# Flat or Hierarchical?

LLMS index: [llms.txt](/dvw/en/llms.txt)

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When all members of a group have the same powers as one another, that group has a fiat organization; if some members have more powers than others, it is hierarchical.

Most formal groups are at least nominally hierarchical, as they usually have a designated leader who (minimally) can expel individual members but can’t be expelled by them. In practice, though, there is a big gulf between this shallow tree structure and a full-blooded hierarchy with multiple levels, promotion, and demotion between levels, and increased powers the higher up the hierarchy you go. This degree of structure is almost always only present in formal groups, and aspects of it may be supported by the underlying code. For example, if the group has money and can own things, there may be provision for “treasury powers,” allowing a designated individual to determine who is allowed to spend the money and within what limits (that is, give a budget).

There have been many experiments in virtual worlds with customizable hierarchies, with textual worlds (as usual) at the forefront. They have the benefit, however, of relatively small and innovation-friendly populations compared with those of graphical worlds, so even poorly thought-out ideas can work well enough in practice.

For the big, graphical worlds, it’s more hit and miss. Meridian 59 had a system whereby ranks could be created within a guild, allowing extra hierarchical levels that enabled groups to restructure themselves as they grew. This was a step in the right direction, although the powers associated with the new ranks weren’t easy to fine-tune.

The bravest early attempt at building a hierarchy was made by Asheron’s Call with its allegiance system. In this, a vassal character swears allegiance to a patron character. The patron may already have other vassals (up to a dozen), and may have their own patron (hence the hierarchy). The primary tangible benefits of the relationship are that a proportion of the experience points earned by all a patron’s vassals is also passed to the patron. There also is a ranking system, whereby titles are conferred on characters the more vassals they have beneath them [^48]; there are tangible benefits to a high rank, in that some magical artifacts won’t work below a certain threshold.

Asheron’s Call only allowed characters one patron (that is, they could only be in one hierarchy). It did permit them to join temporary formal groups, although in practice these were usually composed of members of the same near branch of a hierarchy. Although it’s easy to criticize AC for limiting characters to a single social group in this way, actually that wasn’t the reason its allegiance system fell short of fulfilling early hopes. The problem was, although there were tangible reasons for a character to have vassals, there were only intangible reasons for a character to be a vassal. Although intangibles can hold together vast clans in (and sometimes across) virtual worlds, AC had an unbalanced system. By trickling up experience points, it asserted that allegiance was a part of gameplay; by trickling nothing back down, it denied it.

Most people need no incentive to be the boss of other people, but they do need incentive to be bossed by them. Critical to this is the belief that they themselves may be able to rise in a hierarchy, where “rise” means “getting nearer to the top” rather than “getting further from the bottom.” AC got it the wrong way round. It was close, but no cigar.


[^48]: It’s actually more complex than this, as it accounts for how well the vassal tree is balanced.