The Monk is Good. The Monk is Wise. Thank you for writing again so regularly, Angus.

His comments today on the schism between in-game guilds and the out-of-game requirements for entry rang very true for me. I always wondered why it was that I needed to pay some idiot architect a bunch of money for a house in SWG, when there were a bunch of perfectly good empty buildings in the NPC cities. Seriously, there’s not one apartment for rent in all of Theed?

Angus argues that in games like AO and EVE, it would have made a lot of sense to allow players to join in-game corporations:

You’d have the means to do cool inter-twisted quest stuff like the thing where you get an email from your boss telling you to kill the guy sitting next to you on the airplane ’cause he’s a corporate mole from another company, or more important stuff that everybody else in your guild actually cares about, like stopping somebody from trying to kidnap the princess and poison the king, if you were really high-up in your in-game guild. Of course, on the negative side, you might end up in a corporation with some attention-whore college boy drama queen that never shuts the hell up and drives everyone absolutely batshit. But how is that any different from the shit we’re doing now? 

I wanted to join up with one of the NPC corps about 15 minutes into EVE’s tutorial, and was very disappointed when I learned I couldn’t.

C’mon, just a little RP never hurt anybody.