Community Team - What's Going On?

[Daisy 9731]

 

COMMUNITY TEAM UPDATE

March 2025

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Hey all, it’s Llir the Tech Toddler Community Team Admin. With Hogo stepping down, I’ve taken leadership of the Community Team for the time being. My tenure will not be too long, just until we find a new admin to take the reins, though during my time here I am aiming to make some real progress. I’ve met with the team, both individually and as a group, and added some new folks on. We’ve identified a number of areas that need improvement, from New Player Experience, to Tutorial Island, social media, and more. I hope that the changes I’ll be leading will have lasting impacts on the team, and the server. I want to see the Community Team not only doing their busywork - they’re quite good at things like applications and the community services - but expanding to be what their title suggests, stewards for the community. With that, applications to CT are currently open if you’d like to be part of this new direction. Find the form here, or message me (llir) on Discord. Let us drive change in the community together.

 

 

NEW PROJECTS

 - New Player Experience: Application Format - 

Project Lead: @Cheese

 

Hello lovelies! Recently, in our reviews of whitelist applications and feedback from various members of CT and the general community, we’ve come to notice that our current format is confusing for many applicants and that a lot of people tend to struggle with the same parts of applying to the server. While there are some concerns that changing the application format/process may make it less appealing for potential players, we believe that this isn’t the case, and will in fact make it easier for players to navigate the application.

 

To make the whitelist application process easier and more straightforward for players looking to apply, the application team is looking at how to reword questions to lessen confusion. This includes the infamously confusing questions regarding the definitions of powergaming & metagaming, as well as the roleplay example where the hag asks the weary traveler their story. Additionally, once the wiki is more organized and updated, we hope to implement it into our applications so that newer players may be able to navigate it and include our lore into their characters’ backstories and personas to better integrate them into our community once they join!

 

 - New Player Experience: Wiki - 

Project Lead: @RedeemedAidan

 

Howdy! Another direction the team has been shifting our attention toward is the Wiki, though more specifically in regards to our applicants and new players. The Wiki in the past has been a bit tough for players to navigate and search through, making it difficult for them to access the information they need to begin their journeys on LOTC. 

 

To remedy this, a New Player Landing Page has been created on the wiki and is actively being worked on to give the newer members of our community the resources they need to get started and thrive - all in one page! This page will be directly linked to the application form and will consist of information regarding ancient and recent history, powergaming, metagaming, the skin archive and our various playable races! Be on the lookout!

 

 - New Player Experience: Tutorial Island -  

Project Lead: @Smol

 

Hey! Tutorial Island is a fantastic resource, right? It helps new players acclimate to the server by guiding them through the most commonly used plugins in an informative way. However, we've noticed a few areas that could use improvement. Some aspects of Tutorial Island that worked well in the past are no longer functioning as they once did, especially in terms of its current layout. 

 

We plan to fix this, by implementing some big fixes and some smaller features to hopefully fix the present issues with the Tutorial Island. Firstly, we are working with the Tech Team to design a plugin that will help guide New Players through the Tutorial Island. Additionally, we are planning to reorganize and add new sections to Tutorial Island to make it clearer for New Players. Lastly, we plan to make it more intuitive when it comes to asking for help from our Monks. This may take a month or two to implement properly, so please keep an eye out! In the meantime, we will continue to assist new players as much as we can!

 

 - New Player Experience: Monk Guidance -  

Project Lead: @molly molly molly

 

Hi! Hi! Hi! It is I, brand new Community Team member iloveyoumolly, and I am so excited to announce a BRAND NEW PROJECT for the CT! Yippee!

 

Did you know that only about 1/4th of new players stay on LotC? WHAT? Isn’t that insane!? We all know the tale of the pink tag, who is so excited to log on for the first time! .. Only to wander the roads, unable to find anyone. They then get bored, log off, and never return. That blows!

 

My project aims to address this problem, and get new players into nations and roleplay. The CT has been working on identifying exceptional individuals in each LotC nation/community who are willing to be mentors to new players. By referring new players to these individuals, we are hoping to teach roleplay skills, good player conduct, and of course, get new players roleplaying! I want to foster the kind of unforgettable first experiences I had as a new player, and I think the CT, through this project, can foster those experiences!

 

As of right now, our mentor program is made up of two parts. The first part.. Each new player will be given what I have been calling a ‘noob quest’ on their accepted application message. New players will be directed by Cloud Temple monks to seek out characters played by our mentors, who will then show them the ropes of their community’s RP, and get them involved. The second part is setting up a channel on the official LotC Discord, where the new mentor role can be pinged so our mentors know when a new player is being sent to their nation! Mentors can then hop on and bring our new players into a city and into roleplay, with the aim of getting our new players involved in awesome RP on day one.

 

If you are a great roleplayer with an awesome personality, and want to be a mentor to new players, please (pls pls pls pls) feel free to reach out to me on Discord! My Discord is @elkuknight! We’d love to have as many mentors as possible for this project. Molly out! Bye now!

 

 - Community Featured Media & Social Media -  

Project Lead: @SaviourMeme

 

Hey there everyone, one of the new projects that the team has underway is a two step process of implementing a system for members of the community to submit various types of pieces to be uploaded to our different social media platforms. We hope to involve the community more in this process as we progress through the various planning phases, so be on the lookup for a post to gather some thoughts regarding the system as a whole. 

 

The second part of the project is using a combination of community submitted content, as well as our own media team creating content to figure out a system to bring more activity to the aforementioned social media platforms. A part of this will include a focus on creating more multiplatform content, a video can be cut down into a short and can have images extracted from it for posts on platforms such as Instagram, X, and Bluesky

 

 - Community Outreach -  

Project Lead: @_mady07

 

Hello hello!! With the community team shifting goals and direction we felt like bringing back Community Outreach and creating more opportunities for the community to get involved. That means you specifically can have a say in what's going on. Communication, Conversation, and Content for our LOTC groups to feel included and involved. With this we are looking at bringing back Fireside chats to address the community's questions and concerns directly.

We are also working to install quarterly community meetings where you can get involved and give live feedback on our projects and our goals. This will help us find direction and help you to get changes your community needs and wants.

 

The Community Team is also planning to reach out directly to community leaders and player bases to find out what needs to be worked on. We are calling these chats “Round table discussions.” We will have more information on guidelines for these chats and how to get involved shortly. Thank you all for your involvement and your feedback. We hope to properly adjust our project towards what your communities need.

 

 

TEAM UPDATES

 - Wiki - 

In terms of the wiki, we continue our work on a number of larger ongoing projects, putting some finishing touches on a number of them as we set our sights on some new projects. We are putting some final finishing touches on the magic hub page that we made public some time ago. Similarly we are consolidating our wiki pages regarding topics such as alchemy to centralize information on a hub, with brief descriptions for each piece of information with links going out to specific links to the forums for the full lore. We are also in the process of going through all the racial lore pages and making the information up to date and consistent between each of the different racial pages.

 

 - Events and Arts Contests - 

 

Last month, we hosted our Valentine's event, during which monks journeyed across the nations of Aevos, distributing bouquets of roses to everyone they met. Additionally, we set up our Event Island again at CT, featuring a beautiful Valentine's spring-themed build that was kindly created for us by @KaptainScarlet.

 

Future events are currently on hold as we re-evaluate the value they bring to the server. I’ve found that events are generally enjoyed, though there can be improvements when it comes to their RP integration. Future events will be held by the Cloud Temple Monks in RP, and more focused on in-game celebrations and traditions than OOC holidays, and on a reduced cadence to ensure that they can be well-planned without leading to team burn-out. We are considering a spring event in the coming months, stay posted.

 

For the duration of the month of February, we also ran a small arts contest, we got a couple of submissions and have been able to pick a number of winners for the categories. Similar to the Community Team events we will be putting a short pause onto arts contests as we try to develop a number of improvements to the way that we run the contests.

 

 

 

Winners

Visual Art	Character Art	Creative Writing
First Place   Tavern Game  by @minecraftartist	First Place   Girls Night Out  by @FashionBeard	First Place   Tavern keeping 101  by @Wonderland_Boy
	Second Place   The Midnight Aurelia  by @MayRndz

If you are one of the winners listed above please reach out to @SaviourMeme on discord, in-game or on the forums to collect your prize. If you have any suggestions to improve the way we run arts contests feel free to reach out to Saviour as well.

 

 - Media - 

Alongside the larger project of improving Community Featured Media & Social Media, the media sect of the community team is also working on a number of our own media projects. With a number of ongoing projects in various steps of the process. A new video showcasing the map as a whole with the help of distant horizons is in the final editing stages. We also have a new project showcasing some of the willing lairs around the server on social media, a player base that has been very underrepresented in our build showcases. And finally, in the filming and recording stage we have a new video to help showcase the various non build aspects of the server. We hope that you enjoy these projects when they are finally released to the public.

 

 

APPLICATIONS
 

 Over the last few months, we have seen applications vary between December 2024 to February 2025. In December, a total of 128 applications were submitted and reviewed. In January, a total of 154 applications were submitted and reviewed. In February, a total of 213 applications were submitted and reviewed. Finally, out of these, 410 new players were accepted.
 

In December, we noticed a significant decrease in the number of individuals applying to be whitelisted on LOTC. However, this trend saw a slight increase in January and again in February, coinciding with the Winter break when more applicants were available. This pattern is consistent with trends observed in previous years for these months, but the decline this quarter is more pronounced than in past quarters, resulting in a notable reduction in applications during this quarter. Specifically, during this period in 2024, we reviewed 823 applications, compared to 658 applications in the same quarter last year.

 

With that being said, please find below the in-depth application data for 2024.

 

__________

 

APPLICATIONS DATA - February 

 

During February, we saw a total of 213 applications submitted and reviewed. Out of these, 128 new players were accepted! 

 

Please note that the Racial & Timezone Data shown will only be shown for Accepted Players.

 - Accepted/Denied Ratios -

 

- Race-Specific Data - 

 

- TimeZone Data - 

 

- Raw Application Data -

- Racial Data -

- Humans -

Total: 75

Adunian: 2

Heartlander: 4

Highlander:  10

Farfolk: 3

No Subrace: 56

 

- Elves -

Total: 34

Wood: 9

Dark: 9

High: 6

No Subrace: 10

 

- Dwarves -

Total: 9

Cave:  5

Mountain: 2

Forest: 2

No Subrace: 0

 

- Orcs -

Total: 4

Orc: 4

Goblin: 0

 

- Halflings -

Total: 6

 

- Timezone Data -

Oceania: 2

America: 85

Europe: 41

 

- Accepted/Denied Ratio -

Total: 213

Accepted: 64

Pending-Accepted: 64

Pending-Denied: 56

Denied: 29

 

__________

 

APPLICATION MONARCH

 

The title of Application Monarch for February goes to @RedeemedAidan 

 

With the most applications reviewed during this period, @RedeemedAidan is our reigning Application Monarch of February, followed by @Lortime and @WhatASithuation. 

 

CURRENT ROSTER

 

We’ve had a few people depart the team, as well as welcoming a few new additions and a couple of helpers too! Welcome @Kaiser, @Chase, @molly molly molly, and @I hate you 3000 to the team! Thank you to those who departed for all their hard work & a huge welcome to our newcomers.

We are currently recruiting, so you can apply here if you are interested!
 

 

FEEDBACK FORM

 

Since its inception, the Community Team has been dedicated to assisting wandering souls, whitelisting players, aiding new & old players alike, and much more. However, it's been some time since we've sought feedback on the Community Team itself. With the survey below, our goal is to gather valuable anonymous insights into what the Community Team excels at and where it could improve. We will be aiming to post this form every three months.

 

Please provide honest feedback so we may improve our team's performance.

 

You can find the survey below:

 

 https://forms.gle/JrUyvtrc1DkkgwR76  

(Form will close after one week.)

 

 

Need help? Feel free to contact a community team member via the forums, Discord, or you can use the command /creq in-game and a member can help you out there!

 

Shout-outs

 

The Community Team - For their hard work over the past few months and for all the help they gave in writing this update.

 

 

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me via Discord (llir), or the forums, and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Cheers!

 

[Helmet 1454]

orcs together strong

 

Edited March 9, 2025 by SlitheryC1

[wowj 9747]

ill take my admin pex with a side of grub bucket fries thank you

[Zhikarta 4064]

Super glad to see new projects are taken up. Would still love to see some retention data brought back into these reports again if possible.

 

If help is needed on the wiki for Elves specifically, I rewrote the Dark Elf one this week and I'd be more than happy to help the team out for the wiki where needed.

[molly molly molly 1329]

we are so back 

[Morigung-oog 5697]

Oh shit, they cooking.

[garentoft 9265]

i love you molly.

[Daisy 9731]

2 minutes ago, Statherian said:

Super glad to see new projects are taken up. Would still love to see some retention data brought back into these reports again if possible.

 

If help is needed on the wiki for Elves specifically, I rewrote the Dark Elf one this week and I'd be more than happy to help the team out for the wiki where needed.

 

We're working on retention data. Unfortunately it is very hard to track manually, I'm looking at plugin solutions that tie into Freja and the app database.

 

Absolutely, wiki contributions are very welcome, shoot @SaviourMeme a message and he can get you set up.

[Narthok 10416]

New player retention will be interesting. Extremely funny how massive the race application disparity is.

[MailC3p 2403]

Crazy how the lowest subrace for Elves where High Elves, I always thought High Elves where the large chunk, and then wood, then Dark, apparently I was dead wrong lol

[Unwillingly 18096]

36 minutes ago, Llir said:

As of right now, our mentor program is made up of two parts. The first part.. Each new player will be given what I have been calling a ‘noob quest’ on their accepted application message. New players will be directed by Cloud Temple monks to seek out characters played by our mentors, who will then show them the ropes of their community’s RP, and get them involved. The second part is setting up a channel on the official LotC Discord, where the new mentor role can be pinged so our mentors know when a new player is being sent to their nation! Mentors can then hop on and bring our new players into a city and into roleplay, with the aim of getting our new players involved in awesome RP on day one

I'm curious if there's going to be any discrepancies between this as a staff-sponsored project and non-staff nation poacher DMs. I don't think DMing new player applicants is necessarily evil, and if done right can be beneficial for both the nation and noob, but there's definitely some overstepping sometimes to the point where you'll have noob wranglers messaging applicants with the specific intent of pulling them away from another nation they specifically applied for in their application like "hey that place sucks come to our epic nation instead," or you'll have humans DMing literally every applicant (even elves) with no discrimination. it's not against the rules but to me it's incredibly malicious and misleading. makes me wonder if there's a conversation to be had around the treatment/integration of new players under the purview of nations

[Xarkly 17299]

Think the biggest potential project CT (and Staff in general) could tackle is the production of videos about history (i.e., major wars akin to something like Baz Battles). While a huge undertaking, I think the marketing potential is enormous and the skills are out there on the server if banded together into a focused project.

 

It would showcase what the server's ultimate appeal is: player-made history.

[Cheese 8881]

>:J

[molly molly molly 1329]

1 hour ago, Unwillingly said:

I'm curious if there's going to be any discrepancies between this as a staff-sponsored project and non-staff nation poacher DMs. I don't think DMing new player applicants is necessarily evil, and if done right can be beneficial for both the nation and noob, but there's definitely some overstepping sometimes to the point where you'll have noob wranglers messaging applicants with the specific intent of pulling them away from another nation they specifically applied for in their application like "hey that place sucks come to our epic nation instead," or you'll have humans DMing literally every applicant (even elves) with no discrimination. it's not against the rules but to me it's incredibly malicious and misleading. makes me wonder if there's a conversation to be had around the treatment/integration of new players under the purview of nations

thats a great point and something definitely worth considering! i think there's some overlap with my project and this problem, but i do think that problem of malicious wrangling falls more into the purview of moderation as a case of bad player conduct. our more veteran players should know better than that, and ideally they dont polarize our new players against our communities on day one. but it does happen, and maybe that's a conversation moderation team needs to have. i do wonder how prevalent that issue is these days, because i recall a time on lotc where it happened pretty often in OOC and DMs. i'll keep an eye out for it in the (largely limited ;_;) ways that i can, and maybe some mods can keep tabs on that when new players join. 

that being said though, i think my project sort of accidentally addresses this issue with how i've planned on implementing it. i've planned on giving new players a slew of nations and characters to seek out on their application message, rather than giving them just one nation to seek out. so lets say a new human player is accepted. depending on their background, i'd have my CT monk character ask them to seek out someone like the lord marshal of haense, servantry in the courts of balian, or maybe trying their luck as a bandit/mercenary in salvo. through this project, i want new players to be able to know what options are out there for them, so they can pick which community/avenue of rp sounds most interesting to them! this way also helps us remain as unbiased as possible as far as integration goes, since there's definitely a conversation to be had about staff bias in which nations we send new players to.

[Zqppy 918]

4 hours ago, MailC3p said:

Crazy how the lowest subrace for Elves where High Elves, I always thought High Elves where the large chunk, and then wood, then Dark, apparently I was dead wrong lol

Tbf Mail, most "unspecified" elves are just high elves but they didn't read the lore

 

The same way most humans were probably heartlanders yet they didn't care to read the lore