TOR, The Guild, Life & Everything...

Harl I didn't say anything about a specialist role, I had; 2 leaders 4 class officers then 4 best of class. If the member cap was raised to 30 after launch then 6 would be officer/leaders and the remaining 24 would be agents with 4 being a expert role offering advice.

I think thats a bit inaccurate Harl (I think) and Wityas right we may be getting too many roles.

Technically lore wise we have 1 leader 2 heads of operations maybe 4 officers on the forums by the time of release, ingame that will be different.
We wont have an actual 'leader' ingame as a playing member, and 'officers' I think maybe be a different class alltogether.

So lets look at at PJK's (completly unauthorised) hyperthetical structure!

2 Department leaders LW and SS
4 Class Leaders specialists (this role could be voted for like Tando suggested might be better then a 'role for life')
1 Freelancer role
1 Initiate trainer (probable although theres no confirmation this is actually going to appear ingame)
and lets say 6 Official guild roles

thats 14 still alot but lets think about it,

SS and Lw probably will be a head of a class as well so -2, and some of those Guild roles may be taken by SS and LW (RP director anyone?) and by Class specialists who would more then likely be some of the more active members in the guild anyway to fit the requirements.
So lets say -4 on the Official guild roles and say we'd have two random players as officers with a job

that would leave us with

2 members: Department lead, Class specialist, official guild role
2 members: Class specialist, official guild role
2 members: Official guild role
1 member: freelancer role
1 member: Initiate member

Leaving us roughly with 8 non standard agents and 12 standard agents in a 20 member structure, which is still largish but thinking about it in each class 2 would be officers and the rest would be agents in BH and IAs thats a 5/2 ratio not huge and if we move up to 30 not that much at all.

Now personally I have no qualms about not having a like for like officer role ingame ie just becuase I'm a officer on here I dont automatically expect some kind of rank ingame so my chart ignores that.

Ok personally I'm unsure about the idea of champions because recently I've even complained about there being too many ranks. I'd prefer to keep E.P.O.C.H simple and have the following:

Chief Ops (Guild Leaders)
Special Agents (Officers)
Agents (Members)
Initiates (New Recruits)

Thats how I think the ranks should stay. Now things like Freelancer Commander, Initiate Mentor and RP Assist I believe should be roles in the same way that Emissary, Guild Relations Officer, Creative Director, RP Director and Chief Administrator are.

However I think Tando is right and some more roles are needed, but I have my doubts. For example (and I'm not being funny here) we've had problems in the past with Emissaries not performing their duties and if I could see some of these roles actually working out then I'd be more than happy to add more. For a start I think we need the following:

Head crafting department members - For the dedicated crafters
Raid Leader - For the people that are experienced in running raids
Events Co-ordinator - Some one to post up the guild and allied events regularly.

As for Champions I can definitely see the need for someone to co-ordinate the Buddy System we'll have running when TOR goes live so maybe that could be incoroprated into the guild roles?

Again though, with little game info we should be careful not to jump ahead of ourselves. Some nice ideas here anyway guys so keep 'em coming.

PrioryJK wrote:

Now personally I have no qualms about not having a like for like officer role ingame ie just becuase I'm a officer on here I dont automatically expect some kind of rank ingame so my chart ignores that.

On the contrary mate, if you become a Special Agent in E.P.O.C.H then so does your character in-game.

p.s. Apologies for the double-post

PJK's (completly unauthorised) hyperthetical structure!(TM) sounds like the way to go. Right now all the officers are doing a bit of everything it seems so closer to release we'll start separating the duties more?
I do have one point to make that if only two of the four special agents are class specialists, then there will be some uneven-ness in the rank. Even though on paper all the special agents will be equal, it certainly won't feel that way when you see the other two mentoring some initiates.

You made a point that a big chunk would be higher than standard members. Maybe we should officially bump the member cap up to 30? If we're going to do it sometime down the line then I don't see why we shouldn't do it now. We're not recruiting anyway so we won't have uneven classes until close to release (although at that point, there'll be a lot of recruits to make it even).

I think we definately have to get the Guild Roles in perspective, planned out and numbered, if not for immediate implementation, at least so we know what the plan is and so we won't be running around like headless chickens near launch.

Woah - I stepped away from the site for one night and BAM! uuber-discussion time

Good to see people are still passionate about this place, and some excellent ideas are flowing.
This is defiantely something to discuss at the next Guild Meeting (aren't we due one sometime soon? *hint hint*), but i can see everyone's point of view on this - the advantage of coming into the discussion late

I believe cementing the Guild Structure would not be a bad idea for the sake of organisation, as we have to accept that most of what we have worked on *could* be turned upside-down as BW/LA reveal more info (lack of a neutral faction for example) - we've adapted to that before so we can do so again. Due to that fact there is no real reason why we can't go ahead and put that in place.

We should be aware things are subject to change, is all.

That being said I think we should wait until we've done this Lore RP* of Sureshot's first as it might welll bring to light new information about the guild as a whole and how we see our roles in it.

In short, this Guild is all of ours and we need to work together to make it as awesome as it can be, so please keep these ideas coming!





* RP Name Pending

I'll start with the obvious n00b (aka me) question. What's the point of a class champion?

Anyway, I'm heading in the direction of SS. Guild structure as it is now is simple and functionnal!

2 Guild leaders
4 Officers
16 Agents and initiate

Sounds good to me. Now the "side activities", ie (or should I say firefox?) RP-assistant, Initiate Mentor and freelancer commander or even the ambassadors should be considered as mission assigned to agents, just alike a hit and run mission would be given. This is (in my mind) completely different than guild structure.

Not wanting to get bogged down over differences, but my view is what will officers actually do?
I means they're nice ranks but ingame actual roles will be more important and I think if you have at least an IC role you should get a rank.

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Not wanting to get bogged down over differences, but my view is what will officers actually do?

Well, right now the officers are most trusted and experienced E.P.O.C.H. members, the core of the guild. we have to remember that no matter how much we love RP it will still be MMO with all such game hazardous areas like gear stealing, spying, e-drama and lack of maturity. So every guild need the trustful core to survive. People that will back up SS and LW when SHTF or will be trusted to give the risky role like guild bank keeper.

So representing the guild at official forums, recruitment of new members, handling in-game gear and money or cutting e-drama/banning should be handled by officers. Of course all those things can (and should! ) be done in character.

For example:
-My friend's guild was robbed by a guy who was out-of-a-game friend of guild founder.

-One of WoW private server website was for some time administrated by a new player that was good at web mastering. But when he get angry with the server crew he crushed it and deleted all the data from forums.

-In my own guild we had loads of e-drama because of girl vs girl wars that soon divided the whole guild. It started with promotion one of them to officer status.

[quote="Witya"]

Quote :

-In my own guild we had loads of e-drama because of girl vs girl wars that soon divided the whole guild. It started with promotion one of them to officer status.

Sounds like fun, I hope someone has that on video back to the subject I agree with SS we don't need more ranks the champion was only ever going to be a title that agents could compete for say every 6 months. If that's in a duel tournament or some other way I don't know but we should only have the 4 current guild ranks we have now.

Chef ops
Special Agent
Agent
Initiate

The new roles like Freelancer Commander should be jobs not ranks.

Tando wrote:

The new roles like Freelancer Commander should be jobs not ranks.

Which is exactly how I envisioned them when I discussed them with Sureshot. As far as I'm aware there always was (and probably only will be) 4 Guild Ranks.

Guild ROLES are entirely different, being that they are not restricted by rank (for the most part) - for example an Events Co-Ordinator could be an Agent or even a trusted Initiate. Sure, they'd need to run things past an Special Agent/Chief Op for the final go ahead, but they would be the one responsible for getting the whole thing organised (and should take the credit)

Witya wrote:

-In my own guild we had loads of e-drama because of girl vs girl wars that soon divided the whole guild. It started with promotion one of them to officer status.

Don't start me on the guild civil wars >_<