Remove Gifting Medals Outside Alliance

Interesting thread. Imo, the solution is never to take away functionality. This is a sandbox. Right or wrong, one can extort medals. If it is wrong (to the same extent that we feel newbie is wrong, for example), then I suspect the community will take action. If not then not. That is part of being a sandbox.

I think it is incredibly dangerous and I am vehemently opposed to removing functionality just because it has the potential to be abused by in game actions. If people feel strongly about this, work to make its abuse anathema to the Illy community. It is a model that has worked very well with newbie bashing in the past and can with other abuses in the future if enough people agree.

With the current game mechanics we do not need the developers to allow us to give medals outside the alliance. Taking away this feature will not harm the sales of medals, if anything, it will only deter them.

Before you could gift medals to people outside the alliance you would have to invite someone into said alliance and give the medal that way. Putting them under a rank that could/couldn't see AC chat. But even with taking away gifting prestige outside the alliance this feature can still be abused.

As Luna said the only way this can be moderated is by the people on Illyriad. We need to stand together to protect other players from abuse like this. Then if it starts happening enough hopefully the developers will finally step in.

Question we need to ask is; is it worth losing a member then someone gaining a forced medal?

Thordor wrote: Luna, is there a reason you can't trade Prestige? If there is I would assume it's because prestige is paid for with real money, it supports the game, and having the ability to 'bully' players out of their prestige will make people more reluctant to buy it. This could be seen as the prelude to a bigger problem. The community frowns quite a bit but you would be surprised how many people wouldn't actually do anything. Everyone has an opinion but that's as far as it goes. The GM's are the rule makers of Illyriad and I think should make said rules in the players interests as new problems arise. Imagine you've spent a year or so building up your own characters cities, and working on an alliance, now imagine all that work is being undone before your eyes, it's very demoralizing. I care for my own account, but care for the people in my alliance much more then that, and when the ToS came through I rushed through the 'acceptance' of them to stop my players being slammed. This is just one incident, there will be more, you can count on it, and if you're expecting the community to step up and police the game for you, I'm afraid it wont happen, there are too many ingame things to worry about including political backlashes that the higher ups of the bigger alliances might not think are worth it. If you want people to buy prestige, then you need some kind of 'official' safe guard in place.

I would think that the dev team would very much have an interest in this issue.  If medals are used in this way, one way the community could respond would be by seeing them as a mark of dishonor rather than honor; this would probably lead to people purchasing fewer medals than they would otherwise, which would limit their potential as a source of income.

Luna, is there a reason you can't trade Prestige? If there is I would assume it's because prestige is paid for with real money, it supports the game, and having the ability to 'bully' players out of their prestige will make people more reluctant to buy it.