Subculture and Gatekeeping

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This mornings post is going to be a bit of an odd one but please bear with me. First off I feel like I need to start this with a disclaimer. Gatekeeping is awful full stop. Please don’t do it. Gatekeeping leads to toxicity in communities and it just isn’t cool to try and keep someone out because they don’t align to your lofty ideals for what being part of that community means. All of that said… as a fortysomething geek I understand all too well why it continues to persist in spite of all attempts to remove it. So I feel like I have to start with the inspiration behind this… well whatever it ends up being.

This friends is Emma Langevin a name I only know how to pronounce because she did a Q/A video where she started off pronouncing it. She is a 21 year old TikToker and YouTuber and also is funny as hell. In her videos she occasionally wears assorted Nirvana T-Shirts and has apparently caught shit for doing so. There are of course the ever so creative “were you even alive” comments and the answer to that is no. However fandom doesn’t exactly have an expiration date to it and I figure Emma has just as much right to put on Lithium on a bad day as I do. While I don’t condone this behavior, on some level I still get it because I probably would have been one of these assholes were it not for a series of friends who called me out on my shit.

So the positive is that we live in a time when it is much easier to be into weird shit than it used to be. While boomers were ultimately the first to step out of line against the 1950s Nuclear family, they nonetheless created their own social hierarchy of order and conformity. The 1980s were in many ways about figuring out which template you belonged to and then attempting to conform your desires to fit that mold. If you didn’t necessarily fit into one of those predetermined roles, it could be extremely lonely. Diversity was not a thing that was celebrated in any form and least of which was Diversity of thought.

So many of us desperately sought signs of being part of a larger community. So various pieces of apparel, mannerisms, or activities became a sort of social shorthand for finding someone that might be a kindred soul. You saw someone walking through the mall wearing a Vampire the Masquerade T-Shirt and chances are as a Pen and Paper Dork you were going to find some common ground and maybe even strike up a conversation. In a land filled with polo shirts with popped collars… these folks stood out and were magnetically drawn to each other. The jean jacket often times became the cultural currency emblazoned arcane sigils that would let anyone else you encounter know that you were one of them. Mine changed a lot over the years but for at least one period of it I had a giant Powell Peralta Ripper on the back… which I got because I thought was cool even though never actually owned a single Powell Peralta skateboard. I had more from Santa Cruz than pretty much any other single brand.

Another common currency of “belonging” was the concert tee. Growing up we traded crappy recordings of all of these bands that were then underground. I first got clued into Nirvana because they were the backing soundtrack for a skate tape. Truthfully most of the musical was desperately lifted from the credits of a skate video. I’ve talked before about Santa Cruz Skateboards Streets on Fire movie and how important its soundtrack ultimately became to me. The thing is growing up in flyover country you sorta had to import your culture from somewhere else because it most certainly wasn’t happening natively. In truth we were all a bunch of posers… because we had to invent our way of life based on the clippings and footnotes found in smuggled media.

I cannot understate just how damned hard it was to get anything “good” in the small town I grew up in. We had been listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers for years and only knew of them because they played in the background of some movie we watched. Then we sorta went on a crusade to try and find as much of their music as we could. I cannot fully explain how excited I was when I saw this cassette single sitting near the electronics department check out at a Walmart. Something “WE” cared about actually getting noticed and becoming significantly more easily available. That excitement turned to frustration however as this thing that we felt ownership over… because we had to struggle so hard to get it in the first place… became something that the jocks were listening to.

So this rapid succession of being excited because the accessibility and then getting frustrated at the popularity was a cycle that I absolutely remember going through for several things. The thing is that I now recognize the sheer amount of nonsense that was involved in this reaction. That said I remember going through it all the same because RHCP had sorta been one of those arcane signals of belonging that helped us find more members of our tribe. Even though that “tribe” was contorted as fuck because none of us actually had the exact same ideals or believes or even hobbies. There was overlap obviously but everyone sorta had their own thing going on and we couldn’t really understand at the time that it wasn’t necessarily the shared experiences alone that bound us together.

This wanting to belong and trying to self sort yourself into a container that was easily recognizable was so strong that the very first thing I did when I got a laptop for college… is slap a NIN sticker on the back. Still to this day I have to resist the urge to go over and talk to anyone that has a Horde or N7 logo sticker on the back of their vehicle because that desire to find my people still exists somewhere buried deep inside. Where it turns sour and becomes toxic however is when belonging isn’t enough and you feel like you need to exclude others from finding the thing that you thought was special and unique. I am not exactly sure how to combat that instinct because I too understand it. I was annoyed at how easy folks had it when they found out RHCP existed with Blood Sugar Sex Magic or started listening to Nine Inch Nails after Downward Spiral. They didn’t have to find some seedy tape shop in a town 2 hours away to find the latest concert bootleg of the band. All they had to do was walk into Walmart and make a purchase.

I personally have learned the hard fought lesson that more access to good things is infinitely better for everyone involved. You get access to the things I love and in turn I get better access to the things that you love that I maybe also will love as well. So yeah Emma Langevin was born some six years after the death of Kurt Cobain, but that shouldn’t grant her any less access to being a Nirvana fan. I personally “discovered” Led Zeppelin some eight to ten years after the band broke up, and I didn’t feel like not being there when they were initially relevant was any hamper on my enjoyment of the music. I first listened to Rush in 1990 when a friend loaned me their Chronicles double CD set, and have been a diehard fan of the band ever since. Yet I am certain there is someone waiting in the wings to tell me I am a poser for not being able to conform to some artificial litmus test for fandom.

There used to be a part of me that was a little bummed that the age of instant friendship because of some shared ideal was gone. Then I realized that pretty much my entire twitter feed is populated by random strangers that I happened across because of some shared interest and then decided to strike up a friendship as a result. The act of Gatekeeping was not the social structure that allowed you to make life long friendships. In fact it probably limited your horizons to the point to where you could only see a handful of people. I wish I could spread that message to more people, that you don’t need to carefully guard these things that you love because once they spread they end up becoming far cooler as a result. To be honest one of the best experiences ever is watching someone experience something for the first time that you yourself love. I personally experience this almost contact high of reliving those same emotions that I went through when I discovered the thing in the first place.

Ultimately sharing something is how you keep it alive. Each time you can ignite the fire in someone else’s heart, it allows those really good things to transcend generations. I mean sure it is weird that going down the toy isle is a greatest hits collection of the toys that I grew up with… but it also means that things like the newest rendition of Duck Tales exist for a whole new generation. As a grizzled old man I get to experience being a kid once again as I view these favorite things in a new light.

Revisiting Memorable Characters

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Good Morning Friends. This weekend you did not get an episode of AggroChat because I was effectively knocked the hell out at the time we would have recorded. On Wednesday of last week I got my second shot of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccination and as such I am super happy to be on the downward curve towards at least partial immunity. The first shot was pretty chill and the only real impact is that my arm hurt for a day and a half… but like weirdly it hurt to type sort of every inch of my arm hurt kind of pain. With dose two… my arm hurt almost immediately and then when that faded this weird generic “sick” feeling started to enter in its place. Thursday and Friday were rough and if I didn’t have some pretty important meetings and if I were not remote… I would have absolutely taken sick days.

Saturday I still felt completely awful and it is hard to explain what that feeling is. So imagine you have the flu and that general achy horrible feeling that you have when you have the flu. Then take away all of the symptoms other than that. Because I didn’t have much in the way of symptoms other than this big generic “I feel awful” sort of feeling. I also couldn’t seem to make it through the evening without falling asleep super early. Like I normally get around six hours of sleep and during this little episode I have been getting eleven to twelve hours of sleep. Yesterday I started feeling like myself again so effectively that was somewhere in the neighborhood of three days of awful before the world righted itself.

During this time period I watched Falcon and the Winter Soldier and live tweeted my reaction to the Synder Cut with apparently Tweetdeck auto populating the wrong hashtag. Apart from that and sleeping… I played an awful lot of Elder Scrolls Online and managed to make my way through the Summserset expansion content. Like on initial survey this region is not really my jam. I am not a fan of High Elves and their machinations, but the longer I have spent here the more its natural beauty has grown on me. I mean I guess I understand why they are so highfalutin when your entire world looks like manicured. It would make it exceptionally hard to appreciate the beauty of someplace like Stonefalls.

The thing that I really want to talk about this morning however is Elder Scrolls and the writing behind the numerous side characters that you interact with over the course of the content. Like I have mentioned before how damned good their character writing is when you can become attached to a character after what is effectively a handful of paragraphs of text. What is even more amazing however is how much you will remember that character in the long run. Elder Scrolls has this wonderful history of resurrecting characters that you met during a side mission and then bringing them back into modern context much later.

The thing is… each and every time I remember this character and the adventures that I have been on with them in the past… even though in my case with Summerset and one of the characters some seven real world years has passed since I last encountered them. Often times I don’t necessarily remember the name but as soon as I encounter the character for the first time my brain is like “Oh Shit! It is the Dude from the Place!”. So not only do they make us care about these characters for the course of thirty minutes of quest interaction… they manage to make us care on a level can can be summoned up to add richness to future content.

Sure there are characters like Razum-Dar that at this point we have been on enough adventures with that we should probably reasonably name a child after them. But for ever Raz there are hundreds of smaller characters in the background of each and every mission that leave a similar impression on our brains as we play through the content. Then the Elder Scrolls team has this way of summoning forth these past voices in ways that seem natural and happenstance… and also create this living feel to the world. Characters aren’t just locked within that specific vignette that we first encountered them. They instead have their own lives that often times cause them to cross our path again.

Summerset is the conclusion of a story arc that begin with Vvardenfell and continued through Clockwork City. The multi tiered narrative was new for me and reminded me of some of the things that they managed to weave into the main story for each of the factional areas. This makes me really look forward to the new dragon based content arc because if my understanding is correct it is going to offer a lot of the same story beats spread across multiple content blocks. For now however I am doing another one off, or at least what I think is a one off in the form of Murkmire. I love Argonians and I am super down to be hanging out in their ancestral lands… even if it is a fairly bog standard swamp…. pun intended.

If you have never played the Elder Scrolls Online you should really give it a chance. It is quite possibly one of the best narrative experiences in MMORPGs. I am pushing forward in a hopes of getting caught up on at least one character before the major content drop in June, but even then there is so much content between me and that goal that I am not sure it is humanly possible. I don’t want to rush the content and want to instead spend time wandering around and exploring everything. I doubt I came close to 100%ing Summerset but I probably managed to see at least 90% of the content before moving on. At some point I should probably revisit all of the zones that I never quite completed and see about finishing them off as well.

Azeroth Needs Gods

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Lately as you all know I have been playing an excessive amount of The Elder Scrolls Online, and in doing so it has made me realize one of the things that has always bugged me about World of Warcraft and more importantly the cosmology of Azeroth. There are not actual gods. There are beings that they place in the same position as gods but those largely serve the role of large monsters that we will eventually take down in a raid. This morning I am going to try and explain the difference from my perspective, or at least my particular point of view.

Over my years on this planet there have been a number of games that I have played with baked in pantheons of worship. Likely the first of these was when I got my hands on a copy of Deities and Demigods it seemed both really cool and also extremely natural. I had been studying mythology and the fact that I was also catholic… which sort of has its own pantheon of saints… it all made sense in my tiny brain. I personally was super engaged with the Norse mythology and my deity of choice has almost always been Tyr the Even-Handed. In part because it was really fucking cool that he sacrificed his arm in order to bind Fenrir and in essence stop Ragnarok from happening. It is only as an adult that I tend to feel more for Fenrir in this scenario.

The key characteristic of the gods in a good RPG is that they don’t actually have the ability to directly influence the mortal plane. They can occasionally manifest themselves in the form of an avatar, but for the most part they wage a proxy war for control of territory and the hearts and minds of people. As such various cults spring up that worship a specific deity and generally speaking the only difference between these and the accepted religion of a people is whether or not it actually aligns to their collective morals. As I moved into online games, I found Norrath to be a very believable and vibrant setting in part because it had so many deities vying for power over the world.

In Norrath we had a core pantheon of gods with various alignments and realms of influence:

  • Good Aligned
    • Mithaniel Marr
    • Quellious
    • Rodcent Nife
    • Tunare
  • Neutral
    • Brell Serilis
    • Bristlebane
    • Karana
    • Solusek Ro
    • The Tribunal
  • Evil Aligned
    • Bertoxxulous
    • Cazic-Thule
    • Innoruuk
    • Rallos Zek
    • Anashti Sul

In addition to these there were a whole slew of other minor deities and demigods and general forces of nature that were in various states of activity an influence on the mortal plane. So many of the best storylines in Everquest involve the gods working against each other and attempting to exert influence on one part of the world or group of people. This also ends up creating interesting dualities as different races within the world view the same god in vastly different ways. Brell Serilis for example is the creator of the Dwarves and the Gnomes, but also is referred by the Goblins of the Runny Eye clan as their deity as well along with all of the neutral earthen elemental forces. The gods also work in concert with others for example Cazic-Thule, Ralos Zek and Innoruuk have an unsteady alliance because they all collectively hate Mithaniel and Erollisi Marr and actively seek to do harm to them through their followers.

Elder Scrolls similarly has an extremely rich pantheon of gods and demigods that vie to influence Mundus aka the physical world. In later games this coalesces around an imperially mandated pantheon of the nine divines but there are so many other pantheons present and active in the world. Not the least of these are the Daedric Princes which have a wildly varying number of approaches to their worshipers and motivations. Ultimately what separates a Divine and a Daedra seems to largely be the favor of the government as many of the Daedra themselves took up roles in older Pantheons within the races of Nirn.

Similar to Everquest a large number of the questlines that you find yourself on involve one or more “Gods” moving against each other or trying to exert their influence in a specific sphere of power. The core storyline of the base game of Elder Scrolls Online centers around a plot by Molag Bal the Daedric Prince of Domination and Enslavement attempting to merge his realm of Coldharbour with Tamriel effectively giving him power over both. Meridia another Daedra who is associated with the energies of living beings is aligned against Molag Bal and often times offers assistance to the players in order to fight back against this aggression.

Other deities like Nocturnal are closely tied with specific organizations within Nirn, more specifically the Nightingales are her sworn servants but there has often been a rumored connection between her and the Night Mother revered by the members of the Dark Brotherhood. The keys to both Everquest and Elder Scrolls and honestly Dungeons and Dragons before it is that the gods are alive and well and actively trying to influence the populace. I contend that there doesn’t really seem to be an equivalent of this sort of interaction happening within World of Warcraft.

Roughly five years ago from the time of writing this, Blizzard released a book called World of Warcraft: Chronicles Volume 1 that attempted to take the wildly disparate lore of the World of Warcraft and condense it into a unified world view. This was effectively the equivalent of an ecumenical council and attempted to sift through the various lore and discard the bits that didn’t quite fit while modifying some in order to fit into this neat cosmology. I was fully in support of this notion because Warcraft lore was a complete mess. However what came out of this as well was the fact that this larger world view didn’t have room for dieties really.

In the early days of Warcraft however I thought there was effectively a pantheon of good deities aligned against a pantheon of bad deities. The good represented by the Titans and the bad represented by the Old Gods and this nebulous concept we kept hearing known as the Void Lords. The longer the game has run however it is very clear that the Titans are effectively just a different sort of race of beings birthed out of the core of a world and not really immortal gods. Similarly the things that keep being referred to as “Old Gods” are just sort of this race of elder beings that defy logic and reason but also can absolutely be killed as we have done this to several of them.

The closest thing that we really have to a proper pantheon of deities comes in the form of the Loa that the Trolls worship. However apart from Bwonsamdi and Hakkar we really don’t see a lot of interaction between these individuals and the races of Azeroth apart from the Trolls consistently figuring out ways to “eat” their gods and drain their power. As a result these are also very mortal beings that maybe exist in a different manner but cannot really be thought of eternal forces quite in the same way as a Quellious or a Dibella. The absence of this clear pantheon of power aligned with and against the players has always ended up making the world of Azeroth feel every so slightly hollow. There was always something missing that I never could quite put my finger on until I started to think about it more recently.

Up until this point I could still sort of lean on the Wild Gods of Azeroth as being this eternal force that impacts the world. However Shadowlands even closed the loop there and taught us that what we think of as the Wild Gods are just beings with a different life cycle where they travel to Azeroth, live a cycle there and then return to the shadowlands to regenerate before manifesting again. This makes me not really consider them to be a true pantheon of gods either. There is this new Pantheon of death that we have been introduced to, but they also are very much killable which again makes me question if they represent gods either.

I think the truth is more that World of Warcraft exists largely to create powerful figures and then allow the players to kill those powerful figures. A major force cannot exist for very long without it eventually turning into a raid encounter. Maybe this comes from early frustrations of the folks who shaped the raid content of World of Warcraft being long time Everquest raiders and travelling to the seats of those gods powers… and only ever killing an Avatar and never being able to actually slay the god themselves. I think the storytelling potential of a game is weaker however if you don’t have all powerful beings with their own motivations pulling the strings of “mere-mortals”. World of Warcraft plays at this, but in every case those forces eventually end up on the chopping block as the players end those threats permanently.

I think I like the concept of having endless beings that we can momentarily defeat, but never quite go away and never forget the actions we have taken against them in the past. Everquest has managed to churn out so many expansions in part because they keep relying upon familiar enemies to invent new schemes to take over the mortal plane of existence. Instead World of Warcraft feels more akin to Dragon Ball Z or Bleach where they keep having to invent more extreme versions of cardboard cutout villains for us to eventually knock down in the end. The end result is also a lot of retroactive changes to storylines as new forces and shoehorned into existing events.

That neat cosmology chart that I posted earlier from World of Warcraft Chronicles has already been mostly nullified by the expansion we are going through in Shadowlands. Without a reoccurring cast of Gods, new and more extreme versions of evil need to be invented in order for us to keep prevailing over them.

Life Without the Auction House

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Morning Friends! If you have been reading this blog you will know that I am on somewhat of an Elder Scrolls Online kick right now. This tends to be a thing I go through where I latch onto a game and obsess over it for a few weeks/months and then get it out of my system and move on to other things. I would love for Elder Scrolls Online to be more of a permanent addition to the roster but I also know my personal faults which sorta stacks the deck against that happening. This morning I am going to talk about one of the weirder quirks with the game, the lack of a centralized Auction House. I am by no means an expert in this topic and as a result take pretty much all of my advice with a grain of salt. Traditionally speaking I am not the sort of person that plays the auction house in these sorts of games.

One of the things that I am getting used to slowly is logging in and seeing messages like this sitting in my mail box telling me that I sold something. This morning I am going to do my best to explain how selling items with other players works in Elder Scrolls Online given that I just stated that there is no auction house. I am still very much figuring all of this out myself and I am certain that somewhere in this post I am going to make factual errors just due to lack of experience with the system. What I do know however is that yesterday alone I made around 150,000 gold in sales and I am starting to get a little better at figuring out what to price things.

So when I say there is no such thing as an Auction House, what I mean by that is there is no vendor in the world that serves as a universal gateway to buying or selling merchandise. What exists instead is a series of Guild Stores. If you go to the banker one of the many options will be to access the Guild Store, which by default allows you to buy and sell items from members of your guild. This in itself is not super useful unless you are in a giant guild exclusively populated with traders. What most folks actually want is the ability to buy and sell items from effectively all of the other players playing the game. Here is where we start to get more complicated with the system, but ultimately it is one that I dig.

Scattered throughout the world are a number of vendors physically located in specific cities that are flagged as “Guild Traders”. Since I spent so much of my time in Shornhelm, these are a couple of the guild traders available there and you can see the guild that owns the vendor beside the trader title. Each week guilds throughout the game bid on specific traders in specific locations, and if they win that trader exposes their guild store to anyone who physically walks up to that location and attempt to buy an item. These traders are all clumped together somewhere in the city, and there are absolutely better locations than others. Mournhold for example tends to be a pretty hot location given that its trader stalls are all clumped around the Wayshrine for the city. Shornhelm where I am taking a photo tends to be one of the lower rent areas given that you have to exit town quite a distance away from the Wayshrine before you encounter the traders.

Given that players can be a member of up to five guilds at once, this has lead to the creation of trade guilds that act as cartels and make sure that they have a guild trader vendor each and every week. The above is a screenshot from the guild recruitment tool in game and just a handful of guilds listed under trading guilds that actively have a guild trader. Many of these guilds have trade requirements in that you need to make a certain dollar amount of sales every single week in order to guarantee your slot. However as a result they also tend to be the guilds that are furiously bidding on the highest traffic areas of the game. Many have a way of buying your way into the guild as well through buying weekly raffle tickets, which is a system that I have yet to really sort out.

I personally was looking for something a little bit more chill and ended up going with the Pilfering Peddlers which currently has a guild trader in Solitude. The challenge with being a more low key guild is that last week they failed to secure a bid on a trader meaning that we were effectively locked out of public sales during that time period. Right now I am mostly using it as a way of selling anything that I happen to get out in the world that has any value. Generally speaking I don’t sell anything that is less than 2000 gold on the trader, with the exception being patterns which are all pretty cheap but also sell super fast. The benefit of this system is that it is extremely cheap to list an item on the guild trader and since the default time period is 30 days you can mostly just set it and forget it.

The question obviously then is… how do I know if something is worth money on the guild trader? I lean heavily on an addon called Tamriel Trade Centre, that I spoke about the other day. Essentially it is a combination of a search website, an in game addon and a TSR that runs in your system tray and is constantly updating a list of prices in the background as well as announcing anything that you are selling. I combined a series of items that I have up for sale currently and you can see towards the bottom you will see a series of values in Avg/Min/Max format. Right now that is mostly what I am working off of because it tells me what items have been listed for on traders. Over time I am getting better at guessing what a reasonable amount because the first items I posted sold almost instantly telling me I had put them up for far too little.

My items are hosted on a Guild Trader located at Solitude in Western Skyrim, and anyone who happens to be wandering along can go up to that vendor and buy things directly from them. When this happens the item is delivered to the person via in game mail and then I get a chunk of gold delivered to me in my inbox minus the guild trader cut. What is more likely however is that someone will have gone out to the Tamriel Trade Centre website and done a search on one of the items I was listing and then purposefully ported to that city and bought the specific item they were looking for. The above is an example of a search that includes one of the items I am selling.

Right now I am the most expensive vendor because I sorta took a chance on this item specifically and am testing the waters. Were I a smart trader I would pop around to the cities where folks are selling something similar cheaper and relist those as well. In each listing shown above it indicates the player selling the item, where the trader is physically located at, the guild in question, the price and how long ago the item was last seen. Right now the TTC website is only showing you things that someone has physically witnessed, but given how prevalent the addon is and how active trading is in Elder Scrolls Online it ends up being a pretty reasonable resource.

Tamriel Trade Centre relies not only upon you installing the addon but also running the thin client that hangs out in your system tray. I opened mine and it has all of the things that I currently have listed and my internal database of items last synchronized at 6:23 am which is around when I started writing this blog post. This TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident process) hangs out and is essentially the glue that makes the whole process work. This is ultimately how WoWhead also worked back in the day in that you would install the WoWHead addon and then have a piece of software that was ferrying any information you collected during your WoW Play Session back to the website. There is a mutual benefit here in that I get the pricing information I need to be able to confidently place things on the Guild Trader and they get the benefit of effectively being the centralized auction house search engine that the game is missing.

At this point you are probably saying… “But Bel isn’t this just needlessly arcane?” and on some level yes. On another level however I really appreciate this particular brand of nonsense. Using World of Warcraft is the equivalent of electronic trading in the stock market. The person with the best tools and is capable of executing the fastest trades wins. Elder Scrolls Online is more like a Flea Market where there is absolutely money to be made in flipping items, but it requires effort to root around through the dross, physically go to a location in the world, make the purchase and then post the item for an updated price on your own guild trader. Earlier I said I should go snap up the cheaper version of an item, but in doing so that requires time and effort on my part to physically drop down into a city, find that particular trader and make a purchase.

The end result for me personally is the right amount of friction both on selling of items but also on buying of items. Do I go out into the world and farm an item or do I purchase it off a guild trader knowing there is a bit of friction in that interaction as well? Right now I am turning my proclivity for being a murder hobo and collecting loot into profit, given that items retain value in this game far more than any other game that I have played in the past. Some of the items that I have been selling have been in the game since launch and are still viable gearing options. There is so much content in the game and so many different item sets that no one can really corner the market on a specific type of item. The end result just works and the player based economy in Elder Scrolls Online seems to be thriving as a result, with the only barrier of entry being joining one of the hundreds of trade guilds.