After reading almost every question in the 3 threads that were posted for Bethesda I saw quite a few people asking for competitive guilds and limited membership and I have to ask myself WHY!?

Why cut off huge chunks of the game.

Mages guild has 15 quests

Thieves guild has 15 quests

If you make them in competition you just removed 15 quests that your character can experience. Whats the logic?

In my last game of Morrowind I managed to get close to the top of every possible guild (mage, thief, 2 houses, fighter, and several others and enjoyed every minute of it)

So we can do other paths with other characters, so it gives a choice to make, so we can diversify our characters, to add re playability, ect.

I really want clan rivalries, and the ability to join all sides. This includes the main quest.
That said, it makes little sense to join both sides of rival factions. I guess it would be awesome if you could get away with it and force people to fight to the death.

Where is the logic to be in the Police Guild AND in the Thieves Guild?

This is my stand point on the issue. You should logically not be able to head rivalling organisations.

And Morrowind actually addresses this point. While I forget the exact guilds beyond the Fighters and Thieves Guilds, you can't be the boss of all of them at the same time in that game. You can run a good many of them, but those two in particular have a big conflict in their quests that make the other quest path impossible to finish. From what I remember at least.

Being head of the police guild gives excellent power if one were to become head of the thieve's guild as well.

I want to be allowed to join any guild if I have the skill, but if I'm with two guilds that are rivals of each other, maybe there could be ways people in the guilds could find out, so you have to make a decision or do something about it.

cuz they want to force everyone to play the way they do. just inconsiderate and elitest, ignore 'em

If you want to continue the namecalling, I could call you childish and selfish for entertaining the illusion of being godly in everything.

Or we can be civilized, and focus on the question at hand. Sound good pal?

Jesus, yea totally elitist and stuff right? Get over yourself.

Maybe, but there would be some problems. Some members of the Thieves Guild should ideally be suspicious of you...after all, who are you really a double agent for? Them or the cops?

There's a few reasons. First of all, it allows the writers more freedom to give weight to choice. Things like the Thieves Guild complications involving the Fighter's Guild (Which is totally avoidable), rival factions like the great houses, things like that. You can actually, aside from the Great Houses, Join and complete every faction line in Morrowind on one character, so I don't think people have a problem with that in itself.

Second, the issue isn't so much Blocking players from doing all the factions, it's having it make sense. In Oblivion, a person could be archmage without ever having cast a spell, and that just rips a lot of people out of the experience. As long as Guilds have a requirement to demonstrate trademark skills of their profression, I have no problem with letting Jack-of-all-trades join every guild.

Third, there's incentive for replay. Replay value is never a bad thing, and some instances make sense. You don't hear anyone criticizing Mass Effect for "Locking Content" because you kill Ashley or Kaiden (And it does lock content, hell, it removes an entire party member from the game and it's sequels) so why can't TES games have the same liberties?

I tend to agree that restricting membership is not a great idea. But I think the motivation behind it is quite compelling. The motivation is that the factions are a lot more interesting if they require you to negotiate conflicts of interest. Restricting membership is a way of doing that, but it is an extremely restrictive way. I would prefer it if the game contained other ways of requiring you to make choices (with substantive consequences!) between who you wanted to help/harm, and how you wanted to help/harm them.

For example, perhaps a Thieves Guild quest requires you to steal some alchemical items/ingredients from the Mages Guild. If you are a member of the Mages Guild, you should still be able to complete this quest - you just have to avoid getting noticed. Or, if you wanted to stay loyal to the Mages Guild, perhaps you could find a way of "recreating" the items. But then perhaps the Thieves Guild is testing your loyalty to the Thieeves Guild, and want you to steal some unique items. Maybe you could steal the item, but then steal it back later? Alternatively, if you are not a member of the Mages Guild, you should still be able to become a member after completing the quest. You might not have been detected stealing the item; or perhaps you've gained enough of a reputation as a powerful mage to gain membership despite the Guild's distrust of you.

I don't think such things are beyond the capabilities of Skyrim. They don't seem to be technical limitations. They just require attention to detail with writing and quest design. They are worth it, for they make the quests and factions much more interesting. And there's no need for limiting membership. Indeed, multiple membership becomes a better way of fulfilling the desire for "choice and consequence". It makes the choices more difficult, and the consequences more weighty. Locking the player off from content is an easy way out. It's just: "You only need to make one difficult decision: Mages Guild, Thieves Guild, or Fighters Guild. Decide now. No more decisions later." Not much of a "choice and consequence" system, to my mind.

its funner

Ahh.... there are few things I enjoy more on a forum than seeing someone figuratively haul off and punch himself in the face.....

To the topic - the real point, to me at least, of having rival factions is for the story possibilities. It's just much more engaging if my characters have to make choices that matter - that's part of what takes it beyond just another game to be cruised through, then set aside. TES games aren't meant to be rushed through pell-mell - the TES world is there to be experienced and savored. And part of that is making each character, and each character's story, unique. And part of that is having the character come to points at which s/he has to make a choice between one path and another. If both paths are equally possible, then there's no meaningful choice, and without meaningful choices and consequences to those choices, characters are less distinct and the game is less fulfilling.

It's not so much that the character should be blocked off from one faction if s/he joins a rival faction - it's that the dynamics within and between the factions have to make sense. IF it makes sense that membership in one faction precludes membership in another, then that's the way it should be. IF it makes sense that one could join both, then that's the way it should be. IF there's some way that one could join two rival factions and get away with it, that's the way it should be.

Beyond that, there's also an issue of time and effort - in much the same way as a single character simply isn't going to be able to invest enough time and effort to successfully master multiple skills, a single character shouldn't be able to invest sufficient time and effort to lead multiple factions. I hope that the quests are set up so that it will take just about the entire length of a normal playthrough to climb all the way to the top of a faction. And doing so should be quite difficult AND quite rewarding.

That's my view on the matter at least.......