PAWS WARS [Author: wirehead]
First the sturm und drang with who owns the Paws tavern on Pacific — now it’s actually spreading to other shards. I got this in the mail:
The player run town “The lost City of Paws” has been around for about a year on the NAPA shard. We started small and have slowly grown into one of the major mercantile spots on the shard. We began having events and gaining a community spirit. Not as an RP town but a “come as you are” place. We held to no particular values other than “You are in charge of yourself so if you make a decision deal with the consequences.” About a month or so ago we were approached by a Seer on the shard and told we were a candidate for being blessed. There was much discussion about this amongst our townsfolk.
You see Lum, we arent really interested in Blessing as a goal of the town. it would be nice but, we are more interested in staying a viable community. There are examples all over our shard of “blessed” places that are now nothing but hulks of sham. Cathedral of Fire, MITH the list goes on. We didn’t want to be another “Oh they used to be nice till they got blessed”. However it was nice to receive some “recognition” from the OSI folks.
Now here is where it gets interesting. We were told yesterday that we cannot be blessed. The reason given was that the town does not reside where Paws is supposed to. We were given the choice of changing our name and getting blessed or not changing our name and not getting blessed.
Well now we were mad! Here we had been led on and now we get told because of a technicality that we cannot get blessed! Hmmm There are so many inconsistencies in this that we were flabbergasted. We asked if we could talk to the persons who made the decision in whatever format they desired and where told. “The decision has been made” and no further action on our part would do any good.
No here is the hard part. For those of us who frankly still dont want to be blessed, we became angry at being treated as some serf scum. As a town, we were not given the chance to argue for the town to the real decision makers. It has become clear that this issue wont get to the right ears because if it does it would make the ones who are supposed to “handle these things” look bad.
This is no longer an issue of Blessings. It has turned into an issue of a paying customer getting stonewalled by the flunky at the customer service counter. We feel like the guy getting told by the pimply faced punk that he cant do anything for us because his boss has made the decision and he knows its unfair but he needs to go to lunch so can we just leave like good little people? (As you can see there is a lot of emotion tied to this issue.) It wouldn’t be so bad if the person or persons who made the decision had come forward and been willing to talk to us about it. (yes yes I have noticed I am starting to go in circles.)
I trust this will not start a trend of player-run establishments coming to me to put pressure on Seers, because frankly, if you want your town “blessed” (and what is up wit’ dat term anyway? Are the seers gods or merely saints channelling the blessings of the GMs? It makes my head hurt) getting it to appear on the front page of this site is probably #8,013 on the list of most effective ways to get that done.
That being said, this whole thing just seems odd. First off, is there something magical about the name “PAWS” that makes people froth and wax lyrical or something? I’d think that just changing the name to “Free City of Pawtalacks” or something would get what you wanted done, and you could still call it Paws and pretend it was an abbreviation or something. I mean, you don’t exactly have “Paws” carved into stone blocks or anything. I can also see the Seers’ point that having “Paws” appear south of Moonglow or something would make an Ultima purist throw a temper tantrum.
My real question, though, is what do these folks want? They’ve said that they don’t want to be blessed, but, you know, they’re mad because they couldn’t discuss with decision makers about being blessed, which, by the way, they don’t want. But, what the hell is being “blessed” have to do with anything? Yes, it’s nice to have an IGM show up and throw nifty decorations all over everything. I was part of a player-run establishment (the Temple of Mondain on GL) that was blessed — after about a year of lobbying and politicking. So instead of a keep that we could pretend was a temple, we had a keep with skeletons and statues that we could pretend was a temple.
It’s nice when things are blessed. It adds to the atmosphere of the game. It’s a win win for everyone. But for god’s sake, it’s not a fucking promotion, people. It’s not what you get when you win. It’s just tiles on the screen. And, as you alluded to from the “blessed” communities that I’ll take your word on being moribund, it certainly is no replacement for a living, active community.
THAT is what is important, not whether you have the most funky tiles in your house.