Sorry Cy

[Zed-F]

Fair loot assignment is pretty much enforced by the game in Guild Wars. Everything that drops is assigned an owner by the game, and that owner can do what they like with said item. Trade it, sell it, give it away, salvage it for components, whatever. (It will even assign loot to henchmen if there are any in your group!) That is what FoxBat means by 'first dibs' -- if the game assigns a drop to you, it's yours. No-one else can even pick it up. If you don't want it, and a guildmate likes it, by all means give it away.

As far as good-natured attitude being lacking... I don't really think that comment is warranted. People are still quite willing to help one another out in RB (within the guild, and now that we are within an alliance, probably within the alliance) at no charge. We haven't set any policy on how we interact with people outside our own guild, however. Since we don't generally interact with non-guildmembers except on a 'face in the crowd' basis, and we haven't been particularily interested in recruiting until recently, we haven't needed one. Each person has decided their own policy for themselves.

However, if we are looking to recruit more people, perhaps the time has come to decide whether our guild as a whole should present a united face to the rest of the GW public, and if so what that face should be.

[Occhidiangela]

However, if we are looking to recruit more people, perhaps the time has come to decide whether our guild as a whole should present a united face to the rest of the GW public, and if so what that face should be.

Or, you could take "the grandfather of the BN" way's attitude (Woody) and Moon the Public (Pubbies.)

Occhi

[KingOfPain]

RB doesen't do a whole lot of running for tips, but when leader KoP suggests I consider it when I quickly run his char somewhere... there hasn't exactly been much outcry against it

.

I missed this little bomb.

We quested to Beacon's, IIRC, Seijin was but you weren't in the questing party, you were invited by me to come and play/watch the run. Two of the players in the PuG was talking about their runners during the quest, and as a joke (because we were at Beacon's where people buy runs to Droks) I asked for a run to Droks. No fee was involved. Half Moons had no need or want to be at Droks, she was going to, and did, learn to Monk all the way thru the game with henchies and PuGs. She is the one with the Protector title.

It was a good experience. Both of you had never ran that before, and ended up to be the two who completed the run.

To put things in context, I only suggested, jokingly, that you turn pro when you joke about a payment from me. Granted, I had no strong opinions whether running for gold is BAD, or an acceptable practice.

Upon further examination of this issue. I say that we should not participate in any runs, for pay or not. Most people get runs to bypass parts of the game because they do not want to take up the challenge, or worse, using it to exploit one thing or another.

Running pubbie(s) is not an acceptable practice, whether or not payment involved.

Running guildies should be considered case by case. We variant scum have certain needs, such as to catch up a character to sync up with a team and other weird stuff that we do.



KoP

[soul]

Also, since we've always been a community and not a clan, instead of a hardcoded set of rules we've always just been a collection of people, people who are now spread across many different titles. Many of us have changed quite a bit since we first came to RB, too.

Can be 'a blessing and a curse', I suppose, at least in a case like this. With no rules or real guidelines besides the RB Motto, theres a general sense of how its members should be, but things are largely left for one's own interpretation, and as such not everyone is going to think the same way on a subject such as running for money.

(Note, since I had written this before KoP posted, and just saw his post before I submitted this one, I do agree with the last few lines of it.)

I remember around when the game first came out, and we had new members trying to sell things to others in the guild. A few people spoke up about it whenever someone tried, and I don't see it happening anymore.

If no one speaks up about the things they disagree are in the 'spirit' of RB, no one else is going to be aware. It'll keep happening, and this sort of incident occurs. I think the fact there is no set rules or guide lines for the guild (especially with how we deal with officers) shows a bit more trust placed in others of the community than you might find elsewhere. As such though, I think a bit more discussion between members is warranted when we reach the 'gray areas' such as this.

Not particularly fond of running for money myself, but I don't think being a part of the group involved dirties the whole character, or the guild. More like stepping in mud.

PS - Good to see that the good natured attitude I experience on Diablo 1 is continued on Guild Wars, even if it is only from one person.

I suppose that is a fair, if inaccurate assumption, based on what little information there is about the general nature of things in this thread. However, while Cy might be good at it (and moreso than most/all the rest of us), I do not find what many of us experienced in that regard is missing here.

I don’t expect anyone to care about that,though.

Time has passed me by.

Not sure at all why you'd think that. I care, and I can't speak for the others, but it seems like they do too.

We all want you back.

I don't think time is passed you by quite yet.

[Seijin]

I've only run for fun before and only a few times at that. I've accepted tips if I took anyone, but never forced anyone to pay me.

I've thought about running for money, but never did because...well, I've never needed the money that badly. But I think I did suggest maybe the guild do that to pay for the merchants we could buy for the guild hall...sort of a fund raising event for us to have some fun with.

I've never cared either way if someone was willing to pay for a run for money or if someone was running for money. I've gone through the entire Prophecies campaign with all 6 primary professions and doing it over again with a ranger primary (yes I'm a sick person). I've gotten runs to Droks on about half my characters to get them through ASAP. With max defense armor, that makes ASAP a lot easier to do. Of those runs, I've only had to pay for 1 and it only cost me 1k gold, the others were free, not even for tips (believe me, you don't know how long I had to wait for free ones). Going through the game over and over again isn't exactly the most exciting thing to do for me nor is it the thing I want to consume all my time doing.

I was part of the group that did that run the other night, but I only joined in for fun. They were already attempting it when I had logged on and just so happened to move to copperhammer before they left again. I knew exactly what was going on because it was mentioned in the guild chat. I just wanted some fun, so i joined on to try and run it. I knew money was involved, but didn't care for any of it, I just wanted the fun at the time.

Anyways, I hope I didn't have anything to do with Cy leaving, if I did, I appologize for that. But I was there purely for entertainment value to see if we could make it.

[Zed-F]

As far as runs go, I don't have any problems with receving runs. Yes, you can skip a lot of stuff that way. If you've been there and done that before, though, so what? In general, you're not shirking challenge by getting a run to a harder area of the game, you're just substituting one challenge for a different one... and it's not like the game is all that hard to begin with. Even when you're going for survivor.

Giving a newbie a tour through areas they've never been in is one thing, and I'll agree that that's not a cool thing. But getting a character through to the point where they can be viable adventuring with other level 20 guildmates in whatever zones those guildmates might be adventuring in is something else.

[Hawkmoon]

I do hope that Cy hasn't left us. I would miss him if he did. One of my All-Time Funniest Diablo 2 Memories ™ is his fault: we were playing in the Rogue Revival team game, we were all whacking away at Duriel on Hell diff, and Cy posts:

"afk - phone"

A minute or so later he comes back on:

"telemarketer - I told him I was killing a demon and had to go"

We all cracked up. I can't imagine what must've gone through that poor sod's head when he heard that!

So Cy - I care. A lot of us care. Don't leave over a trivial matter. Your character isn't soiled. She (actually, her driver) didn't choose to participate knowingly in something that she would object to on principle.

Regarding KoP's comment about making it Guild Policy not to engage in running non-guildies, that's fine with me. I agree that most of the people asking for runs are trying to bypass content (and one must wonder why they're playing the game in the first place if they want to skip large portions of it), though I understand Seijin's point about doing the story ASAP with one's umpteenth character. However, I think that it would be a great Guild Policy to assist random people with quests and such (for free, of course). In any outpost, there are nearly as many people posting "lfg for [insert quest name here]" as there are "lfr to XXX." If we want to make a good name for the guild, or just to have an entertaining time, or to win converts, surely that's a better way to go about it?

Just my $0.02.

Cheers,
Hawkmoon

[Seijin]

I've never skipped content, I just used the runs to get better armor, that was all. I still went back to Beacon's to do the quests and missions from that point on, through the rest of the game. So I didn't skip stuff, nor have I ever skipped anything, I just made it a little easier going through the story the next time around with better armor so I could quickly use those characters to help out guildies or unlock skills.

If we made a policy of no running anyone outside the guild, I wouldn't mind. It would clear things up definitely in terms of running for money. As for helping random people, I've done that many times. Usually I get a nice laugh at watching them do stupid things or have them not listen to me when I tell them if they wander off I'm not going to heal them. I've had half my group leave and still complete the mission with the ones who stayed.

I'm pretty kick back and will go with the flow of whatever the guild wants to do in this matter. But I do have to admit that sometimes its fun seeing if you can make that droks run and having people to cheer you on.

[Drasca]

.
Running pubbie(s) is not an acceptable practice, whether or not payment involved.

Running guildies should be considered case by case.

Is this in light of ZoS's policy on running and how we look to them? If so, I don't care for toadie'ing up to other guilds and their policies and will try to take your offer up of "Find a better alliance". Actually, I should do that last part anyways, and preferably a Kurzick one

I disagree. For one, this is a double standard that excludes the public the right of services. Case by case is an unrealistic vague and unspecific standard that'll allows guild members to arbitrarily run when they want, giving no real change on the running of guild members front. There's also no good standard for when to and when not to run.

Secondly, I do not believe it is morally wrong to run people where they've been before. Do you manually walk / fight from town to town say from Droks forge to Frontier gate on your level 20 to do LDD? The teleport option for convenience is here.

The people I've run with, we've done it for fun and challenge, and sometimes as a favor for convenience of the person run. That's always goign to be my primary motivation. Being paid for runs is currently publicly accepted social norm, and while I won't condone scams, when I've completed an honest service, and people want to pay monetarily of their own free will and in amounts they think is worthy, I don't object to nor am beneath accepting payment.

To put it another way, I am virtualy sure all of us have sold excess runes or materials to the various traders in town. Those prices are determined by overall player demand too, and such selling is honest business. People want to buy at those prices, for their own convenience, and we've given it to them. Honestly, I've bought most of the runes I've used. As nice and generous as the people here are, we don't have the critical mass for a closed economy.

I know I have participated in honest and fair free flow of goods and service.

Within the guild, it is probably best to advise new players not to be run to places they've not been to and even refuse if you don't want to. (Escort with other characters is another matter). However, there's public demand, and public services will supply when demand is high. Market actions can't be stopped completely. Since this can be a fairly harmless service, and potentially entirely beneficial to the end user, I don't believe banning helps us or makes us realistically look better to the public.

Unless its the ZoS you're looking to impress. If that's the case, I spit on the ZoS alliance and their policies. I didn't sign on for Alliance rulings and policies. I expect RB'ers decide for themselves as individuals and as a collective group.


PS:

I just used the runs to get better armor,

Strike better with uglier.

[FoxBat]

OK sorry for dragging your name through KoP (maybe I shouldn't have), and I know you aren't a fan of runs in general... but I did want to make the point that there's never been any kind of position on this topic that I've heard before. It's not something that has been done often in RB, but it's happened and I haven't heard loud complaints until Cy.

Personally I have a hard time reasoning why selling/accepting tips on a run is all that different from selling an item in public chat, but it's not a terribly important point to me. I've only run for money one other time in my GW career, so it's not something I do alot anyway, and I would have no problem avoiding that in the future if it will create less trouble for the guild. (Besides, runs somehow don't seem like they can be anywhere near as common in factions.) I think I see better where Cy is coming from and it isn't exactly on this kind of debate anyway.

Cutting out running altogether, or never picking up pubs for a free run... that doesn't sit as well with me. I know Drasca's compulsive running habits annoyed you on half moons :P, and that a culture where guild running is permitted can lead to a sense of entitlement for runs, or an unwillingness to resist being run even if that isn't particularly desired, but I'm not as settled on this point. ANet did something right with a low level cap in that it allows people to spend more time together even if their chars are old and advanaced or young and green, but this is somewhat ruined by the need to reach an outpost/mission before you can participate with guildies in it.
Additionally, some PvE characters I just want to get PvP-ready ASAP, which means getting them to the cap zones for key elites... or simply to have them avaliable with the right waypoints if guildies want help with hard quests like titans, SF, or UW/FoW. Also I'm not particularly lazy... most of the time, I find some skill setup to just make my character run themselves!

Now if we concluded that running is OK in the right context for our own guild... I'm not sure I see a good reason to outlaw that for pubbies necessarily, it seems to be reinforcing that elitism which Cy's post precisely concerned me with. I am going to hang around Beacons just to run people for kicks? Probably not. But if theres guildies in the run, would it be bad to bring some pugs along for the ride? I had a good bit of fun doing that droks run for the first time... and I can't see it as necessarily reflecting horribly on the guild that two white-caped crusaders were in the front at the end of the run, and did this all at no charge...