*Sigh*. I suppose I knew that the East would eventually follow so many other Kingdoms in adding Yet Another Freaking Layer of Awards. But man, I so don't approve -- with every passing year, the award system becomes simply an enormous list of merit badges. Their Majesties are good people, and well-intentioned, but IMO this is a significant mistake, that will do more harm than good.
OTOH, I suppose it's self-correcting: we're pretty much getting to the point where nobody has any ideas what the awards mean any more, so they're becoming irrelevant. (I mean, *I* can't remember a lot of them any more, and I'm a court junkie.) More and more people, far as I can tell, are coming to regard the award system as Just Plain Stupid, which does leave room to convince them to ignore the whole idiotic morass and concentrate on the game instead.
(Yes, I know -- I've lost this particular battle, and I have better things to do than beat the dead horse. But I'm going to allow myself one good grouse first...)
Of course, the fact that we *need* a grid of all the awards in order to keep track of them is appalling...
I'm assuming this means the East now has grant level awards.
Far as I can tell, the whole thing is basically Midrealm Envy...
In hunting this info down I saw mention of a royal hallenge for garb at Birka to be inspired by Pixar films and that made me rather ill.
You aren't alone :-/
(Equestrians and thrown weapons and siege weapons and unarmed combat left out again, while arts and sciences gets lumped into one.)
Heaven forfend we discuss patterns and models and instead continue to create more special procedures for the ever infinite edge cases.
I look at this and go "this is not doing *anything* for my already-existing pathological fear of Court."
1.) I think royalty want to 'make their mark' on the kingdom. Passing laws is no good, a future monarch can 'un-pass' them. (AEthelmearc once had a pair who wanted to pass nearly 30 of them in one reign) But, once an award is given, it's permanent. And rather than deal with classes of activity as mentioned above, the royalty will reward specifics in their field of interest. I believe both East and AEthelmearc have awards for table settings.
2.) I have seen lists of 'triple-peers' with bonus cookies if they have a royal peerage as well. I saw a face-book discussion of who would be the first 'quad-peer' within a week of the creation of The Order of Defense.
3.) Like Justin, I'm a data junkie. I made a list of ALL the peers of AEthelmearc along with the dates of their first AoA level award, first GoA level award and first PoA level award. It now takes longer to get a Grant of Arms in AEthelmearc then it did to get a Patent of Arms in our part of the East before AEthelmearc was created. And the length of time increases the longer time passes. Grant awards add another 'step on the ladder' but that makes it a longer ladder, not one with steps closer together.
-- Dagonell
Worse, the people writing recommendations usually assume the step-ladder -- that you have to recommend for the lowest award this person doesn't yet have. And why not? It's hard to know which "level" is appropriate for somebody, if you aren't in the Order yourself. Hell, *I* don't know what the appropriate distinctions are between the new ranks.
The new awards *will* worsen the step-ladder, and they *will* make it harder for people to get Peerages, guaranteed -- decades of experience shows that more levels slows people down. This is *not* a way to help the Kingdom.
(Yes, I'm angry about the whole thing. I'm proud of my Kingdom, and it annoys me when it does something this stupid just because *other* Kingdoms happen to be stupid in the same way.)
I had that very sentence come up this year, and in another case the continuation of that outlook: "We can't put X in for Pelican! They don't have their Dragon's Heart (Kingdom service award) yet!" Especially when I think of people like Master John McGuire, who had his Laurel before his Maunche
And yeah, I agree that switching the OHMs to Grant-level is a minor detail, and the argument for doing so is stronger. It's adding the pile of new awards that is going to cause damage...
Mostly, I'm annoyed because the whole damned thing is counter-productive. Yes, it gives out more toys -- but in practice, it's dead-certain to make it harder (or at least, take longer) for people to get Peerages, which are the big shiny that folks care most about if they're award-motivated in the first place. This is *not* a good way to retain members.
(And yeah, totally agreed about the gamification...)
So if the people at whom the awards are targeted and who will be *directly* affected are excited and enthusiastic, I find it a good thing.
I was chatting with Aaron about this the other day. He took the data from the OP and did a bit of quick statistical analysis on it. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that the amount of time it takes between AoA and Peerage has been steadily rising, at a roughly linear rate, for the 15 years he analyzed.
So to me, this is basically a hack. It's dealing with a real problem, to be sure, that it has gotten *much* harder to get the mid-level awards. But the appropriate fix isn't over-complicating the system even more (and making it harder to get the higher-level awards as a result), it's to *fix our freaking standards*. I am *so* fed up with people whose standards for the Manche are higher than the standards were for a Laurel when I joined. *That* is the problem we should be fixing instead.
(Yes, yes -- shoulders of giants and all that. I hear that argument all the time, and it's largely misplaced. That says that the overall *results* should be rising over time. But the amount of *time and effort* it takes to achieve the awards should not be rising so dramatically, and that's the problem we're mostly ignoring here.)
And honestly -- I think most of the folks who are cheering for this don't really understand the side-effects it's going to have. I would bet that most of them would be less happy if they knew this will increase time-to-peerage even further, and most will claim to the high heavens that it won't do so. But fifty years of history says that it's near-certain to: when you add more levels, you exacerbate the step-ladder effect, and everything takes longer.
As I said at the top, I know I've lost this argument, and I don't plan to spend much time worrying about it. But I *am* exasperated at our inability to step back, actually look at our deeper problems and grapple with them seriously. Instead, we just keep applying surface patch after patch, creating an ever-more-baroque monstrosity while not actually making the Society any *healthier*...
I also think that conceiving of the metric as "time-to-peerage" is not particularly useful - not everyone gets to peerage, not everyone wants to get to peerage, not everyone is well-suited to getting to peerage. (I fully expected to wait a lot longer than I did, actually, and quite possibly not get there, and was totally fine with that.) Just because there is a *possible* endpoint doesn't mean it's where everyone wants or needs to go. I think a lot of the happy people that I have directly spoken to are looking at the middle, not the end, and I believe their happiness is valid and appropriate.
Oh, there's no question that the system is *very* arbitrary and whimsical, often in unpleasant ways -- that's the way it's set up, for better and worse. But that's why I find actual statistics much more interesting than anecdote: the trend lines tell us a lot more than individual stories. And those statistics are pretty compelling: we are making the system ever-harder, setting the brass rings ever further away. (The temptation to make jokes about Doppler shift here are strong, but thoroughly OOP.)
IMO, that's incredibly *dumb* of us, as a small-s society, and it undermines the entire point of the award system, which was to encourage people. Instead, my observation is that the system tends to do more to discourage them at this point. It really needs a serious overhaul instead of these patches, and I find it deeply depressing that there is essentially no way for that to ever happen, for a variety of reasons...
Wanna trade?
Re: Wanna trade?
For those who play in other kingdoms, as I do, it gets awfully tiring to be told that because I (at the time) did not have the mere AoA level arts award, I was not welcome to teach an advanced class, mentor a student in a specialty, judge a competition, attend an artistically oriented meeting, run an activity, and so on.
Easterners know what it means to be an invested, working member with no decorations about the neck, but other kingdoms see it as a vote of no-confidence.
Having friends from these other Kingdoms which do have more of a tiered system, I have seen enthusiasm and investment come with the "Royal Whim" grade of non polled recognition.
Really, it isn't about the dangly bits at all for most people. It's about recognition. Someone to look us in the eye, say loudly and publicly to all assembled "This Person Matters", and be inspired to continue on in the more private pursuits of arts and service. The jewelry stands more to remind me when I look in the mirror that I have a responsibility to continue to earn that recognition.
It also helps me to be seen as an established and enfranchised member when I am elsewhere.