Community Team Update - March 2020

[LotsOfMuffins 1357]

 

 

COMMUNITY TEAM UPDATE LOG

MARCH 2020

INTRODUCTION

Hello again!

 

March has been crazy, both in-game and out-of-game. First of all, I hope you all are staying safe during this really, really odd time and are finding things to entertain you while you’re probably stuck inside your homes like I am. In terms of the Community Team, we’ve been hard at work continuing to enforce our new application standards, advocating for the community, engaging with the players, handling the loads of applications that’re coming in, and working on all of our huge projects, including (but not limited to) Tutorial Island, the transition of the NPD into the main discord, updating the magic lore on the wiki, the monk guidance rework, and more!

 

MARCH DATA

- Overview -

 

This month, we saw a total of 261 apps handled, with 141 new players welcomed onto LotC. 

 

Just like last month with our raised application standards, only one in every two applications are actually accepted. Despite this number, we still say nearly 150 new players in March, which has increased a lot compared to 211 applications and 111 accepted new players in February. This, obviously, is probably due to everyone being stuck at home. However, despite this large influx of applications, the Community Team has been hard at work handling them, and I’m super proud of each of them for putting forth extra effort as volunteers in order to handle all of these. 

 

- Accepted/Denied Ratios -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- Race Specific Data -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- New Player Guidance -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TEAM DATA

- Application Team Data -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

- Other Team Data -

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APPLICATION KING/QUEEN

 

This month’s Application King goes to… @_Pan! 

 

@_Pan

 

Followed behind by @LordScisso and @armajesty!

 

Once again, @_Pan maintains their title of Application King. @LordScisso is pretty new to the team, so great job to him for catching up so quickly. Previously, Community Managers didn’t really do a lot of applications in order to focus more on their managerial duties. However, @armajesty has really helped out a ton this month in reviewing loads of applications. 

 

CURRENT ROSTER

 

- Community Administrator -

@LotsOfMuffins

 

- Community Managers -

@armajesty

@Nestro_Miner

@puffables

@NotAFie

 

- Community Team Members -

@chaosgamer

@_Pan

@Mariolla

@Cordial__

@NOZway

@marb121

@LordScisso

@TheBelidle

@LotsOfFish

@NotASunny

@Ttsim

@Shmeepicus

@epistile

 

- Content Creators -

@puffables

@Pup

@z3m0s

@Beordan

@Parion

@nerdypenguins

 

 

PROJECT UPDATES 

 

WIKI - Nestro_Miner

The Wiki Team has found itself under new management once again. Hopefully, I am here to stay for a good while! Under my leadership, the first project tackled on the wiki was updating the Lore Section. Now The Lore Category is a big one and also very important, there's quite a bit of work needed to be done and we are working on it. We hope to finish the entire Lore Section within a month and we are being aided by a few members of The Lore Team.

 

Besides updating The Lore Category, there are a few other concerning issues we would like to tackle;

 

• Firstly, there are over two hundred pages that have no category and we will be working on fixing this!

• There’s a lot of maintenance work that needs to be done and The Wiki Team will be working on fixing them.

• There are over seven hundred pages that aren’t linked with anything and it will take some time but we’ll also be working on fixing them!

 

There’s much to look forward to and we plan on recruiting more members soon to help make the Wiki a fun and informative place! If you’re interested in joining then please contact me @NestroMiner#0001.

 

BROOM CREW - @armajesty

March has been an extremely productive month for the Community Team’s Broom Crew. Our members have been working effortlessly in order to complete their current assignments. I am glad to say that we have finished the re-sorting of the guides on the forums. This was done in an attempt to keep things more organized as well as to remove extremely outdated guides with misleading or false information. We’re hoping to see this system starting to be implemented as soon as possible! Moving on from that, we have completed the reorganizing of the discords. This includes which channels should be added, removed, etc. Our lovely Admin has been working hard to actually implement these changes and we will continue to see changes in the main Lord of the Craft Discord until we are ready to destroy the New Player Discord once and for all. Now that we have current projects we are moving forward to focus on the Pots ‘n Pandit’s Rework and the re-sorting of the Skin Archive. What is in store for these two projects is still a mystery, but will soon be announced.

 

PROJECTS - @puffables

The Projects Focus Group has been working hard at the conclusion of several of their projects! With some new helping hands, the Tutorial Island is building its way up - really coming together [we love our shrimp island..] !! Prompts set, its not long now before this shiny project can be released! The Travellers Guild has replaced the Quest Guild - further developed, a few tweaks to bring the best experience. Fully complete - expect to see this released and going in the coming weeks. Along with Travellers, we've picked up the project of improving new player guidance - this should link in smoothly and well with the other two projects, a smooth transition into the server for any new players. We thank the lovely Projects FG team for their work, along with the other teams working with us, so many wonderful helpers! ❤️ ❤️ 

 

Looking forwards to bringing you all more wonderful stuff, and the RELEASE of many of these long-spanning, hard-worked projects.

~ puff ❤️ 

 

CONTENT CREATION – @NotAFie

Hey guys! Fie here. I just wanted to give you all a quick overview of the ‘new’ sect ‘Content Creation’. The Content Creators (CCs for short) have been working closely together with the many different Teams for quite some time. Let me summarize what the Content Creation group is and what we do: The Content Creators work closely together with other teams and CT focus groups. For example, we create trailers for the events hosted by the Event Team, we do Art for the forum posts the Community team makes, etc. Of course, not every CC has the same talents/fields to work on. Therefore, we have four categories:

 

• Art
• Video editing
• Skinning
• Building

 

Puffables is an artist, the video editors are z3m0s and ElvenMommaHacker. Our three skinners are Beordan, Parion, and nerdypenguins. Nerdypenguins is also a builder. Much appreciation and love to you all. I’m super proud of you guys. Our current projects would be the training videos ElvenMommaHacker is working on right now, as well as the trailers which are being made by z3m0’s. An upcoming project would be the overhaul of the Skin Archive, to list one. The skin archive is a collection of many different skins for all the different races/cultures. Players may use these skins for free. This project would be a collaboration with the ‘Broom Crew’, managed by Armajesty. We will begin by sorting out the outdated skins and slowly adding new ones for each race.

 

I believe I have covered everything that needs to be covered. Once again; I thank all Content Creators for their hard work and the effort they put into this work. 

 

Cheers ~

 

EVENTS - All Management

The Community Team had a wonderful time running events within the month of March. The events that have taken place to this date are the Creative Cafe and the Battle of the Arts contests! One event that players can still look forward to is The Labyrinth, a maze-like event with tons of traps and prizes! The new system regarding events featuring manager-lead volunteer-based teams has been super successful, and is much more efficient than having three people in a focus group trying to run events! This makes it a better experience for staff and players alike and allows us to hold more fun events for the community! Next month we are following an Easter theme with our events. The ones we are currently planning include Chase the Rabbit (a twist on Chase the Turkey which was held in November) and our one-year anniversary for the group with a server-wide Easter Egg Hunt. We hope to see you all participating in further events!

 

APRIL’S DIRECTION

 

February was mostly filled with application changes, with increased standards and higher expectations. March, however, was primarily about community advocacy. Back in December, we had a report system where each member would write up a report based on either Google Form responses or quick interviews and send it off. It didn’t work due to a multitude of reasons, including the robotic aspect of just using Google Forms, the lack of motivation, and the sheer number of people you had to reach out to in order to receive an accurate measurement of what the playerbase wanted. In March, we’ve begun our next community advocacy initiative. Instead of each member doing one report, all members work towards one common report, and they don’t have to write up the summary; the managers do. We are currently in the middle of our first community advocacy test run. Read more on that below. 

 

Last Month’s Goals:

1. Engagement

The Community Team has been more heavily encouraged to engage with the community than ever before. With this past month’s Community Game Night, where we played a LotC version of Hunger Games with the players, Creative Cafe, and just generally chilling in the VC’s and being in the various channels, the team has really improved. I want to give a special shoutout to @NOZway for going above and beyond with planning events with the community such as movie nights and generally always engaging with the players. 

 

2. Wiki Team

The Wiki Team was manager-less last month. It was a rough time. It feels like we get a new Wiki Team Manager each month just for them to quit within the same month. However, Nestro_Miner has been sticking around, so hopefully, that’ll continue. They’ve been making great progress in regards to updating the lore, and our first round of updates will be for magics! Read more about what the Wiki Team is doing above.

 

3. Application Standards

As stated up above, application standards were tightened and improved. The ratio of accepted applications to denied applications has become nearly 1:1, meaning half of all applications are denied. This goal is considered accomplished! To read more about how we dealt with application standards, read our previous month’s update: 

 

This Month’s Goals:

1. Engagement

We focused heavily on engagement last month due to some player feedback concerning how little the CT actually interacts with the players, so although we started last month, we’re continuing to focus on this and aiming to continue encouraging engaging with the community. 

 

2. Community Advocacy

This past month, we started with our next community advocacy system with the topic of the charter reform. Each member has been asked to reach out to a nation leader/steward, a charter leader/steward, and an unaffiliated player, and speak in VC with them. In this VC, they ask them questions about their thoughts on the charter reform and how it will be in terms of success, as well as whether or not they believe the Charter Team is going in the right direction. The team members then take notes of this discussion and the manager in charge of the topic (me) compiles the notes into a loose report, which is then sent to the Charter Team. We’ve only just begun with our interviews, so one of April’s goals will be to push forward and finish the topic, ensure the players’ voices are heard by the Charter Team, and then move on with another topic!

 

3. Applications

With everyone stuck at home, we’ve had a huge influx of applications. This next month it will probably continue to increase. So, one of our goals is to simply be able to handle all of these applications. Management has been reviewing more, including myself, and the team has been picking up the pace pretty well overall, so we are looking to continue with the hard work!

 

If you have any questions or comments about the direction that we are going in, feel free to leave a comment down below or reach out to a team member.

 

 

[Nozgoth 2897]

gang

[NotAPan 459]

Good job, team

[NestroPapaya 478]

Proud of you guys!! ?

[Evonpire 1814]

Haha deny machine go buuuurrrr

[TheBelidle 65]

Spoiler

GANG 

 

[MeteorDragon 2799]

Go team and gg new managers

[Zacho 1734]

A well written update! I particularly like the idea of setting goals as a team and setting them publicly. Obviously we will all fail in out goals at one point or another, but I’m confident that the CT can overturn this and make all their goals very consistently, a nice addition for sure.

[LotsOfMuffins 1357]

1 hour ago, Zacho said:

A well written update! I particularly like the idea of setting goals as a team and setting them publicly. Obviously we will all fail in out goals at one point or another, but I’m confident that the CT can overturn this and make all their goals very consistently, a nice addition for sure.

 

Thank you! It’s been something we’ve been doing for the last few months, since December I think, and so far, they’ve been helping keep us on track. 

[Shmeepicus 3941]

Thanks mom.

[E__V__O 1984]

[Fie 2519]

gang

[snoopie12 817]

Good job you all, keep following this path ❤

[Harold 3239]

Good update, keep it up.

[Hobbs_Burrows 495]

Denying 45.9% of people? People have willingly sought out this niche, fairly hardcore themed server and you turn 45.9% of them away? I think you need to seriously evaluate your priorities and outlook