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Post by Antione on Nov 13, 2014 9:59:23 GMT -6
Last night in vent, I had a discussion with some of the members of the guild. After our first trans-continental trade run, we came into a few issues that were presented when it came to loot distribution. How exactly are we going to handle it in the future?
After that run, we found that the item we were turning in for was used by one person, and is something none of us can yet use effectively. So, what we are going to do is sell to that person and use what money we gain for the guild bank. However, in the future when it comes to crafting items, what I'd like to do is distribute that based on who is crafting, and what armor is needed.
It was brought up as well that if we are going for money, we should handle that by people taking turns. Such as, every time a person goes to turn in a pack, they say off the number of the pack they are turning it. So say, I'm turning in a pack, and it's my second one, I'd say "2" in the chat. The people participating in the trade run would get to keep the money from their turn ins, and the crafters would be able to keep what money they get from the crafting. To me, that seems fair because then no matter what you're getting money for the work you've put into the trade run.
As far as gilda... if we decide someone needs to start making gilda so that we can get another ship, or an item the guild can all use, we'll definitely start to dump gilda onto that person. Mainly I'm thinking of doing that if we go for a fellowship plaza, which is something we've talked about doing to gain awareness of the Dreadhowl Corsairs.
Another issue brought up was gear distribution. Initially my thought was "first come first serve". The issue with that was quickly pointed out, that people could constantly beg for items. The best way to handle items like this, is by getting everyone up to the same level at the same time. It may take a while, but once we get that done we can start to get everyone on the same page. Level 50's will have priority on the sheet, however, so they will have the higher level gear before a lower level that cannot yet use it. Also, when it comes to "Duel gear" that's something the player will have to do themselves. It'd be nice if we could get everyone outfitted, then get them all to a point where we could all have two high level sets of gear for duel classing---but to be honest, that's a waste of resources and items that could be used on another person in the guild. Others may feel it's not a waste, but if you've already got a set of armor then the person who -doesn't- will take precedence over you.
At some point I'm going to put down who I have for what in regards to bows. We need to all keep track of what we are crafting for who. I'll likely touch base with the people I've made bows for to see what they have so that I can get everyone onto the same level.
It will take some time, and it will be a lot of trial and error, but these are my thoughts on the matters.
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Post by crosem on Nov 13, 2014 11:47:36 GMT -6
I'll helpfully strip my anonymity. The person with the crystal stabilizers, the person who jokingly said "first come first serve? ok, I want all the gears!", etc, it's me. Let's see if I can contribute to the solution instead of just pointing out problems.
Let's start by dealing with the crystal stabilizers from last night by nailing down exactly what will happen to any stabilizers sent to me. Tier 3 oil/polish/pigments (henceforth just 'oils') are very profitable sometimes but often don't move very quickly. As a result, what I'm going to do is take any stabilizers people send me and put them into a private chest I have. Stabilizers will exit the chest in two ways: Someone in the guild decides they want tier 3 oils (and supplies me with other materials as appropriate) or I decide I want to make tier 3 oils to sell. If someone in the guild wants oils, well, they get oils. If I make oils to sell, I will send the current market value of the oils consumed to Clorneth, in a mail titled DONATION TO GUILD BANK to make it more difficult to miss. This procedure means that the guild gets the benefit of having crystal stabilizers available for crafting and, over time, money flowing into the guild bank. The extra 10% the guild gets by avoiding the AH fee may be considered a donation to the guild by me.
I'm willing to follow this procedure with any alchemy materials the guild wants to send to me, and can provide a list of such if desired. I'm willing, with respect to making components for guild members, to donate fairly large chunks of my labor in the name of supporting the guild. If I'm handed or mailed materials and requests, I will spit out results and mail them back, no questions asked. It is in principle possible for the guild to ask for so much of my labor that it seriously impedes my ability to make money, but I plan to cross that bridge when I come to it. I'm currently at 40k+ alchemy, fyi, so I can make all the possible oils, the highest tier of minor health/mana potions (the ones on a 9 second cooldown), and I'm not really that far from being able to flat out make everything.
So.. those are some notes with respect to what we're doing with this one batch of crystal stabilizers, and with any ingredients people are interested in just sending me as donations to the guild. What happens next time we do an intercontinental run? We could repeat this procedure, which has the advantage that it means literally anyone can hand in packs since they're just mailing stuff to me (or whoever) anyway. This is useful in Ynystere, and is likely to be even more useful in the more dire circumstances of Freedich. Alternately, we could do the same split-and-count-off thing you've proposed for gold runs, but.. I do think the problematic circumstances of intercontinental runs make the additional layer of steps worthwhile.
That brings us to gold runs. I agree with your proposed solution - it's very much like what we've done with the merchant ship thus far, and works. There is actually a subtle problem with crafting packs - 20% of the turnin value is often barely enough to pay for the materials. We didn't have a problem with that, because we usually had people around who were very happy to see stocking up on packs as a donation. If we've got people of a similar mindset here, there's no problem. I do suggest that when we set out on a gold run everybody knows what the split is - if we've got six people and 20 packs, I suggest distributing the extra two packs by /roll, and then the two winners get to count off one higher than everyone else. I also recommend not actually taking turns - just tell everyone what their count is and let them count off as they pick up packs.
Gilda stars are a special case of being purely an effort as a guild to achieve something. Those runs are simple to administrate: they're volunteer-only. One major consideration when planning that, by the way - make sure whoever is the recipient is someone who is trustworthy and very available to use whatever we're giving them for the guild!
Regarding gear distribution, I'm going to do that whole edge case thing again, I'm sorry! You've mentioned in this very post that you want to get more attention for the guild, which suggests that you want to recruit. So, we recruit a couple people, yay! We're at tier 4 gear at the time. They have no gear worth noting. Are we going to stop advancement for the entire rest of the guild to benefit these people we don't necessarily even like or trust? Meanwhile, I happen to have fairly high alchemy skill and my wife owns a merchant ship, with the result that I can make a fairly large amount of money. As a result, I opt to just buy myself gear, which puts me ahead of the rest of the guild in terms of gear. Doesn't that mean I'm being penalized, since I won't get any gear from the guild until and unless everyone catches up to me?
Before I propose solutions, I want to discuss what a good solution has to look like. You may disagree with the solutions I come up with, especially since I'm not 100% sold on all of them myself, but I think the constraints are pretty immutable. They proceed logically from the fact that equipment is a major goal for a lot of people and something people tend to get invested in emotionally. The solution we use must be transparent, fair, organized, and must involve a level of administrative overhead we can cope with. Fairness is, hopefully, the most trivially obvious of these requirements - if a system isn't fair, everyone will get upset and things will fall apart. Similarly, if it's not transparent, nobody can be sure it's actually fair; information about what's going on and what people can expect has to be publicly available and the process has to be understood. The necessity of organization proceeds from that in turn, since if a system isn't organized nobody will know what to expect. The business about low overhead is a matter of human nature - if a system requires more work to implement than we're willing to do, it will fall apart quickly.
So, ideas:
Screw collective action! It's hard! We set up all our efforts to distribute money evenly to everyone involved, people buy materials with their money, hand them to crafters, and combines happen. We can use collective gold to compensate crafters, buy materials which are then sold at a discount, or have small contests or other events to distribute it. This has the advantage of simplicity, but weakens our ability to act collectively. It also potentially has transparency and fairness issues, since there's that business with distributing any collective money we do get.
DKP-like system. We do things that generate gold for the guild, we track how many guild events and activities people show up and contribute at, we award points to people for doing so, and people can cash in points for stuff. This is actually an entire class of solutions, rather than a solution. We could use DKP as lottery tickets, we could award them for outright giving the guild money, we could invent new and interesting subsystems.. Administration is a big problem with this. Fairness is also a big problem, because building a system that can't be gamed or that people won't perceive as being gamed is a Hard Problem. It does make giving people incentives to act collectively very easy, though, and definitely feeds into it.
Voting. We decide who gets the next gear upgrades by vote. This is also a class of solutions - who gets the vote, how does it work, etc are the major variables. The problem with this one is obvious, it's not very fair to someone who puts in a lot of effort but who isn't really liked. It can have transparency issues, if the people are voting are only officers or only long-standing members of the guild.
Flat distribution, aka the system Antione has proposed. Has potential fairness issues, addressed above. Administration is a problem, too, since everyone's gear has to be tracked. One major advantage of this system is that it is the one that yields the most improvement in effectiveness as a guild per unit of resource input, and that kind of contributes to what I'm going to recommend.
That's the list of ideas. I'm going to go ahead and propose something based on it, having given this quite some thought just while typing that up. Also, a concrete proposal you can tear down is probably more helpful than a big confusing list. So!
I propose a hybrid of "flat distribution" and "screw collective action!". What we do is, we pick some level of gearing and toys (a clipper? a farm cart? some land?) that we consider 'basic'. We use things like trade runs whose purpose is explicitly for the benefit of the guild (so, we tell everyone at the start that one person turns in all the packs and they'll send the money to the guild bank), donations, et cetera to raise collective money. We use that money to elevate everyone to the 'basic' level we have agreed on, as well as to fund collective efforts like a guild manor, fellowship plaza, etc. We have forum threads tracking all uses of this money, how much cash is in the guild bank, who needs to receive things, etc. If we have no collective goals and everyone is at the agreed 'basic' level, we stop doing things that raise collective money and distribute any money we do have via lottery contests, etc.
It's worth pointing out that we probably will want to keep the 'basic' level pretty static, because the cost of upgrading gear increases exponentially and at the point where we need a large pile of gold for one upgrade we should just hand people their large piles of gold and let them make their own decisions about gearing alternate skillsets or buying land or what-have-you.
Meanwhile, at all times we also do things that do not raise collective money. Merchant ship runs where the money is split up and so on. This will ensure that people have opportunities to make gold for their discretionary use, which will help keep people who are already at or beyond our basic level engaged.
That's my proposal, and that's my wall of text. To everyone who has read this far: I'm sorry!
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Post by Antione on Nov 13, 2014 12:04:37 GMT -6
These are all pretty good ideas, I really do have to give it some thought and talk it over with people.
Edit: I'm pretty interested in your suggestion---though the meat of it all will be the implementation. I'm sure we'll all figure it out at some point, and hash out how it'll all work and whatnot.
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Post by tsivenya on Nov 13, 2014 12:28:44 GMT -6
One thing I'd like to point out is that the people driving the ships, especially on inter-continental runs, may want some sort of compensation. I personally don't, and as far as I know I'm the sole merchant schooner owner thus far. But you may get someone who joins later and decides they either want something in return for being tied to the helm for that long, or they want a chance to turn a pack or two in.
I recommend adding this to the list of things you want to hash out right now: whether or not you're compensating drivers in any fashion. Merchant schooners are huge investments that a person simply cannot even use solo due to owner's mark constraints.
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Post by tsivenya on Nov 23, 2014 13:39:22 GMT -6
Has anything been decided on how loot/turnins are going to be handled on merchant ship runs?
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Post by Antione on Nov 23, 2014 18:55:41 GMT -6
Not set in stone yet, but Derek and I have been working on doing some stuff.
Right now we have a bunch of packs that we are going to "Donate" to the guild funds, and try to run them so we can make some more money for land and crafting. As for things like crafting materials and the like, or gilda... again, I think that's going to be a donation of packs or materials to make them rather than money.
When it comes to distribution, I'll probably delegate a few people -EARLY ON- before the run to pick up the gold/materials. Likely Derek will be one person, while the other will be someone else like say... Crosem when we do the runs. People that I know I can trust with that sort of stuff.
Gilda runs will be super specific however. That'd be dependant on who wants/needs what, and based on things like "Is it a boat? How often is that person on so we can use said boat?" And the like.
Like with me? I feel it'd be stupid for me to own ships, but houses sure. I can easily dump stuff to make taxes, but with boats I'm not on as often as I'd like to do runs for people.
Again, this is all something we have to hash out.
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