*breaks long Stratics silence*
Many people seem to be missing the essential truth here – this shard is in a mess. The population has been on decline for years now, but lately it has reached life-support level. Anyone coming here is presented with a barren landscape with little apparent activity and not many reasons to stay. There are few viable regular guilds available and it is almost impossible for a start-up guild (not a re-branded old one) to get rolling. At the same time, the lack of activity drives more existing players away as well as those returning from breaks. What we need is more people – killers, monster hunters, crafters, consumers, anyone.
Unfortunately, the development team do not understand Siege and have no interest in us, Lord knows some of us have tried. The Community Manager is obviously too busy to enter into any discourse with members of his community and his minions just offer promises and then ignore you a couple of days later. They couldn't even be bothered to help support a Siege Tenth Anniversary celebration, which would have required next to no efforts on their part.
We have tried various things in the past to drum up interest in Siege, but these have been fairly pointless as they only bring in one or two new players, if that. However, one thing that was a huge success was the introduction of said NEW books. In the brief time they were in place there was a real surge in NEW membership. The inference is clear: many people visit the shard to have a look around, but when all they see is the tumbleweed blowing through town they log out, probably never to return. Seeing the NEW books gave them some point of contact and allows us (the Siege community) to get a foot in their door. With the NEW books removed, numbers gradually waned.
The main objection to the books – the favouritism – simply does not hold water in my opinion. Since I have been on the shard, NEW has existed to serve the Siege community. I am sure Shalimar has her faults like all of us, but she has always been passionate about bringing new blood here and has worked tirelessly on this. She always prefers that graduates make up their own mind about who to join rather than having to give suggestions herself, and she has always favoured new guilds or smaller guilds where appropriate. I believe she is as neutral a GM as we can hope for. Further, any guild wishing to raise their profile with NEW members can do so easily. If you want to bring your guild to their attention, simply interact with them. The White Council used to do champ spawns with NEW regularly until I stopped it a few months ago to actually LOWER our profile.
Gilfane is one of the guilds that is accused of syphoning off more than its fair share of NEW graduates, but this also does not stack up. Most of our new members this past year have come from other sources. We are a large guild with plenty of members and an active web site/forum and as a good-aligned PvM-cantered guild we fit the style of a good chunk of UO players, so we will always get our share of newcomers. And as for me having a co-leader of NEW, I only did this when Shalimar had only one active co-leader left (Obeta I think) and it was difficult for people to get into the guild. So I reactivated my daughter's old account and put her in NEW. If other people would like to step up as legitimate NEW co-leaders in my place (i.e. be prepared to down tools and go and guild someone, help them with their template, explain the Siege rules to them, etc.), they are more than welcome – it will save me $15 a month.
So anyway, carry on fiddling while Siege burns if you will, but the bottom line is that short of the devs coming out and putting their weight behind the Shard, I believe the simple step of restoring the NEW books is the biggest service they could do us.
