Complaints and Suggestions

[Aeon the Piglet]

I'm a long standing guy from [Fail], and I've got a few complaints about how this alliance is being run.

Granted, I've been gone for a couple of months for personal reasons (involving family fights and funerals). You may remember me as the guy who was pushing hard for Fail to join ZoS's alliance and all that, or you might not.

Here's what I think:

1) I just asked on alliance chat what the alliance forum was. No one from our guild or Arch knew what it was. I was getting ready to set one up when Jude mentioned this place.

2) Total lack of new guilds. The alliance has been open for over a month, and, other than a steady stream of people leaving, we have nothing to show for it. Our guild takes responsibility for some of the losses, but quite a few have been people who left for a more active alliance.

3) Total lack of interest in doing things as an alliance. Jude only started a thread on alliance events when I threw a fit that nothing had been done for such a long time.

I don't have a real problem with people trying to set up an egalitarian wonderland of funk. I do have a problem with saying that that is your motive, and then disenfranchising two thirds of the alliance by default. If not even my guild leader knows about your forum being the alliance HQ, if no one from Arch knows either, something is wrong. Z trusted you guys to pull something together, and followed you out of an alliance that we worked pretty hard to get into, because he believed that you guys would do better and that we'd get some results.

Instead we've lost a ton of members and we're considering our options elsewhere. Do we want to make it work? Sure. But this gig was your idea, and the ball has been in your court for a good month now, and we've yet to see any real gains.

Here are my suggestions:

1) An independent forum for the alliance. I don't care who runs it, but I don't like that it is a subsidiary of your guild's website. If you do decide to pull out, we lose our only communication structure. Plus, I'm pretty sure you guys have the controlling interest in Oink as well, so we'd be looking at dissolution as well. The other issue with regards to the forum is that it is where all the decision making is occurring. You claim that we don't participate, and then make all the decisions. The reality is that no one outside your guild is even aware that "we" had a forum. Fail and Arch both have our own forums, and the same charge about lack of participation can be made there about RB. Where are the posts from you guys on Fail's forum?

An independent forum would solve these problems. And there are plenty of sites that will host forums for free (invisionfree.com for one), so cost and inheritance is not an issue. The perception matters a great deal. I straight up do not like seeing King of Pain listed as the poster under almost every single topic in this forum. He might or might not be a nice guy (I don't know him), but I DO know that a single individual doing everything is bad if your goal is democracy.

And if you guys don't think who hosts it is a big deal, then why not let us over at Fail host it? We've got a nice domain and we can set up an alliance section too.


2) Get some more allies. I'm sure that a principled stand and waiting on "serendestiny" sound nice, but they don't add to the cart. I'm talking active recruiting policy, and post haste. No one finds anything when they aren't looking, and we aren't looking. This issue (and the lack of discernible leadership) has directly resulted in unacceptable losses in our member pool; people that we will be hard pressed to replace.

I'd like to make sure that everyone understands that I am not asking that we fast track in some shit guilds. What I am asking for is that we actively seek some new people, and we do it now. Frankly, a four guild alliance where one guild is a ghost sounds like a joke to me (and something I'd be well out of), but I'm sticking around out of loyalty to my leader.

3) Some scheduled and promoted events for the entire alliance. I don't care what they are or who runs the program, but it has to be stuff that more than just members of RB take part in. If you lot deem it necessary, I'll take that on.

Why? because right now we might as well be a solo guild with a couple of people on friend's list. I've kept up with some of the crew, and they've pointedly mentioned the lack of interest in doing anything as a unit. When I came back and looked around for people to group with, I generally got the same response. Everyone is either hitting up their guild mates or doing some heroway, and that is definitely a bad thing.




If you want a democracy, cool. I can dig it and work with it. But you are off to a lousy start if your goal is to include the alliance, rather than just your guild.

edit: By the way, thanks for reppin us pigs.

[FoxBat]

RB doesn't have enough active people who are even willing to commit to guild events anymore, let alone alliance ones. You could pull a few members into such a thing but there probably isn't going to be leadership from us.

I agree that the last shot this alliance has is some kind of visible alliance forums. Two nests down on a guild forum isn't a great place. Maybe there are people that actually want some input on how the alliance is run, but the fact that Arch leaders are here and still don't take interest is not a good sign to me, and I don't want to point fingers but your leader Z knows about this place too. Ironically proper alliance forums are somewhat contingent on an alliance name which we can't even get agreement on, even though thats apparantly a more important topic of discussion then how to actually handle guild admissions.

Of course making an actual alliance, as opposed to joining a bigger one, was RB's idea in the first place. So I don't blame other guilds for not stepping up to the plate either when they just wanted to join another alliance and let them run things. The problem with us is most of the proponents from RB aren't active enough to implement their grand ideas, yet some of them still insist on doing it their way. We could bring in other guilds that want an active role, but they will probably want to run things their own way, and I don't see why they should bow to our structure that we can't be bothered to implement. How different is that from joining an established alliance then?

As you can tell, I'm not terribly optimistic about our chances, and I don't think this mess has been good for our guild either. If there are enough here who care about running an alliance, they will refute my opinion and get on with it. Just I personally don't and I haven't seen enough others volunteering.

[Sciros]

Arch is aware of an "alliance section" on RB's site as far as "where to go," although we do have a separate "alliance section" on *our* forums where we try to duplicate any relevant discussions. I wonder who was on that was unfamiliar, as the Alliance forum has been in our "Announcement" for some time... so, that ignorance is not RB's fault what-so-ever.

I'm surprised you guys (Fail) have only said anything now; why not a month ago?

I can bring in 2 guilds today if you want. Contacts are: Balric Ironhide for one, and Hey Zero Wanna Soda for the other. (Feel free to discuss these guilds with myself, Uca, or Leon, who are relatively familiar with them.) But I've been waiting on the alliance to kinda "get under way" with the alliance name, etc. Though, unsurprisingly, all of this has bogged things down a bit.

If you want this Alliance to actually get big and awesome soon, we're all going to have to put in some work in the coming weeks.

What I propose may seem a bit "radical," but I suggest just making RB the leader guild and that's it. No phantom guild stuff; it will slow things down guaranteed (we have enough evidence of that already), and enough to outweigh any benefit guild *leaders* might feel they get. (Most members really don't care who the lead guild is; it doesn't affect their day-to-day play, and certainly shouldn't.)

Separate Alliance forums are a lot of work. If Fail feels strongly enough that they are necessary, I say Fail is welcome to set them up. Otherwise, just take the responsibility to inform your guildmates that Alliance discussions will take place in the RB forums. Provide a link on your own forums to make things easier. Alternately, you can duplicate discussions in your own forum to spare your guildmates having to track 2 forums for a single game (with an "Alliance forum," they would have to do that as well).

Next, I am a bit confused about your concerns... on the one hand, you mentioned dissatisfaction with a lack of "discernible leadership." On the other hand, you are not happy with King of Pain exercising some of this "discernible leadership" by taking the initiative to start Alliance discussions.

For the record, I, and my fellow officers, have been aware of this forum for *quite some time,* and took the time to look up (maybe via Google) "Realms Beyond" in order to establish contact a long time ago. Some folks have been waiting for Fail to do the same.

Events are something everyone is welcome to initiate. If you feel there aren't enough, no-one is stopping you from hosting one or two. In fact, there was a full 12-person Deep run that Arch and RB participated in just this weekend. I imagine Alliance Chat kept people in the loop.

You may have had a steady stream of people leaving; Arch has had a steady stream of people joining. I'm sorry if the state of the Alliance has affected you negatively, but it seems it didn't have to.

Anyway, the million dollar question: why hasn't your leader posted anything here, if he was the one interested in pursuing this alliance to begin with?

[Aeon the Piglet]

Sciros, I talked to two of your members today who had no idea about where any alliance forum was. I asked them to check your guild status page and your website, and they were unable to provide me with a link to here.

If you wanna call that active awareness, go ahead, but I'd rather call that total ignorance. And as far as I can tell, you're the only one posting here who isn't from RB.

As to setting up a forum, excuse my french, but you have no idea what the hell you are talking about. I'll have one set up within five minutes of the post time of this reply, and I'll edit into this post.

My complaint about having only one person posting is simple: If this is a democratic union, why is only one person posting topics?

I'm totally fine with one person running the show, but I don't call it a free form egalitarian environment.

If you want to know why I wasn't posting, I was in the midst of a major family feud that only ended recently with the death of my grandfather.

As to the rest of my guild, they weren't posting because none of them knew about this forum. Telling someone about something once and then never referencing again is not enough, and it never will be.

I'm off to set up this forum. I'll provide the generic password to the root admin to every guild leader that wants it, and have an admin account available to them as well.

[Sciros]

Call a couple of my members' lack of knowledge of this forum what you will, but they're likely folks who don't frequent even our forums (there's a prominent post that links here) so whatever. An officer should have been able to point you here. Uca, Magister, and a couple others post here who are members of Arch.

Not that it matters. We have an alliance section on our own forum, and having one person frequent these forums is enough as long as that person relays stuff to his/her guild.

As for setting up a forum, the set-up is quick but you get what you put into it. If you are going to say I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, then I expect a bot-proof, ad-free, well moderated forum around and a link to it available by the time I'm done posting this message. If it's anything less, why should my guildmates go to it when they have such a thing available to them at our site?

My answer to your question about why only one person is posting topics: because nobody else is or feels he/she needs to. Simple as that. KoP took the time to save everyone else the trouble. And actually, now that you posted a topic, the premise upon which your question is based is somewhat shaky. Nobody stopped you from posting, after all.

Ignorance isn't an excuse, by the way. The link to RB's forums has always been public, even on ZoS's old Alliance page. A google search of "realms beyond" will also point you to the right direction with no trouble.

While more effort could have been taken to keep all guilds in the loop, coming on here and complaining about it is a lot less useful than simply joining in the discussion and making all other interested parties aware of it.

[WarBlade]

1) I just asked on alliance chat what the alliance forum was. No one from our guild or Arch knew what it was. I was getting ready to set one up when Jude mentioned this place.

What alliance forum? We don't really have one. There were a few people pressuring for one when we started setting up and others of us were happy with a more decentralized stance where each guild maintains one and key members move around them and keep the chanels of communication flowing.

This thing we have here that looks like an alliance forum was an experiment and could use some fixing up, but has served an interim function while we try to organize.

2) Total lack of new guilds. The alliance has been open for over a month, and, other than a steady stream of people leaving, we have nothing to show for it. Our guild takes responsibility for some of the losses, but quite a few have been people who left for a more active alliance.

We've run into some problems sorting out a name. Therefore we barely even have an alliance at the moment.

3) Total lack of interest in doing things as an alliance. Jude only started a thread on alliance events when I threw a fit that nothing had been done for such a long time.

Yes, things have been quiet. There's a lull before the storm that is the upcoming release. If that's a problem for you then organize something.

I don't have a real problem with people trying to set up an egalitarian wonderland of funk. I do have a problem with saying that that is your motive, and then disenfranchising two thirds of the alliance by default. If not even my guild leader knows about your forum being the alliance HQ, if no one from Arch knows either, something is wrong.

When did Realms Beyond become alliance HQ? The person who was strongly pushing for that has left and now there's this alliance sub forum that tends to fill some of the alliance forum needs. Arch has one as well, although it has seen little use.

As for "disinfanchising two thirds of the alliance" that's a pretty bold statement to make and you don't exactly clarify how we are doing this aside from pointing a finger at the RB forum and referring to it as if it is the only legitimate alliance forum. I have been one of the few people speaking out to stop that from happening and have had no real support on that position, so if you feel strongly about it then please add weight to the debate in those threads as to why you feel a central forum based on RB's boards is not something you support.

Z trusted you guys to pull something together, and followed you out of an alliance that we worked pretty hard to get into, because he believed that you guys would do better and that we'd get some results.

Instead we've lost a ton of members and we're considering our options elsewhere. Do we want to make it work? Sure. But this gig was your idea, and the ball has been in your court for a good month now, and we've yet to see any real gains.

"Egalitarian wonderland" - "ball in your court"

You can have one or the other, not both. The goal was a democratic alliance of equals without a centralized leadership. That means the ball is in everyone's court. Please contribute.

Here are my suggestions:

1) An independent forum for the alliance. I don't care who runs it, but I don't like that it is a subsidiary of your guild's website. If you do decide to pull out, we lose our only communication structure. Plus, I'm pretty sure you guys have the controlling interest in Oink as well, so we'd be looking at dissolution as well. The other issue with regards to the forum is that it is where all the decision making is occurring. You claim that we don't participate, and then make all the decisions. The reality is that no one outside your guild is even aware that "we" had a forum. Fail and Arch both have our own forums, and the same charge about lack of participation can be made there about RB. Where are the posts from you guys on Fail's forum?

An independent forum would solve these problems. And there are plenty of sites that will host forums for free (invisionfree.com for one), so cost and inheritance is not an issue. The perception matters a great deal. I straight up do not like seeing King of Pain listed as the poster under almost every single topic in this forum. He might or might not be a nice guy (I don't know him), but I DO know that a single individual doing everything is bad if your goal is democracy.

And if you guys don't think who hosts it is a big deal, then why not let us over at Fail host it? We've got a nice domain and we can set up an alliance section too.

Ok, so you've skipped most of the founding debate of this thing and have a completely messed up version of what the alliance is or what direction we are aiming at. Do you realize that everything you've brought up there has already been discussed?

In the interests of catching you up, the matters of where we discuss alliance matters have fallen into three positions:
1.) Central alliance forum hosted on one of our forums. This has generally been accepted as a bad idea by some and preferred by others.
2.) Central alliance forum based independently. This has slowly been established as unworkable or pointless over the first version of a centralized alliance forum.
3.) Decentralized alliance forums on each guild site, which in very rough terms is what we have now.

As for Fail's forum... Please advertise it! I would have posted that name brainstorm thread there too if I'd known you guys had one. I asked around and nobody could answer. It wasn't until later that Jude mentioned you had one at all and the whole time nobody from Fail said anything even when one or two of your members were visiting here. If you want any form of recognition in this alliance you are going to have to position yourself to be noticed and direct people's attentions back to where your guild is actively communicting.

PS. On that note thankyou for finally stepping up, posting a thread and showing us that your guild is taking an interest, but I'll point out that using the thread to fire an opening salvo of criticism might not have been the best plan for getting some RB/Arch <--> Fail communication going.

2) Get some more allies. I'm sure that a principled stand and waiting on "serendestiny" sound nice, but they don't add to the cart. I'm talking active recruiting policy, and post haste. No one finds anything when they aren't looking, and we aren't looking. This issue (and the lack of discernible leadership) has directly resulted in unacceptable losses in our member pool; people that we will be hard pressed to replace.

We've had people suddenly appear in our guild when we split from ZoS. Then we had most of those same people leave again a couple of weeks later. These ephemeral "grass is always greener" people are minor footnotes for guilds and alliances... You want more of these? Go recruiting right now before we've even established a name and we'll surely be flooded with them.

I'd like to make sure that everyone understands that I am not asking that we fast track in some shit guilds. What I am asking for is that we actively seek some new people, and we do it now. Frankly, a four guild alliance where one guild is a ghost sounds like a joke to me (and something I'd be well out of), but I'm sticking around out of loyalty to my leader.

Good. Be loyal to your guild. What we don't need though is individuals from the least involved guild to approach the wider alliance and inform everyone who has debated, argued and spent time trying to do something constructive that what we've done so far "sounds like a joke". If that's your attitude then you have no business complaining that nothing has been done in the first place. Send us some active and constructive people instead.

3) Some scheduled and promoted events for the entire alliance. I don't care what they are or who runs the program, but it has to be stuff that more than just members of RB take part in. If you lot deem it necessary, I'll take that on.

Why? because right now we might as well be a solo guild with a couple of people on friend's list. I've kept up with some of the crew, and they've pointedly mentioned the lack of interest in doing anything as a unit. When I came back and looked around for people to group with, I generally got the same response. Everyone is either hitting up their guild mates or doing some heroway, and that is definitely a bad thing.

Go for it. Organize something.

If you want a democracy, cool. I can dig it and work with it. But you are off to a lousy start if your goal is to include the alliance, rather than just your guild.

Democracies require people to get involved. We need more Fail participation - So far you guys have been the silent guild to the rest of us and we could really use your input. If you want us to participate with Fail on Fail's forum then you will have to guide us in.

[Uca Firewind]

Aeon. Yeah. As far as I can tell, you've been afk... and now instead of actually looking into what you're talking about, you're complaining about the ways things have been handled in your absence. Because saying Sciros is the only presence other than RB here is absurd. First of all, I'm the nosiest bitch in the whole world. I comment in like... every thread? And we have others who post as well. Take a look at the Get to know each other thread. And, for the record... I *can't* find a link to fail forums, so... That's why I'm not posting there. Wanna provide one?

I'd suggest you take the time to read the discussions we've had. The arguments about why we decided to go ahead and leave the "alliance forums" here, the discussions on events, (prior to Jude's post), the discussion on the "Phantom guild" and the discussions on the leadership: Democracy vs. Democratic Anarchy.

As for Z trusting us to handle things... I (and probably everyone else) was unaware he expected us to do everything and Fail nothing. Because let's just be honest... Fail hasn't done much of anything. When we say things like "We're going to have an Alliance run to the Deep at 8pm!" when I can look at my friends list and see four Fail people on... And we get no Failers... I'm left a tad helpless. We haven't organized events. Well, lemme just say it takes time. We're a new alliance and we haven't even chosen our name. (BTW, I've personally asked in alliance chat for Fail to help in that and numerous other things with no response, even though I see my friends list full of Failers. [including you, Aeon] And I've spammed that "RB forums are where we're voting on _____" So... without Fails website... Which is Fail's responsibility to give us... We've done all we could.) If Fail is loosing members because of a lack of alliance activity... I'm wondering if Fail truly understood what building a new alliance from scratch entailed before they left with us.

Don't get me wrong... I have *really* enjoyed playing with Fail. I just... haven't done it in about a month. To me, it seemed like once we started the new alliance, your members stopped wanting to talk to us. =\

It just seems like you're coming to the party late and complaining about things that are 100% in your power to change. Please do so. We need help. Fail can't expect the alliance to be run the way it wants with no participation.

Fact of the matter is, all of us want to push the buck, but NONE of us have been doing what we should be doing.

[Aeon the Piglet]

Sorry, had another funeral to go to in PA. Here's the url to the forum I created when I got back: http://s11.invisionfree.com/Alliance_of_Oink/

If you don't like it, I'll give you an admin account to mod it. I've got a generic pw on the root admin to give to all the guild leaders. Took me all of ten seconds to set up.

The alliance email account is allianceofoink@hotmail.com. If people have problems with hotmail, I've got no problem changing it.

Also, you won't be able to see much until you register. This is a security thing that I use on every forum I've made. Granted, there is only one post (from me, brief intro), but you'll be able to see all the forums after you register and are validated.

@Uca: Ask Jude. I've not been on since well before we were even in ZoS due to a major issue with my family that required moving to california. You may doubt that, but I told several people what was happening before I left. I did not get back onto GW until maybe a day before my first post on this forum.

[Uca Firewind]

@Aeon: Then my friend's list has been bugged several times. *shrug* not unheard of, but whatever. Not really important at all.

Also... Please read the forums. We're not an Alliance of Oink. We're Realms Beyond Alliance. As shown by a very important poll, about a week ago. Which we actually had an alliance wide meeting in game about (where Fail *did* have a presence) so... yeah. I'll register on those forums, but I doubt those will be kept. I don't mean to sound as if you are being a pain, because I love that you're being proactive now... but I'd suggest you take some time to catch up and discuss alliance things before just doing.

[WarBlade]

We're not an Alliance of Oink. We're Realms Beyond Alliance. As shown by a very important poll, about a week ago. Which we actually had an alliance wide meeting in game about (where Fail *did* have a presence)

I'm going to dispute that. It was not an alliance-wide meeting. It consisted of some of the officers and Fail's presence consisted of one person who went AFK for a large chunk of it to read this thread right here, thus becoming little more than an observer invited out of courtesy.

I'm not happy with that situation personally, given that clandestine meetings behind closed doors was one of the incentives to leave ZoS. What's done is done though, so I'm inclined to view the current arrangement as merely a stabilizing factor until we can get organized enough to pull off a legitimate decision about the alliance name and structure.