*Club-Group Merger

Hey all,

A couple of months ago I posted my basic idea about converting groups and clubs into one being.  I've had some time to flesh out the idea a bit and I'd like to give you the document I've been working on.

This is aiming to be an exhaustive list of everything a "new" club would have to offer - if I've missed anything out, please don't panic.  It doesn't necessarily mean it will no longer be a feature, it's more likely that I've just forgotten it exists.

Here is the document

If you can think of any other features that would be great to have, please post below and we'll see whether they can fit in!

A few other Q&As that I haven't addressed in the doc:

Why so many costs/purchasable features?
Not all clubs are going to want the same features.  An art-based club may not have the same kind of requirements as a breed-based club.  They might not really want a horse registry or stud book.

Why are you adding a monthly cost to run the clubs?
There's currently no real incentive to keeping a club active and running.  If a monthly fee is involved, an inactive club will just close up or be passed to one of the admins, and an active club will try to provide the fee every month and will therefore (in theory) be more involved with its members to try and earn donations and new members to keep the club alive.

Can I still own a club if I'm the admin of another club?
Yes.  You will be allowed to own up to 1 club, but you can be an admin in as many clubs as you'd like.

Last edited on 2017-08-14 at 14:33:19 by River

In general I quite like this merger. I think calling them clubs will be fine. Everyone knows what it means, and groups are often already called clubs, so it's intuitive.

Some minor suggestions/tweaks:
- add discipline to the list of automated registry requirements.
- allow people to create more than one group, but possibly make each additional one more expensive.

An idea:
Could we get the ability to purchase more than one registry? This would allow a club to have different groups, e.g. a conformation group, a dressage group, etc, each with different requirements. This would mean you could have a club focus on a breed as a whole and still set high requirements for different groups, and also allow club members to easily find horses suitable for their breeding goals just by looking in the corresponding group within the registry/stud-book/etc. This system would mean you wouldn't end up with players split between multiple highly specific clubs, e.g. Driving Gypsies, Dressage Gypsies, Conformation Gypsies, etc.

Added discipline :)

I'm hesitant to allow more clubs to be created because of the possibility of abandoned clubs and/or an overflow of "Arabian Club", "Arabian Association", "Elite Arabians" as people have mentioned previously.

It could be something I consider down the line though.

Ah, we overlapped haha.

See, I'd personally be okay with Driving Gypsies and Dressage Gypsies as 2 different clubs.  They're at least distinctive from each other.  If EV ever became huge (unlikely, but a girl can dream right?) it might be nice to have that distinction rather than a "one size fits all" club.

Regarding the idea of a single person being able to create multiple clubs, I was thinking of a case where someone might want to have something like a recipe sharing club and a breed club, i.e. two completely different clubs with nothing in common, which would do very different things. The breed club would do things like register horses, etc, while the recipe club would serve purely a social purpose.

I think having a cap on the number of clubs a person can own would still be sensible, I'd just like to see that cap be slightly higher than 1. Maybe make it so you can only have a maximum of one of each type of club?

Fair point about Driving Gypsies and Dressage Gypsies working well as two distinct clubs. Perhaps a better example would be if the Driving Gypsies club decided it wanted to have sub-groups for high conformation horses, those with rare colours, and those with very high stats.

Also, some more small tweaks to consider:
- giving clubs the ability to eject horses from registries which have previously been accepted. This would make sense in the case of registries which have a discipline or colour requirement, and the horse has its training changed or a colour changer used on it such that it no longer meets the club requirements.
- allow clubs to pick an image (i.e. character) instead of an EV horse for a mascot. This could be utilised by things like art clubs, role playing clubs, fan clubs, maybe other social groups e.g. Chocoholic Club.

Last edited on 2017-05-10 at 06:21:54 by UlyssesBlue

This sounds awesome, but I'd like to be able to have more than one club because if I can only have one, I'm stuck with the one that I have... and to be honest, I'd rather have a different one if I could only have one.
(I just said 'one' A LOT)

Last edited on 2017-05-10 at 12:29:48 by Raptorfang Ω

Yeah, I've been wanting to start a breed club for a while, but I already have The Coding Club, which I'm certainly not going to get rid of. I'm currently president of both that and the Gypsy club, and don't feel there's any issue with that. The clubs aren't similar, and they do completely different things, and there's no clash in the time I've got to put into them.

Overall I like the ideas for the new set-up. I'm excited about the idea of having admins, and the new features related to registering horses. 

I second UlyssesBlue's input about being able to kick horses off the registry, and about raising the club owner limit to allow for members to have one of each type. I totally understand the need to limit breed and discipline areas, but there's so much room for possibilities in the other categories it can't hurt to allow more there.

Don't forget though that you can still be an admin of clubs - you and a group of friends could get together and set up different clubs which you can all run?  Admins will have the same permissions to do things as the owner - except promoting an admin and abdicating.

It's also, in that way, an attempt to get members to work together.  If there's a club you'd really like to run but don't have the free slot - find a friend who wants to do the same.

I can consider it as something that we add depending on how new clubs go, but don't forget at the moment clubs are in a dire state.  I don't suddenly want hundreds of new clubs popping up and then either being abandoned, or people getting disheartened because nobody is interested.  I'd prefer to keep it small for the time being.

Can you be an admin if you are basic, or do you have to be deluxe?

Support, but I agree with Abbey, it should be one club creation per player. Not only can people be an admins in as many clubs as they want but each person can ALSO have up to 3 accounts, ergo 1 person can actually make 3 clubs and be the admin for as many as they want.

Hmm...

How about adding some sort of award that is automatically assigned (though separate from) like the current horse achievement awards are. I say that because of the mention of monthly points. I guess this would be more for the horses rather than the player, though some sort of player award could be interesting too.

The one thing I'm not too thrilled with is the need to get players to 'sign on' in order for a club to be created. It's hard enough to get players to participate in current club events (I got a whole two mascot entries this month), so I'm a bit leery that this would actually work. I can see a lot of clubs not getting created because players will just ignore this requirement. If this requirement has to stay, maybe lower the requirement to 5 rather than 10?

I like the idea of club awards or trophies that they can give out to some members.

Also, what will happen to the existing official clubs when this merger happens? Will they be closed down, or will their ownership be transferred to a player, or something else?

Last edited on 2017-05-11 at 19:59:07 by UlyssesBlue

I have a question: If you already have the group set up, will you have to get 10 Signatures to keep it, or will the owner be able to keep the group when the clubs & groups merge? Like I am totally on board with the merge, and I am most certainly digging these features that are going to be available. But this is the only part I guess you could say I'm not completely clear on.