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State of Culture
Portius
Likes big books, cannot lie
So, there's two other threads bouncing around with similar titles, and I thinking this one should more or less work the same way. The fact that there's a culture competition leads me to believe that there's supposed to be actual conflict over it, and right there's a lot of problems with that. Some of them are mechanical and probably only have mechanical fixes, and I'm outlining my thoughts on that below. But some of them probably have social fixes, too, and I'd like to hear ideas on that.
Now, I'll admit to having a little bit of residual bitterness over some of this, so please try to filter that out if any bleeds through into what I'm saying. I'm also probably going to be giving examples of a couple things here, and not all of them are really complimentary, but it's nothing personal. Please don't take it that way.
I think that there are two big problems with culture. The first one is that it's pretty static. The second is that it really doesn't effect anything. I'm going to handle the first one first.
I think that staticness is the big reason that there isn't much actual competition going on over culture. I'm pretty sure that Glomdoring has been cultural center for something like three quarters of the time I've been playing Lusternia. It's hard to get into the spirit of competition when it's so hard to make an actual change or have the outcome be in doubt. Make things change more easily, and I think you've got a big start on making cultural competitions better. I think this one's mostly a mechanical problem.
If you look at culture scoring, you'll notice that most of the points come down to certain static bonuses. Biggest library, most honorable family, and so on. This is bad. The problem is that in a lot of these categories one place is so far in the lead that people aren't likely to catch up. This wouldn't be so bad if you could score points in those categories some other way, and those things were just bonuses for doing well. But you can't, which means that a lot of the time a person's effort won't actually have any effect on the scoring. Look at Serenwilde's library, for example. Not so many recent books published. They'd have to churn out a ton of books to try to contest the library ranks, and until they get close (A huge amount of effort. Writing is time consuming and a lot of people don't do it, I'll get to that later) nothing will have a visible effect. I think that disincentivizes competing pretty hard.
The solution for this for the library (And I assume stage things, although I don't really know how stage scoring works) is to either drop the points for being biggest library and such or reduce them to just being bonuses. Instead of the way we do it now, base the score off the actual scores used to see who gets those bonuses, (Fun fact, you can check that with LIBRARIES. I have no idea where that command is in the help files, but I only heard about it when I saw it mentioned on a forum post somewhere.) Keep the prestige awards the way they are. I think they do contribute to making things more dynamic, but they aren't enough and most people can't really get in on them, so they can't fix the problem on their own.
Family honor has the same core problem, I think. The first step is to remove the cap on honor for lesser houses so that every city can compete. Right now, Hallifax just doesn't have the population in one family to get a greathouse, which makes it way harder for us to compete on culture. I think the second step is to break up honor into multiple categories, writing, stage, hunting, and such. Basically make the scoring on everything that gets a + or - based on house type its own score with its own rankings. Then give a bonus on culture for top X scores in each, and give points based on the absolute score, just like the library.
If you get that going, people would actually be able to feel like their making a difference on culture by doing things. I think that would get more people into culture, which makes it more dynamic. Plus it removes the possibility for wierd quirks like a city that's ranked fourth in both literary and scholarly individually, but does great overall if you add them together, to do poorly because it split its writing.
Second problem is that culture doesn't really have an effect on anything. It adds power, I think, and that doesn't really matter. There's no real incentive for doing it either for the organization, except trying to be the best in something. I don't have great ideas on how to fix this. You could make culture rankings give some bonus or penalty in revolts. Makes sense thematically, and it helps tie culture into conflict more, but I don't know what that would do to revolt balance. You certainly wouldn't want to do this unless you rebalanced culture so that people can actually compete at it. Otherwise it'd just be handing out a bonus to one or two orgs. My only other thought would be to add some neat thing that an org can access if it's doing well. Some kind of bling or something. I'd like to hear ideas on this if anyone has them.
As a side note, if you did things like that you could add in support for formal cultural alliances to merge culture from more than one org and share the benefits, so that an org with strong culture and weak fighters could feel like it was contributing more to its alliance.
Those are the problems I see with how culture is set up. That said, there's also problems with participation. To put it real bluntly, next to nobody has anything to do with culture. At least it seems that way from my perspective. I'd have to count to be sure, but I'm pretty sure a majority of the books I've published in my year or so as Hallifax's librarian were written by me. I'd have to ask around to see if that's the case in other orgs and for the stage, but I'd bet that it is. Some of that's probably on me. I'm not great at getting people to do things, and I think some of it's inevitable since writing isn't really everyone's thing. But I think we can fix some of it.
We could find a way to make the culture people get more credit. There are times when I, and I assume most other culture people, feel like I get basically no credit for things I do unless I kind of go fishing for compliments. That probably discourages some people. That's probably a social fix.
We could also try to change the fact that there's basically no reward. Hallifax hands out credits, but it's so few as to be basically irrelevant and I don't think most people ever collect them. I've never remembered to. Some of that's a thing orgs can fix, but I feel like handing out money or credits probably won't help no matter how much you offer. You could maybe ask patrons to set up something like a guild honors line that you can hand out for culture (is that possible, @Zvoltz? I don't really know what you guys can do for that kind of thing) and that might help. I dunno how much other people care about honor lines and such. You could make it so publishing and such give XP. I don't think that would get new people into culture, though. It'd help out those of us who hate the grind of bashing and make up for the time spent writing that could be spent on bashier pursuits, so I think it's a sound plan on its own merits, but I don't think it'd change much.
So, mechanical fix proposal. You could set up a system where publishing/performing/whatever gives some currency. I'm calling it patronage and fluffing it as either people wanting to support an artist for fame and such, like patrons do, or in a place like Hallifax it could be gifts from hangers on trying to soak up the culture person's limelight. It has some thematic justification, basically. Anyway, let people get this per word published or whatever metric seems best, and trade it in for stuff. You could go for the curio/ikon route, and maybe even do culture only ones for it. I could see some awesomeness on each org getting a curio set that you get from being cultural, or a culture ikon group either per org or in general. You could do minor artifacts like dolls or something, too, or maybe honors lines. The more I think about it the more I like tying the rewards into the org, since that seems to fit the theme of being cultural, but that might be way too much coding. If you do this, make sure to give patronage out for acting in plays, too. Gives people who don't want to write a way to contribute and get in on the goodies.
That's about all I've got. I welcome your ideas and commentary, especially on social fixes. I'm not too good at those, so I'm hoping to hear some good advice, personally.
Now, I'll admit to having a little bit of residual bitterness over some of this, so please try to filter that out if any bleeds through into what I'm saying. I'm also probably going to be giving examples of a couple things here, and not all of them are really complimentary, but it's nothing personal. Please don't take it that way.
I think that there are two big problems with culture. The first one is that it's pretty static. The second is that it really doesn't effect anything. I'm going to handle the first one first.
I think that staticness is the big reason that there isn't much actual competition going on over culture. I'm pretty sure that Glomdoring has been cultural center for something like three quarters of the time I've been playing Lusternia. It's hard to get into the spirit of competition when it's so hard to make an actual change or have the outcome be in doubt. Make things change more easily, and I think you've got a big start on making cultural competitions better. I think this one's mostly a mechanical problem.
If you look at culture scoring, you'll notice that most of the points come down to certain static bonuses. Biggest library, most honorable family, and so on. This is bad. The problem is that in a lot of these categories one place is so far in the lead that people aren't likely to catch up. This wouldn't be so bad if you could score points in those categories some other way, and those things were just bonuses for doing well. But you can't, which means that a lot of the time a person's effort won't actually have any effect on the scoring. Look at Serenwilde's library, for example. Not so many recent books published. They'd have to churn out a ton of books to try to contest the library ranks, and until they get close (A huge amount of effort. Writing is time consuming and a lot of people don't do it, I'll get to that later) nothing will have a visible effect. I think that disincentivizes competing pretty hard.
The solution for this for the library (And I assume stage things, although I don't really know how stage scoring works) is to either drop the points for being biggest library and such or reduce them to just being bonuses. Instead of the way we do it now, base the score off the actual scores used to see who gets those bonuses, (Fun fact, you can check that with LIBRARIES. I have no idea where that command is in the help files, but I only heard about it when I saw it mentioned on a forum post somewhere.) Keep the prestige awards the way they are. I think they do contribute to making things more dynamic, but they aren't enough and most people can't really get in on them, so they can't fix the problem on their own.
Family honor has the same core problem, I think. The first step is to remove the cap on honor for lesser houses so that every city can compete. Right now, Hallifax just doesn't have the population in one family to get a greathouse, which makes it way harder for us to compete on culture. I think the second step is to break up honor into multiple categories, writing, stage, hunting, and such. Basically make the scoring on everything that gets a + or - based on house type its own score with its own rankings. Then give a bonus on culture for top X scores in each, and give points based on the absolute score, just like the library.
If you get that going, people would actually be able to feel like their making a difference on culture by doing things. I think that would get more people into culture, which makes it more dynamic. Plus it removes the possibility for wierd quirks like a city that's ranked fourth in both literary and scholarly individually, but does great overall if you add them together, to do poorly because it split its writing.
Second problem is that culture doesn't really have an effect on anything. It adds power, I think, and that doesn't really matter. There's no real incentive for doing it either for the organization, except trying to be the best in something. I don't have great ideas on how to fix this. You could make culture rankings give some bonus or penalty in revolts. Makes sense thematically, and it helps tie culture into conflict more, but I don't know what that would do to revolt balance. You certainly wouldn't want to do this unless you rebalanced culture so that people can actually compete at it. Otherwise it'd just be handing out a bonus to one or two orgs. My only other thought would be to add some neat thing that an org can access if it's doing well. Some kind of bling or something. I'd like to hear ideas on this if anyone has them.
As a side note, if you did things like that you could add in support for formal cultural alliances to merge culture from more than one org and share the benefits, so that an org with strong culture and weak fighters could feel like it was contributing more to its alliance.
Those are the problems I see with how culture is set up. That said, there's also problems with participation. To put it real bluntly, next to nobody has anything to do with culture. At least it seems that way from my perspective. I'd have to count to be sure, but I'm pretty sure a majority of the books I've published in my year or so as Hallifax's librarian were written by me. I'd have to ask around to see if that's the case in other orgs and for the stage, but I'd bet that it is. Some of that's probably on me. I'm not great at getting people to do things, and I think some of it's inevitable since writing isn't really everyone's thing. But I think we can fix some of it.
We could find a way to make the culture people get more credit. There are times when I, and I assume most other culture people, feel like I get basically no credit for things I do unless I kind of go fishing for compliments. That probably discourages some people. That's probably a social fix.
We could also try to change the fact that there's basically no reward. Hallifax hands out credits, but it's so few as to be basically irrelevant and I don't think most people ever collect them. I've never remembered to. Some of that's a thing orgs can fix, but I feel like handing out money or credits probably won't help no matter how much you offer. You could maybe ask patrons to set up something like a guild honors line that you can hand out for culture (is that possible, @Zvoltz? I don't really know what you guys can do for that kind of thing) and that might help. I dunno how much other people care about honor lines and such. You could make it so publishing and such give XP. I don't think that would get new people into culture, though. It'd help out those of us who hate the grind of bashing and make up for the time spent writing that could be spent on bashier pursuits, so I think it's a sound plan on its own merits, but I don't think it'd change much.
So, mechanical fix proposal. You could set up a system where publishing/performing/whatever gives some currency. I'm calling it patronage and fluffing it as either people wanting to support an artist for fame and such, like patrons do, or in a place like Hallifax it could be gifts from hangers on trying to soak up the culture person's limelight. It has some thematic justification, basically. Anyway, let people get this per word published or whatever metric seems best, and trade it in for stuff. You could go for the curio/ikon route, and maybe even do culture only ones for it. I could see some awesomeness on each org getting a curio set that you get from being cultural, or a culture ikon group either per org or in general. You could do minor artifacts like dolls or something, too, or maybe honors lines. The more I think about it the more I like tying the rewards into the org, since that seems to fit the theme of being cultural, but that might be way too much coding. If you do this, make sure to give patronage out for acting in plays, too. Gives people who don't want to write a way to contribute and get in on the goodies.
That's about all I've got. I welcome your ideas and commentary, especially on social fixes. I'm not too good at those, so I'm hoping to hear some good advice, personally.
Any sufficiently advanced pun is indistinguishable from comedy.
1
(c) Iron Realms Entertainment 2012.
Comments
Great House bonus is the only real static bonus. That is related to how great houses work - it is better now than it used to be, when sheer number of family members (even those who don't log in) contribute and maintain honour gain. In today's system, families have to actually work to keep their honour bonuses, and the effort required to maintain honour at the higher levels is significant. Trust me. That said, as long as the Great House has a reasonable amount of activity from a handful of players, they will avoid the yearly obscurity penalty. The current thresholds are reasonable, I feel. Ysav'rai has enough activity to warrant not losing honour due to "obscurity". And if threatened, Ysav'rai can put up a good fight for the top spot, I believe. But this also means that it's fairly difficult to get Ysav'rai off the top spot - any attempts will be a long term project, and must require an even greater amount of effort over time than what Ysav'rai members are capable of doing. Not realistic for less populous houses, and nearly impossible for lesser houses.
Lowering or eliminating the most honourable Great House culture bonus is not unreasonable. There are other rewards that can be given for being the most honourable - even if nothing is given in replacement, the current perks can arguably be enough.
Other than that, however, I don't believe there's anything else wrong with the mechanical aspect of Culture. Getting Culture Center gives power rewards, the same as getting a village. Villages don't really give anything other than power. If you want winning Culture to be more visible so people know and so that they are encouraged to compete because of the prestige or bragging rights, then adding a politics post every year to announce cultural center might help. I don't see any need for adding extra rewards to winning Culture.
As for motivating people to participate, that really boils down to player initiatives. Credit rewards are pretty good - even 2 credits for a publication, capped at 4 or 6 per year, is an awesome deal for newbies. And that's the main source of your culture: you want your newbies to get in on the scene early, and take an active role in participating. But other than that, the job of making culture visible to your org is on the shoulders of the culture ministry. I know there have been past Glom librarians and culture ministers who made yearly posts to encourage, urge and organise publications, stage productions and bard/scholar gatherings. Things have been quiet lately, but the momentum still carries on from that tradition. Mechanical adjustments won't change that, adding curios or ikon rewards won't change that.
And please, whatever you do, no more new curios.
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
Regarding the newsposts: This might be a Portius problem, but I'm not entirely sure I feel comfortable making posts for things that are mostly me churning out books, or really on me publishing something myself. I could and probably should do a post on the other people's, but then it looks inconsistent and I'm not sure how I feel about picking and choosing the ones to announce, either. I don't know. It's a thing to do, probably.
Estarra the Eternal says, "Give Shevat the floor please."
2014/02/17 04:11:02 - The cultural strength of the Free Alliance of Glomdoring has generated 3237
power
2014/02/17 04:11:02 - 1000 power was added for the presence of the Guardian Tree of the Wyrden Way
2014/02/17 04:11:02 - Rikenfriez has donated 1000 power towards the conquest pool
It gives the amount of culture you have, every month change. Both constructs and villages each give 1000 power every month (assuming your government is religious).
Despite the fact that there are big bonuses for winning prestige, family honour is primarily generated through bashing/influencing/offering/killing people/competition events. So yes, I agree it's got no business being worth 500 points in the cultural totals.
I strongly agree that successfully critiqued books should award large amounts of experience/essence. Maybe a million essence/5000 words? This is a great idea. I'm not sure how to do it for plays.
The currency idea is interesting, but we sort of have this already with the Bardics. The rewards here get pretty huge. As far as I understand it, you get bigger rewards the more you enter and win. It's separate from the library prestige, but people can (and do) submit the work in both places. Winning Bardics does give an honours line, so it is definitely something that you can speak about in-character when promoting the rewards for writing things.
I also feel like it wouldn't be difficult to get the BoD to agree to give out larger credit incentives for successfully critiqued books -- but this is something for our org to address in game. Some orgs do give out really generous awards. Ours are a bit small. Incidentally, as the Librarian it's incumbent upon you to make sure Maellio distributes the incentives. If people see others receiving free credits in the citylog more often, it will be a regular reminder that these awards are there for the taking and they just need to finish their projects-in-progress to cash in.
Vive l'apostrophe!
As for power, I'm pretty sure that having cultural center is equivalent to one village, although I can't find a citation for that. I'm not sure if you get any power without having cultural center or not.
Edit because sniping: So, you get your score in culture and center is itself equal to one village. If power mattered more that'd be pretty big, and it not really mattering is more a problem of power not being worth much than culture itself. Neat. Bigger than I thought it was.
As for bardics, I think they do help with this, but I think having some sort of non-competitive reward structure would have a chance of boosting participation. The XP thing would help, certainly, and might very well be enough on its own.
In regards to Halifax in particular, my policy people a message once their book starts giving culture with how many credit's they're owed and telling them to collect them from Maellio. Doing that instead of messaging Maellio is mostly because a holdover from when I was first librarian and thought it was kind of improper for the librarian to take the credits for writing. Figured doing it came with the job and all that, and I wanted to give people the choice of taking them or not. So I don't know how many people actually take them, but I'm pretty sure I haven't missed the message on anyone yet.
Concerning cultural center: Prestige winner, biggest family, the three biggest library awards and stage all give about the same amount respectively, don't they? Stage does seem sort of momentary compared to library.
Concerning personal acclaim: If you move in the right circles, good authors do occasionally get recognition for it. Magnagora currently has credit rewards that are honestly probably too high. I do feel it's the job of the librarian to publicize new arrivals and ruffle writing out of people, but this is more about going 'hey this is interesting' than it is 'hey you should write stuff, look at these neat rewards'. Having a high level of RP within a city can probably provide assistance here. Sermons, lectures, that sort of thing. Give people topics to think about.
I don't think the fix is necessarily adding new systems, although if done well they could certainly be neat. Something like a history/library/stage/people division might work if you want to implement specific subbonuses. A currency, though? Ehhhh.
PS your lecture on bees was great, do more pls
I know that many people who are very into the cultural stuff over other aspects of play wish that greater importance would be placed on it. I think you are right that most cultural ministers/librarians could use some help advertising the activity. Dolling out rewards more often is free publicity, so to speak.
Vive l'apostrophe!
She is accounted Speaker of Fables among literary writers.
She is accounted Savant of Reason among scholars.
Pretty cool!
I've seen Hallifax (and Gaudiguch!) do well vs the more established orgs (mostly Glomdoring) in the cultural arena, even before Most Scholarly/Literary was changed to only count "recent" submissions. The library and the theater are already extremely subjective in terms of what "winning" is. Especially when you can write a 1,000 word poem of random words shoddily strung together that takes about 10 minutes to type up and it counts for the exact same as a well written, entertaining 1,000 word short story. Tying additional rewards to something so easily game-able isn't really likely.
In the end, people participate in culture because that is the part of the game that appeals to them. I would really encourage orgs to come up with or improve their own incentive programs to reward the hard work their cultural elite put in. Plus, in the long run, credits for writing for your org is going to net your more than flavour rewards (dolls, curios, special currency, etc.) will, especially if you are looking to be involved in other aspects of the game and trying to learn skills or buy artifacts.
I don't know if that's something that really matters. Just a thought, really. I've kind of hit the point of just throwing out ideas in the hopes of finding something that works.
The culture awards for recent publications are fine for me, they just need a bit of dedication over time. A RL year seems reasonable. When I became librarian for Gaudiguch I targeted the literary rank and just chipped away at it. I can't take credit as none of the books were written by me, I just did the nagging.
The scores for all time biggest library award are depressingly high for us. Though it's impressive how far Halifax has got in its shorter time. I'm torn because it makes sense to have an all time score but it does give a big handicap to others getting cultural centre. Maybe the calculation could take all books into account but weight the older books less, I.e. full weight for publications in the last year, half weight for 1-2 yrs old, quarter weight for 2-3 yrs, etc. Minimums could be 5 points for a winning prestige, 3 for submitted prestige and 1 point for everything else.
I've not worked out what that'd do but it would give newer orgs a more hope.
From my own experience, I know that I'm a lot more prone to actually finish something if I have other people holding me accountable. Ever since I made the mistake excellent decision to tell Talan that I'm working on a book, she's been asking me how it's going, and I've made more progress on the thing in the last week than I did in the last, uh, four months. I am a terrible person. For my stage things, it helped a lot that there was an actual deadline that they had to be done by.
I would recommend handing the library publicity job to someone else. You already do a ton of work for the library, and you deserve to have someone announcing how awesome you are for it.