The dreaded Family Seat

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  • SylandraSylandra Join Queue for Mafia Games The Last Mafia Game
    So family reps. I like them. Not against them. Basically agree with what @Talan said earlier in the thread before affinity became the topic at hand.

    And things.
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  • SiamSiam Whispered Voice
    Zvoltz said:
    I don't really forsee Affinity going anywhere. Some admin like it (or at least feel it is necessary) and some admin hate it with a passion. So far we haven't really been able to come to a consensus on what should be done with it, and its been that way since I became an admin. I wouldn't hold my breath on something being done with it either way.

    That being said, let's stay on topic!
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  • Right now, the family house seat seems a bit much just because oh my god so many seats of power but I think with the incoming guild changes they'll be a perfect tie-breaker vote.

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  • LavinyaLavinya Queen of Snark Australia
    I think it's important to have a tie-breaker vote if possible, so odd number of leaders is ideal. That being said I'm not overly concerned about that person being a family rep. 

    HOWEVER if there is no longer an important place for family rep, there's needs to be a reason we work hard on family honour. 



  • SiamSiam Whispered Voice
    Lavinya said:
    I think it's important to have a tie-breaker vote if possible, so odd number of leaders is ideal. That being said I'm not overly concerned about that person being a family rep. 

    HOWEVER if there is no longer an important place for family rep, there's needs to be a reason we work hard on family honour. 
    For...honour!
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    #bringShikariback 


  • SilvanusSilvanus The Sparrowhawk
    It's not like the council seat or even influence bonus is worth the effort.

    All about that free 500 culture points for some arbitrary reason. 

    A real change would be for families to use honour for something unique. 
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  • I like the Family rep seat personally, but it is effectively only as good as the person seating in it.

    When I was the Ysav'rai rep for a while, I went about trying to represent Ysav'rai interests, vote for policies which favoured Ysav'rai members, agreed mostly to council proposals by Ysav'rai members and gave more objections to non Ysav'rai proposals etc...

    Or at least, I tried to. Unfortunately, by the time I was on the seat, Ysav'rai was down to 50% membership in Glom. (T_T come back, you far flung Ysav'rai expats)

    But I still like to fantasize I did a good job being the family rep.

    Family reps can also change hands quite handily in the current system. There was a period when Ysav'rai and Nightshade was neck-and-neck in honour due to us squandering our lead to inactivity ticks (gods, those ticks depleted our honour so quickly) and everytime the honour lead changed between the two houses, it was down to whether the other side realised they had the lead and could replace the seat with their own rep. That sort of points to the honour system as the cause of the problems, but well, it's easy to say "honour is the problem" but hard to pinpoint what to actually do, so I'll not dive into that bucket of worms.

    Back to my original point, though - the idea of a representative of a core group of players whose allegiance is to a "family" is actually a concept I like. It adds a wildcard to the mix of politics, one that goes past guild/faction memberships, is more fluid in membership and less defined in ideology and therefore more volatile in nature. And this can give families actual organisational presence. In all of the other IRE games, families are like a group of players' own private circle-jerk orgy of happiness. You like me, I like you, let's get together and share a last name. End. In lusternia, the potential is there for something more - just that there hasn't actually been much of an actual implementation of it so far, yet.

  • EnyalidaEnyalida Nasty Woman, Sockpuppeteer to the Gods
    Talan said:
    No, because it's too tumultuous, and too tenuous, and the possibility for betrayal/in-fighting is too huge for drama queens and kings to resist.

    The system you're suggesting basically puts the family rep in a constant state of flux. The family rep would either be on the chopping block, or be a lame duck 100% of the time. That is not conducive to getting work done, and it marginalizes the council seat itself. It is hard to make plans that involve someone who could be gone at any moment.

    You might see the chance for families to work together, I see the chance for families to conspire to stab each other in the back. That's not good for morale. Cous d'etat might be fun in theory, but they're rarely executed by those who want to work hard to serve the populace. Those people tend to do things out in the open, over time. Your system does allow for that, but equally it also allows for 11th hour secret fuckery, and there's more than enough of that in the family system as-is. It also creates situations where you're asking people to vote against whole-families if they do not like one individual member. Further, it diminishes the power of being the most honorable family in an org, which is not really fair considering that most honor is gained in direct service to the org..

    Council seats should be relatively stable with ample warning that a change is coming. The current system allows for that.


    So, exactly like guildmaster positions with respect to changing who the leader is? Guildmasters can be voted out at any point if they become unpopular, they are vulnerable to drama and backstabbing etc. If a family gets way ahead in honor rankings, they effectively become a permanent fixture barring utter disaster.  Why should the family seat be the one and only member of the council immune to that kind of pressure? 

    I'm all for removing or reworking the family position because it affords the family with high honor a functional permanent seat with almost no way to challenge or remove a bad councilor from power. Guild and org leader seats are ostensibly held responsible and responsive to the population by way of the threat of an election to remove them from power. Family seats are not. This is why (when it becomes an issue) I've always pushed towards counting the family seat holder advisory and not a full voting member of councils internally, and continue to support mechanical reform for the family seat - having been one for a long while and enjoyed the benefits of the "You can't get rid of me, neener" factor. 


    Why not just include a full second popular vote for a council member, if a fifth, not-a-GM-not-the-leader councilor is desirable? Perhaps each of the major families in an org get to nominate that person, and the house leaders all get super votes based on their honor? Or something like the pledging system suggested, within the framework of an election timescale - so it's not totally fluid, but a bad leader can still be challenged somehow
  • The difference between GMs and the problem Talan is pointing out with the "families back each other" thing, is that the backstabs can happen in an instant. A GM election always takes a minimum of 5 days to a week, and that's on a position that represents a fifth of the org's population. A family rep can represent a large swathe of the org, and if you have them replaced every two days with the warning of someone snapping their fingers, you WILL see much more drama, and not in a good sense.

    It's one of the things that threaten the Achaea/Aetolia city leaders of the vanilla IRE government style - they need to install actual loyal goons in the council to vote for them, or they face an inability to effect any change as the CL, since any unpopular decision can be backstabbed and they lose all their privs right there and then. And sometimes, they're backstabbed for no reason anyway.

  • EnyalidaEnyalida Nasty Woman, Sockpuppeteer to the Gods
    edited March 2016
    I'm comfortable with a 'conclave of families' type  mechanic (or some other mechanic) that takes 5 days to a week to shift, as pointed out in my post. You can see a family rep change every IG year now, if the family head feels like changing it afaik. There's a lot of room between "Changes on a whim at any time with no delay" (unsuggested) and "Changes never because x family has so much honor that they won't be overtaken for the next IC century" (how it is now). 
  • Everiine said:
    I think the problem with affinity was that we went years and years without out, and some gods who were less politically ideological seemed to encourage drawing followers from different places as long as they believed in the tenets of the god. Then affinity just appeared out of nowhere to one day to solve a problem that for years nobody knew was a problem because gods rarely brought it up.

    As I'm not in a divine order, I couldn't care either way :) . But for those who were really attached to their gods while living in a different org, it came as quite a shock.
    It didn't come from no where. Things weren't that black and white. When the game was in open beta, even back then there was a bit of eye brows raised over Elostian's order in Celest. Didn't He even move out of the city over the same?
  • EveriineEveriine Wise Old Swordsbird / Brontaur Indianapolis, IN, USA
    I wasn't around in Beta, so it did feel like it came out of nowhere from my point of view. Of course, Ev has never been in a divine order and has no interest. But it did seem like there were certain gods who were very much a part of their org (Lisaera, Fain) and others who were more broad-spectrum gods, like Lacostian, Elcyrion, Elostian. And even then, some had tenets open enough that others could possibly join.

    And what I mean by dropped out of nowhere was that didn't we literally wake up one day to an Announce post saying Affinity was in, and there had been no mention of discussion of it even among envoys before that? Or am I remembering wrong?
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