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| Obduction Backer |
Joined: Tue May 09, 2006 1:17 am
Posts: 1702
Location: Spokane, WA
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Ghame wrote: Those imagers are there, because the person(s) who built the Age put them there. If it is 'wrong' for KI shots to be there, then they would have been designed so that they could not do that. If people want to stick up pretty pictures, as far as I'm concerned, they have every right to - because the game allows them to do exactly that.
To take that further, if the imagers were for the exclusive and sole use of a few individuals, then they would be locked in such a way that only they could use them. As it is - they are not. They are public. Anyone can use them. Why not take the next step and tell people not to put on a black shirt unless you apply for permission and approval from GoW?
I'm not going to speak for Cyan's position, but allow me to elucidate a bit more on why the Guild shirts and the imagers in the Guild Pubs work the way they do.
Cyan has for quite some time been under a fair amount of pressure from the community to implement Guilds in Uru. The stuff in Kirel and the associated Guild Pubs were a first baby step along the path to making that possible, and things are miles from where they need to be for a final implementation. Essential concepts like group management and membership are almost entirely lacking from the KI interface, and the Guild shirts, being free to wear and swap around, are a poor mechanism at best for indicating if someone is a member of a given Guild. At the time they were made available, the purpose of the shirts was to enable you to show support for a given Guild, not join it. More on the Guild membership thing later though.
Because the KI lacks the ability to differentiate explorers based on any sort of membership role beyond a neighborhood assignment, and because the Guild shirts are not intended to be the sole determining factor of membership, the Pub imagers are incapable of being locked down without drastically overhauling the fundamental communications tool in the game, which is something Cyan certainly did not have the time or money to execute, nor was it absolutely necessary in order to get the ball rolling on discussing the Guilds in an in-game fashion.
Now, because the Pub imagers are in the Guild Pubs, and you can only get to a Guild Pub if you're in possession of a t-shirt for that Guild, I think there's a reasonable expectation on the part of the Pub's users that it be reserved for Guild-related business. Obviously there's no way to enforce this, but as a matter of etiquette, I think asking players to be considerate of the intended purpose of the imagers is a perfectly acceptable practice, and being forgiving of players who are unaware of it is obviously an important part of executing it. I don't think anyone in the Guild Pubs would openly castigate a new player for uploading something to what appears for all intents and purposes like a public imager simply because they don't know any better. I would hope that an ideal resolution to a conflict of this nature would be to politely explain to the new player what the Pubs are, and why it's somewhat important that the Guild be able to display their own information on the imager, rather than it being a public free-for-all. No yelling, no flaming, no ordering people around, just educating them and asking them to respect a minor etiquette-oriented practice.
Quote: I am not condeming or condoning the loading of KI shots - perhaps pretty pictures should be on the Bevin imager - but I condem individuals who think they have the right to tell others what to do. Guild business or not. I would even ask the question if this guild has any official status or not with Cyan and what thier take on this "Imager-hogging" stance is.
Again while I can't give you Cyan's position on "imager-hogging" as you've dubbed it, I can say with a pretty fair amount of certitude that the organizations and individuals in the Guilds of Greeters, Writers, Maintainers, Cartographers, Messengers, and Archivists (as well as the D'ni Linguistic Fellowship, which has sort of taken up the fallen banner of the Guild of Linguists) have all been, to some extent or other, recognized by Cyan through their interactions with them. For example, back when the plan to open-source Uru was first announced, it was the Guild of Messengers who were given the announcement. The organizations representing the Guilds of Writers, Maintainers, and Archivists were all explicitly called out as essential contributors in the development of player-created content in the context of an expanded D'ni universe.
The Guilds we have are grassroots-created organizations of like-minded explorers who have taken up Cyan's call to action in creating them, and have organically created their own internal organizations and policies for membership and advancement. Just because Cyan doesn't maintain a roster of Guild membership or presently have the ability to create an in-game system for Guild participation and hierarchy doesn't delegitimize their place in the community.
Quote: I think this "guild property" attitude is extremley conterproductive, especially to the new player who finds that "some group of people" are telling them what they can or cannot do when they have no authority to do so.
Personally, I would argue that the "you can't tell me what to do" / "how dare you try to organize this mess!" attitude is far more counterproductive to the ongoing effort of rebuilding Uru as a player-created world than trying to do anything to bring some order to the technical limitation-induced chaos.
So let's do it this way: the Guilds as they exist have no ability to influence, expand, or control the game's content because Cyan has not had the time or money to make such things possible. However, Cyan has historically worked with each of these groups to foster their efforts and bring them into the process of making MOUL a game focused more on player-created content, and the community as a whole has largely accepted the legitimacy of the various people running the Guilds that we have. So, please respect the request, at least on the part of the Guild of Messengers, that the imager in their Pub be reserved for Guild-related postings, and engage new players in a constructive manner by educating them, not chastising them, if/when they upload something of theirs to the imager because they don't know that they shouldn't._________________ Grand Master
Guild of Archivists
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