Old City Progress
From FiranMUX
Contents |
The Problem
The Old City was founded on the 'head boss' mentality which was run initially by Pangaros, followed by Sangreos and then Narin. Each boss after Pangaros tended to have a little less of a firm hold on things and as players roster important characters, things tend to get messy in a monolithic structure like that. It became a big old mess and staff stopped spending time working on it because nothing they could do would fix the issues. The Old City had become an inherently broken system.
The official excerpt that's related to this is as follows:
The current OC structure is not functioning because:
1. The code is set up to support the one-boss structure,
2. There isn't currently a clear leader,
3. the system gets gummed up with rostering and such,
4. A lot of the time it isn't much fun, so people leave, which is a vicious cycle,'
5. The system makes it hard to be in the OC but not part of the crime syndicate,
6. The lines of succession in crime are more convoluted both ICly and OOCly than even, say, trying to choose the next Griffon Clan
Leader, and therefore it gets mucked up a -lot- if there's any movement in theupper ranks, like say a death, and
7. There are some real reasons (such as stale characters and a stale environ) that people don't seem to like to take OC characters.
The Deal
As people started filtering back into the Old City and a few more PCs were seen in that part of the city, staff decided that they should discuss the situation with the Old City folk. The gist was that they weren't going to put any more effort into fixing the Old City unless the players put up the effort first. If the Old City started trying to clean up their own problems first, staff would reciprocate. The official excerpt was as follows:
Celeste says, "What if everyone was willing to agree that at least for say, one RL year, you would not have TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION as your chief objective, to allow the new mini gangs to take root? Would that help?"
Celeste says, "Time out! Okay. I'm going to try and list some salient points, please don't be offended if I misrepresent, it's not intentional I'm just trying to get us refocused because I think we're doing the around in circles stuff again. a. We like the idea of gangs. They address 1, 2, 3, and 6. They may or may not help or hurt 5 and 7, depending on how they're established. b. We like the idea that there is some cost-benefit required for the size and stretch of gangs, so we have some limits involved. (1, probably 5) c. We don't want all-out warfare in the OC because it ceases to be fun quickly. (helps with 4) d. We want some competition and jostling for position between the clans. e. We want to renew tensions with the guard in an OOCly fun way, and be able to focus more on harassing wallers and being a community in the OC. (several.)
The Rub
What that left the Old City players with was the task of putting effort into fixing the Old City themselves first with a new schema that wouldn't break like the old one did. Celeste gave the Old City assignments and people have actually been carrying through with them fairly well. The assignments were as follows:
Celeste says, "Okay. I think we've actually accomplished a lot tonight. We've identified the problem *points to the problem object* as we see it, and come up with some solutions that we think might work. At this point, I know that my responsibility is to take what we've done here tonight and put it into something that I can take to the rest of staff for their consideration, and work on some realistic ideas for how to phase in code support for gangs as we've discussed. What I see yall's responsibility as being is to go and try to start doing the IC and OOC legwork. IC, by starting to build gang @orgs and relationships with one another. OOC, by continuing to talk and discuss this, as well as other ideas. I would really like to see the OC players jointly agree to a lot of the self-policing stuff and commit to these ideas, publically, like in an IB thread, where the rest of staff and I and all of the other players can see that we're all on the same page. Does that sound reasonable?"
Progress
The Old City has made a lot of progress so far. A new apartment has been built, people are actually putting the effort into cleaning up the fire/raid/flood damage, gangs have formed(some new, some old) under the new structure, the inter-gang rivalries have been sparked and the Old City is back to giving the guard the finger. All good things but there needs to be more progress.
Structure
The new foundation of the Old City has evolved organically with the knowledge that staff doesn't want a monolithic crime syndicate(as seen above in 'The Problem'). The rest has been PC driven and what the Old City players have come up with is something akin to a small council. Basically, there are the gangs in the Old City and they claim turf, cred, etc. The leader of each gang has final say of what happens in their turf and by extension the gang leaders, sort of run the Old City. It's not really close to being well-organized but it is a good start and could easily flourish into a fully functioning criminal organization. All of that will, of course, need to be developed ICly.
Ideas
- Make a kid gang if you're an Old City child.
- Find a guard by his/her lonesome and give them a thrashing.
- Lure a waller into the Old City and give them a thrashing.
- Steal something! (don't forget logs if you do).
- Make an @org. A gang @org is the obvious choice but it could be for anything. Organization is the key!
Gangs
For those comfortable with it, I'm putting a little section here for folks to list the gangs and members of them. As I said, if they're comfortable with it.
- The Anaems
- Sorry, members are kept to Old City folk only
- The Istems
- Unnamed Group
