I'm starting a new thread rather than use the Valentines Day Concert thread for this. Seems that it will be a bigger topic than a couple posts.
I had recapped an in-game conversation I had had with a member of another band. That band also planned on a Valentines concert on the same night we are. They rolled theirs back to a later hour to avoid conflict once they knew of ours. It highlighted the need to have a central schedule of some kind. The person I talked to agreed that the usual places don't seem to update as often if at all. (I offered to promote their concert at ours, which I thought was only fair.) I proposed some sort of email exchange, where band leaders/schedulers could email one another with dates/times/places, so a better picture of what is open and who reserved which time when is built.
Bri suggested a website with a calendar, write-permissions to the calendar going to band leaders. She also brought up needing to learn more about the state of LOTROArtists.
Silth echoed the website idea, probably a Guild Launch site.
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I think a website is fine, but it is open to exactly what happened here. Who maintains it? If they move on to other things, how does it continue to be maintained? I'm not sure that rebuilding LOTROArtists would be the answer.
Ultimately, it falls back to the old adage: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Unless all bands use a resource, it can't cover all bases. I think that it's legitimate to say "unless you register your time, it may get booked by someone else". Again, that means something universally used and updated.
My thought of an email list has problems, too. If there is a conflict, the "conflictee" would have to contact the "conflitor" and enter a dialog to fix it. Also, the list would have to be maintained. If the contact person left the game, that band wouldn't get the info. With a calendar site, at least other members could see the information, and request access to replace the member who has left.
What kills me is that there IS a universal resource and no one uses it. On the official LOTRO forums, there is an event calendar. I've submitted Valentines Day for us, but it has not been approved by the mod there yet (after three days of waiting, and counting). It does seem more for recurring events. https://www.lotro.com/forums/calendar.php Note that you probably have to be logged in to see anything.
The person I spoke with in-game mentioned that Lonely Mountain Band tries to coordinate Landroval, and I agreed. I just think it's a LOT of work for one person, and then there is the chaos factor of having bands tell them their plans, or not.
I don't know that there is a simple answer; I think we may just have to adopt a policy of putting out publicity as soon as possible on new concert dates, after we look around to see if we can find anyone else on those dates. If later someone else announces on the date, try to message them with links to our announcement, and other than that, not care so much if they overlap. Kind of thick-skinned, but likely the only practical answer.
