Janos Valentine's page

A long time ago I played a game called Shadowbane, and one event that stays with me is that my best friend in the Guild Kingdom I was in was actually a spy from a neighboring guild full of fliers.

He blew his cover one day trying to recruit me, I didn't even think much of it at the time, but when I mentioned it to my guild mates it led to him being KoS and our kingdom going to war. We probably could have won, but he wasn't the only spy, and before the siege our best tank, a buffer/healer, and one of our Templars betrayed us. Either they had been recruited or were working with the enemy all along, either way out little castle fell and our tree was destroyed.

That may sound like the sort of thing that really sucks, and it did at the time, we invested a lot into building up the castle and getting all the trainers and crafting/merchants ect, but I loved the game for allowing that to happen. For two months I had been grinding with this guy and ganking one of our more PvP oriented nieghbors, and he'd been plotting against us the whole time, and afterwards his guild had a reputation that made the kingdoms north of us less than friendly to them.

One thing's for sure, I played Shadowbane a lot longer than I ever would have because of that experience, I hope Pathfinder offers similar intrigue.

A typical problem with MMO's is the structure of Guild Politics. Creating Kingdoms is an amazing concept but when the leaders of a Guild go missing it causes the guild to slowly die. I saw this happen in ShadowBane and every other MMO, so I would like to ask, what will Pathfinder do differently?

I had a suggestion, if anyone working at Goblinworks is willing to take the feedback from someone who missed out on kick starter. What if guilds could be formed with different kinds of governments, ranging from direct democracies in which members voted on everything, to representative democracies where members elected leaders, to republics monarchies and caste systems.

The typical guild is a caste system, the guild leader(s) hold absolute power and each rank down is a rigid ladder caste under the leader(s), which causes all sorts of problems but would be interesting if it were only one of several ways a guild could be structured in the game. There could even be different flavors of guilds, such as hoards, tyrannies, theocracies, and kingdoms made up of multiple guilds which members could pay or earn their way into, with guild councils formed through natural rank progression as guilds became established.

A lot of ideas to throw out, to be sure, but if this game copies the same formula for guilds that has been in place since days of old, it will have the same problems that have killed all the best Kingdoms in similar games.