soon as the member reaches HR5. This solves two problems with the current system. The first is that housefavours can cause a novice to skip ranks that are part of the novice program. This is a problem because a novice can be very helpful in one area and earn a lot of housefavours while still not meeting the basic expectations of the house in some other area. This problem forces elder members either not to use the housefavour system to reward novices at all, to try to guess whether their housefavour would push a novice past the threshold of the next rank, to discourage novices by disfavouring them, or to add even more recordkeeping duties to novice aides by forcing them to track progress through novice programs without relying on houserank. The other problem is that it devalues housefavours as rewards for novices because as soon as their houserank is set to HR5, the favours they've accumulated before that point become meaningless. If housefavours can be given before HR5, but aren't applied to houserank until HR5, then novices can still be rewarded with housefavours, those housefavours are ultimately more meaningful, and there are no problems.' for review.
I am, as we speak, graduating that person. If someone does a good enough job to get the favours, it means they were probably very much cut out for full membership imo. I am all about making sure people get rewarded for playing the game in a positive manner more than I care about only having 4 out of 5 tasks completed. Shit, especially for an RP-heavy house.
Thankfully, there's a command right there for you to just promote such people! Problem solved!
None of this changes the fact that it is very much possible (and has actually happened) that people who aren't ready for full membership end up at HR5 thanks to housefavours. If there's any lesson to be taken from this thread, it's probably that the opinion that getting enough favours for HR5 means someone is probably cut out for full membership is very myopic - it has a lot to do with the context of the house you're talking about. It works fine for the Harbingers, but just a few posts up Aerek discusses the Shield and how a lot of favours there do not necessarily mean that someone is cut out for full membership.
We had a similar issue back when I was in the Naga (when the Naga were still a house
It's clearly a problem that the system is designed in such a way that rewarding people for doing an otherwise boring and thankless task can actually lead to things like people milking their way to full membership in the Naga. The way housefavours interact with the normal novice system seems mostly like an awkward legacy thing that's just never been adjusted because novices who manage to get that many housefavours are pretty rare (mostly because most houses are pretty stingy with the HFs).
The fact that there are houses where accumulating favours suffices to prove readiness for full membership really shouldn't distract from the fact that there are many houses where it doesn't. And those houses where it does can just promote the people doing all this stuff and racking up all these favours anyway - which is probably better than waiting for the favours to cross some arbitrary threshold too.
I do like that the current system allows you to directly promote, but with HFs still affecting House rank, people can and have bypassed the 'requirements', especially if you 'got lucky' and got HR15 favours all the time. Perhaps HFs just shouldn't affect rank below, say, HR5. Yes, you can reward people differently but even just the term 'housefavour' carries connotations that boost people's esteem. Or perhaps houses should make a pact among their Council to use less HFs as actual rewards and just make use of more credit rewards.
Stories by Jurixe and Stories by Jurixe 2
Interested in joining a Discord about Achaean RP? Want to comment on RP topics or have RP questions? Check the Achaean RP Resource out here: https://discord.gg/Vbb9Zfs