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COMMUNITY TEAM UPDATE [Posted May 2026] APPLICATIONS - April 2026 During April of 2026, we saw a total of 168 applications submitted and reviewed. Out of these, 78 New players were accepted! Our accepted/denied percentage ratio last year was around 126/93 Please note that the Racial & Timezone Data shown will only be shown for accepted players. - Accepted/Denied Ratios - - Race-Specific Data - - TimeZone Data - - Referral Data - - Raw Application Data - - Racial Data - - Humans - Total: 38 Adunian: 4 Heartlander: 4 Highlander: 8 Farfolk: 7 No Subrace: 15 - Elves - Total: 25 Wood: 5 Dark: 6 High: 8 No Subrace: 6 - Dwarves - Total: 7 Cave: 1 Mountain: 3 Forest: 2 No Subrace: 1 - Orcs - Total: 6 Orc: 2 Goblin: 4 - Halflings - Total: 2 - Timezone Data - Oceania: 6 America: 58 Europe: 14 - Referral Data - Through a Friend: 47 minecraft-server.net: 4 minecraftservers.org: 25 topg.org: 0 minecraftservers.biz: 1 minecraft-server-list.com : 8 minecraft-mp.com: 6 planetminecraft.com: 0 minecraftforum.net: 1 TikTok : 5 Youtube: 10 Twitter : 1 Google: 12 Reddit: 15 PC Gamer: 2 Bluesky: 0 Other: 1 - Accepted/Denied Ratio - Total: 168 Accepted: 32 Pending-Accepted: 46 Denied then Accepted: 1 Pending-Denied: 42 Denied: 48 APPLICATION MONARCH The title of Application Monarch for April 2026 goes to @TaraJess. With the most applications reviewed in April, @TaraJessis our reigning Application Monarch of April, followed by @Kaiiand @Monty Cobra. - 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. With the survey below, our goal is to gather valuable anonymous insights into what the Community Team excels at and where it could improve. Please provide honest feedback so we may improve our team's performance. You can find the survey below: https://forms.gle/JrUyvtrc1DkkgwR76 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! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me via Discord (@Smol_bean), or the forums, and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible. Cheers!

COMMUNITY MEET MINUTES [Posted May 2026] INTRODUCTION Hello! This past weekend, we hosted our second community meeting, and it was a pleasure to connect with all of you and address your questions. We appreciate everyone's patience while waiting for the meet minutes. Below, you'll find some updates from the respective staff teams and responses to the questions that the community submitted. TEAM UPDATE MINUTES - Technical Team - Daisy: Biggest thing is we did the 1.21.11 update not too long ago. From what we understand, there are still some stability issues with 1.21.11, specifically with Figura, and I've seen and even experienced some memory leaks. So we're gonna keep 1.21.5 compatibility for a while and look to where it's adding 1.26.1 compatibility moving forward. That means the server version will still be 1.21.11, but clients from those two versions will be able to connect, as well on newer versions in 1.26.1. Did have many issues with 1.21.1 on the client side. So we will look towards keeping other versions compatible for quite some time. But in terms of server side performance, you know, outside of the initial bugs that always happen with an update, 1.21.11 has proved quite performant on the server side. We've seen improved TPS server performance, restart times. In terms of the Java team, we're doing a few kinds of backend refactors right now, looking at improving our internal systems APIs. I'm working on a big refactor of a little plugin that we have that handles a bunch of various tweaks and optimizations to LOTC. Some other members of the team are working as well on custom cooking recipes and things along those lines, as we mentioned in some previous forum posts. In terms of the implementation team, we just finished reviewing the first set of realm apps that came in or settlement apps that came in when we opened the applications. So we've added four settlements in and there might be one or two more coming soon. But then that'll probably be it for a little bit, just because we don't want to bloat the system with too many until we kind of see what the results look like in terms of activity spread and that kind of thing. We are also still looking for who will be the permanent leader of the implementation team. As you all know, earlier in the year Kaiser stepped down and then we had Dominic, who also left the team about a month ago. So we'll be looking for somebody to take over permanently there. Once that is sorted, then we'll likely be looking for another addition to the implementation team as well. So you are always welcome to post an app on the forums if you're interested in applying for the Implementation team. The Triage team is currently stable, and we're effectively managing the incoming tickets. However, there's always room for extra hands. If you're interested in assisting with ticket triage, inventory rollbacks, or similar tasks, we encourage you to apply! As for the Java team, I've shared the update already, but we continue to seek skilled coders, so applications are always welcome. Roadmap Tech Team Applications - Mod Team - Spoopy: In relation to the mod team, I was appointed as moderation admin at the start of April. We've had my first proper mod meeting since then. I've introduced about five people to the team. So we've got Fionn, Bones, and Suxals as the first wave and then I added GMRO and AntiSociety about a week later. From that meeting, I was originally going to write up a little update post afterwards, kind of like a summary, but I didn't because until I actually get the rules changed that I wanna do, I feel like it's a bit of a hollow post. But the first thing we're planning on addressing is build rules specifically targeted towards redstone doors, their overuse, and kind of just the counterplay around them. So there's a few ideas we've floated around, some a bit harsh, some a bit less harsh. I think I'm kind of aiming for a middle ground on things and with that as well, we talked a little bit about how it would affect some other things like raids, heists, and even trickle down to war. But my first basically big update's gonna be just war rules, not war rules, sorry, build rules update. And then following that, XDisarray has been working on a thing that hopefully will come out soon where he wants to open a community forum for CRP issues also relating and see what things we feel like are good and aren't good. - Story Team - Squakhawk: Quick thing on the oversight clarifications. We posted last week that ooc oversight is gone. I’ve had a lot of people asking if book teaching and all that is still there. That's still fine. That didn't go anywhere. I didn't talk about that at all. It's just ooc oversight, which was like voidal magic and two other magics. I'll touch briefly on what we'd considered or are considering. Not as a replacement, but as a supplement to it. There was a while ago, I think it was actually like I think it was bones way, way, way back suggested that if you learned a MA or something on another on one character, that you could self-teach it on another as sort of proof that you'd already, you know, gone through the teaching process, figured that out. And I kinda danced around that, but that's not something we're super into right now. Mostly just'cause it's kind of lame and it takes away a lot of uniqueness to a character and their story that they're building and they're a part of especially when it could potentially enable you to play the same character like five times. Other than that, as mentioned with the last meet, we got some lore videos coming out. Things have fallen behind schedule a little bit. Saviour's been busy, I've been lazy. One of the videos is more or less prepped and ready to go. The other one is waiting on me to finish recording the script I wrote and the last one is that this is one that's been in progress forever. but it's like a two hour mega feature. We'll probably chop it up into more digestible bits, but I might make an offer two hour straight run through and it might be longer than two hours. Two hours is a conservative estimate on how long I think this video is going to be. But it'll be exciting. I'm very happy about it. Otherwise, in the last meeting I mentioned we were gonna have an anniversary CA come out very soon. that was mori, if you hadn't put the dots together and I'm pretty happy with how the mori CA has gone and how it's doing. I was really worried about it kinda becoming a flavor of the month CA with a lot of like poop RP, but it's been really good. I'm happy with how many players have made permanent characters out of it. I'm glad that there's like active groups for it, and that they're pretty well integrated in places. I guess it's really cool. I'm really happy. I'm stoked that they worked out. I was really scared that it was gonna be bad but I'm very happy about that. Another thing is we're gonna adjust lairs a little bit soon. Mostly coinciding with mods about having stricter rules on redstone. We're also gonna explore mostly on the mod side, but as you know, we've been talking about it. About adjusting heists, raid cooldowns, all that for lairs. we're gonna figure that out And I'm probably gonna up the build size permittable. From seventy five by seventy five probably to what we had with lairs on launch, which is I think closer to one hundred or one fifty. but around there. well we'll probably up it a little bit to like one hundred, maybe one twenty five or something. Still small, but with layer criteria being more solid. after we had a couple of lairs back to back where we were questioning our direction. Now that we have it more affirmed, um, I'm pretty I'm pretty confident we could raise the size a little bit now that it's not mini settlements. We're also adding mostly spearheaded by ninjayyz the region lore messages to the big lore regions in the map. I finished four or five last night and then we have two or three additional ones. We'll probably write a few more and then we'll push them to main. it was just something that fell behind on map dev. We would have had it out otherwise but the regions I believe already exist, so that should be nice and easy for us to work out with. Other than that, we are hopefully gonna have like we do every year, but some big summer events are coming up. So hopefully we're gonna have a meeting this week about that. But there's already a few in planning for big summer events that should be exciting. The last one I wanted to talk about was actually two more things. One was that the earplug situation is crazy what we'll likely do going forward. We talked about this a little bit in the story and mod co-op chat is we'll probably just end that force having an item, and role playing it appropriately. Most widely accepted is like Padfoot, because that's a lore supported thing that you can do with the lore of Padfoot. The thing is, that would just totally deafen you. So it's a trade-off of being able to be immune to sound-based things. So we'll probably just be enforcing that and otherwise considering it powergaming if you either don't have an item or aren't loading it properly or reacting to it properly. We'll see how that goes. See if we need to adjust based on that. like if there's enough red lines that should be associated with an earplug item, that it should warrant an invention lore piece is an example. But otherwise, yeah we'll just use common sense rules. Other than that, the last thing I want to talk about. Is a little bit of LT burnout. Sure, people have noticed that ticket timers are probably a little bit longer. And it's simply just a flood of them. We got eight hundred and sixty tickets last month. Which is way above our normal. I couldn't really tell you why, other than just more things require a story signatur,e and that's it. The volume of people who have magic and accessibility to these things is way higher. Normally, we're sitting around four hundred like last year. but the last few months have been eight hundreds, nine hundreds, crazy high. and that's just we don't have enough staff to back that up. So we're trying to work on that and get better on that. I will say, despite that, we've almost completely cleared out the Lore Mag queue. There's only a handful of pieces left in there. So I'm really happy about that, as that happens like once a year but hopefully once we get that, out we'll stay on top of that and .then with MArt Mag, hopefully usually after lore reviews MArt's soon get cleared ou,t kind of in tow to that. But I'm pretty happy with the team right now. I'm proud of them that even in this like low energy state, they're still fucking doing great. Ticket times may be longer to like a day or two, but I'm happy we're still getting them done. Other than that, of course, Lore Team's always applying. If you think you'd be a qualified candidate, you can always request to apply. In the future, I think what we're going to be doing is to try and alleviate the little crisis we have going on right now because apps and mags and and marts, all that stuff is manageable. I mean, it's manageable. It's really the sreqs because it's a lot and it's a lot of work. I think what we'll probably do is we might look into slackening some of the items which may require a signature unnecessarily or instead maybe looking into reducing paperwork on some things. That may make it a bit easier to do these things like the questions and the app stuff those sreqs get answered pretty quick. But the ones where it's like item signing or changing a sign or moving clone vats, which happens like five times a day. We might look into changing how we do it on our end to see if we can make it quicker. Cheezboi9: Botbox actually brought a really cool idea for a plugin to kind of help with St signing. I'm not sure if you'd be interested. I'm gonna make a community poll for it and see if everyone else is interested, but essentially it'd be like an inspect thing where you can add it to an RP item where you physically put the items inside a little container, kind of like the food bag, and you can open it up. To be able to see what contents were used to create that item and those items will be locked into that item once it's crafted. I don't know if that would kind of help alleviate some of those tickets, but that's definitely something we can look into doing or collaborating on. Squakhawk: I don't know if it helped too much but it would be cool. I still like it. Daisy: We had done some work for ST signing sreqs in the past with the plugin that we had put together that didn't quite match what Squawk was looking for. We could always revisit that as well. The idea was sort of that you could make a sreq and attach a roleplay item or a set of like materials to the req rather than people having to worry about things like chests and stuff, just to make things a little more streamlined. That's if you're interested, Squak, we could definitely revisit that too and try to. I think your main problem with it is it wasn't integrated with the existing ticket plugin. Squakhawk: Yeah, that was a big issue. Daisy: So we could look into that again. Squakhawk: I will say the compliance and the leaving stuff in chests is actually insanely high. If it's I don't, I don't think I've seen a wreck closed for not having the items available in months. Daisy: Okay. not more so than just so that you know it just requires less sort of manual intervention. reqs can just be done faster if they just click a button and open the chest to do everything there, I think, rather than having to do TP and stuff like that. Squakhawk: Yeah and do passwords and stuff. Story Team Applications - Community Team - Smol: Presently, CT has been working on several things behind the scenes. We recently implemented a new application system format, which has led to a slight increase in accepted applications while also reducing application processing times in recent months. In addition, we are currently developing new systems to better support new players in the long term, so keep an eye out for future updates. Outside of this, we have been working on bringing more CT events to the server, with additional events currently in development, as well as improving media-related projects in the background. We have also hosted an art contest. contest lately, which is always a fun thing to do. We saw a couple of entries, but it would be brilliant to see a bit more in the future. So, if you guys have any feedback for CT contests, My DMs, saviours, and any CT's DMs are always open for that kind of feedback. Regarding the wiki, we have been hard at work updating guides, historical timelines, settlement information, and many other sections across the wiki. CT apps are closed for now, but we are looking to reopen them in the near future, likely around June. Q&A MINUTES Q: As CT admin, what do you believe the scope of CT's duties and responsibilities to be in regards to community relations, conflict mediation, and constructing a safer, healthier community environment for LOTC and her official social spaces? What are your team's thoughts? Smol: So, this question is in a similar thread to one given by echo and a conversation I had with Keia last evening. When it comes to conflict mediation, I do not agree that CT should take on a direct role, as it has never been part of CT’s duties to mediate conflicts. From my perspective, the Community Team should primarily focus on the scope of duties it already holds, rather than being involved in resolving player conflicts between individuals or groups. The reason for my opinion on this is that once CT becomes involved in mediation, it risks blurring the line between helping players and holding authority over them. It can also place CT in situations where they are expected to interpret and rule over conflicts that are better suited for moderation. I think maintaining clearer boundaries is healthier in the long run, while still encouraging better communication practices across the server in a more passive and supportive way. In terms of community relations, I will speak about this in a later question, so I won't repeat too much here on this. But when it comes to a healthier community environment for CT, it is not something that will be fostered overnight; it is something that will take time to foster, but it is something we can work towards in small steps. I believe that having the server have more transparent dialogues, like we are having with the Community Meet, for example, and wider server discussions can help foster, over time, a healthier environment. It won't be a perfect nor a complete solution, and I will never claim it to be so. Still, it makes a good stepping stone to foster the communications we wish to see more of in the present and future. Q: Should staff when on duty been seen in other lesser known groups to ensure smaller groups and player bases feel included. This could rule out how players feel towards staff being biased? Squakhawk: I don't think any staff team is going to happily force members to roleplay in places they don't want to be. I mean if someone wants to go there, they're more than welcome to, but I feel like it's especially if it's forced, and I say, Alright, Raider Blue, you're gonna go fucking roleplay with the orcs now not only does that fuck up whatever he wanted to do beforehand, which I have no right to say to begin with. But I don't think that Raider Blue is gonna get the most pleasant experience when he's there strictly to have things provided for him or provide things from him to other players and for other players to ask him for things and view him as kind of a plant cause they're gonna look at Raider Blue and they're gonna say this guy is not a wood elf until someone made him be a wood elf. Not many people roleplay orcs comparatively to humans. If someone wants to roleplay an orc, they can. But I'm not going to make them. I would be shocked if they didn't step down out of how insulting they'd be. Q: How will admins ensure that staff across all teams are not being biased or favouring a certain group Irply and oocly? And if their not biased somehow, how do we ensure players don’t feel like that they are biased? Squakhawk: I think people ruling out players' feelings are biased about staff, I think that's just a cultural Lotc thing. I think no matter what, we could have glass walls and people would still think staff's biased. And I think that's just something that comes with someone making a ruling I don't like. Q: How do staff ensure that players feel heard and seen? Many players feel heavily disconnected from staff how do we change that and make people feel included? Squakhawk: Make a forum post, talk to a staff member. We're doing a community meet right now. We've been so much more casual with our communications. Instead of having a forum post every couple months where admins talk about, you know, whatever they want to push at the time. We've just been dropping stuff in status updates. Like, hey, by the way, we're dropping this tomorrow. or even talking about it in these meets or making forum posts and announcements for it just casually and it's a style I think we all much prefer over the kind of semi professional it was before. On the second part, if you feel disconnected from staff, one, I'd kind of feel good about that because it's good that you don't feel like you have to contact staff so regularly. I think it's good if you can roleplay on a server and have fun without having to interact with staff more than you have to. But I think public outreach like we've been doing and pushing for is is just the best way to do that. Q: Should ST, host more events from what they already do? Squakhawk: I haven't done any events recently and I was stressed about that because last map I was doing events more or less for two years straight. Every week one or two events. I am so burned out from that right now and I was worried, I was like, man, I'm worried that the numbers are gonna be so much lower because I'm not doing events and I always did big events. So we actually pulled the numbers and looked at our last month report, because we were running activity checks on ET. So in 62 days, the Story Team ran 146 events, about two and a half events a day. With 10.6 people per event, and 25 people per day involved in events. In total, we counted 1,545 non-unique players in those 62 days. We can't track unique players, it'd be way too much of a pain in the ass and while we had the same amount of events last year in October. We have over 1.5 times more players than then. So I'm really happy about that. As for the nations represented between last month and now, the split of events held outside of nations to inside of them or for specific groups is about 26 to 22. So half of our events are taking place just in the wild. So if you're sprint jumping in circles around a city, then it's probably not gonna come your way. Even with that, in April we held events in every single nation plus a settlement and more than half of the lairs I believe. So should ST host more events? Sure. I'm always pushing higher to bigger goals and greater things. But I think every month we do better than the last, and we've been that way for like two or three years now. I'm really fucking happy with the ET. Bob Box and Raider Blue are fucking awesome. They are phenomenal. Q: Should mods change public forums posts to being able to modreq it privately? So far it’s limited on what you can modreq but forums posts are for a majority of reports Spoopy: So this is basically just the private versus public report thing. One for mod req it. No, because we like forum posts, so we can stay organized. We have a written thing there that we can go back and look at. Because it has happened before where sometimes we might forget about something and then someone goes, hey, there's still a report open in the forums here. If it goes in someone's DMs and the thread closes, we might forget about it. The mod might not be around or more info comes in that they don't relay or whatever. So we like it being on the forums just for organization. As for everything being a private report it's something we disagree with because a lot of reports, unless it's cases of harassment or things, we need to talk to both sides of things like is there any sort of real disagreement or metagaming. If you just get one side of a report it might seem one way but then later we find out it's another and have to correct it. So we like having the back and forth on it. I think as it stands, I am fine with the policy as it is. I don't really see a reason to change it. We're able to bend our own rules when we think a situation is, yeah, it's in the category of it should be a public report, but if there's enough there that it probably should be private. We're willing to do that. And we never make a private report public without telling the person that we'd want to do that. Q: Please can the forums me updated and please I beg of you please fix searches. I wanna go on google and type animatii and the lore comes up not some denied lore from 5 years ago Daisy: So yeah, the reason that the Google search index for the forums isn't working great is because we added extra protections to disable or to block AI crawlers, which, according to some analysis I did, were significantly impacting the performance of our forums. I haven't had a chance to look into it yet, though I will look into trying to allow search engines, mainly, you know, Google and stuff like that. The problem is that these search engine crawlers are now also using AI, which is really doing some stupid stuff to a performance to the forums load. But yeah, I can definitely look into this soon and experiment around with the settings and see how it impacts forums performance. Because if you remember a few months ago, the forum's performance was absolute garbage and it's a lot better now. Back to you know where it used to be even a little better than that. So we we want to maintain that standard of like usability for you know for for for our players on on well using the forums, while also you know making it accessible through through search, since I know the forum search is fairly particular and the Google can be a little better at finding exactly what you're looking for. So that's why I will look into that when I have some time. Squakhawk: I will say, if you're looking for lore, I'm gonna go ahead and plug it again. There’s an accepted stuff lore sheet. It's got everything on there, every lore piece. You won't be able to find cultural posts, stuff like that, because we don't post that on there. But anything lore related, it will be on this Google Sheet. Highly recommend you bookmark it. It's available in the Story Discord. I will always plug it. It’s always updated. We always do stuff with it. Accepted Lore Documents Q: Should tech team work with st to make more lore based plugins? Ie alchemy brewing for example? Daisy: Right now the Java team's focus, asI mentioned, is on improving some of our stuff on the back end while also working on a project or an initiative on tech, which we call immersive pastimes. You know, things like, custom crops, custom cooking recipes, even something potentially like hunting are things that we'd want to tackle first before we start looking into plugins like alchemy integration. I have had some discussions with Squawk about things like mechanical alchemy, specifically about at least processing herbs and like you know, making the postings that don't require ST signs, for example. So it's definitely something that everyone is open to, it's just something that isn't on the top of our priority list right now. Squakhawk: I mean I'm down for it. I'm down for theAlchemy plugin. It requires a lot of pre-checks. I'd like to be able to verify if someone has an alchemy app, which would require Tying apps to personas, which would require being able to actually sort apps on the forums. Which is its own debacle. So there's a lot that has to go into it. Granted, it would open up a lot of doors if we had apps tied to characters, but it's tough. Daisy: Like even if we had apps tied to characters, we could even like code like particle effects for s for like spells, for example. Like imagine if when you go to whatever the hell we call Misty Step, brisk step, that it like you know spawns particles and stuff like that, and then it displays where you're going to like the teleport location rather than you just having to emote it and go place down a block, right? So yeah, that that he is he is right though, that we would have to get the MA integration or FA slash MA integration with personas before we can even really look at something like that, which is something that we've talked about and is on our long term to do, but is quite more complicated of a process than than it might sound. Squakhawk: Yeah. And I'd rather prioritize stuff like brewing, which is, you know, something everyone can do and everyone would love. Over alchemy, which would still be great, but I think for the most amount of happiness in the shortest amount of time is good. Q: Should tech team evaluate all plugins and add to them. I feel most them are outdated and could be reworked? Along with this should tech team host a survey and see what the players feel could be added, amended or done plugin wise Daisy: I think that kind of mentioned that in my team update. And if you look at our tech team roadmap, a lot of that is noted too. So we do have plans to refactor and sort of rehash a lot of our old plugins. Notably, one of the big ones up on the chopping block is show and sell the shops plugin, which is also the bank's plugin, which is also the treasury plugin, which I and I talked about at the auctioneers' last meeting. It just does so much, and it is a total pain to maintain. So we're looking at taking our oldest plugins and improving them. Even something like Better Teams, which is our tag and status plugin. We have plans to sort of improve the way that works in terms of donor distinction and allowing people to set any tag that they have access to rather than just always displaying the highest tag they have on tab, you know, synchronizing tab with the slash tag colouring game, things like that. So yeah, these are definitely things we have in mind. And as I said right now, now that we've pushed out 121.11, our focus is two parts. It's working on immersive pastimes like brewing, cooking, farming, while also taking a look at our old code base and reworking a lot of that. For staff, we recently did a lot of work to improve our Omni search, which is our logging and search plugin that we use to help players with issues, look into problems, that kind of stuff. So there is a lot going on in the back end. It's just, you know, this kind of stuff is slow. Q: How will admins ensure that staff across all teams are not being biased or favouring a certain group Irply and oocly? And if their not biased somehow, how do we ensure players don’t feel like that they are biased? Squakhawk: So we kind of at least on ST, we punish our own and we don't we don't really protect them from mods. If someone is doing things that are against staff or against rules. Every single time I get pinged, I get notified like hey your staff member's doing this, I say punish them as normal. I believe that applies across all teams. I don't think I've heard of people getting off scot-free for being staff as if you see bias or things like it, I encourage you to report it. I think that's going to be the best solution because if you just say nothing and just say they're biased, it's just gonna get kinda written off but if you report it to an admin, to a manager, to other people on the team, you might have more results there. Spoopy: In terms of mod bias this question gets answered every time the same, but mods never solo make decisions at this point. Even if the same mod who took the ticket is giving you the ruling, there is an at least 90% chance that it has been pinged in mod chat, asked in VC, asked in the in-game mod chat that a second person has given their opinion and said this is fine. So very rarely are mods even making solo rulings, and especially with just how active the team is, there's a pretty high chance that Trin, Connor, or I even have seen it and given the approval for that verdict to be delivered. That's on the mod end of things. Q: How will admins ensure that staff across all teams are not being biased or favouring a certain group Irply and oocly? And if their not biased somehow, how do we ensure players don’t feel like that they are biased? Daisy: Something we've discussed before. I mean, do have the capability to do it. activity is collected per region but in terms of how we do it, it would be a major shift from the current system. So right now when a nation has land, it's totally open for them to do whatever they want on a quartile. So as long as the nation has activity and they're paying upkeep, it's kind of hard to enforce such a thing. Like, you know, evicting a vassal. Especially because like a nation's vassal might be so, you know, a family's manor that has five people in it. I know that's probably not what you're talking about, but these are the kind of edge cases that would pop up if we started doing activity checks on vassals and at the same time, you know, tech team has zero management over vassals. We don't touch them, they just exist as they are. The only time that we'd ever get involved is if a vassal rebels and becomes a nation, then we would run the commands to do that. it's just the current way that vassals are set up, there's no application process for them. All you do is modreq and get a region. There would be no way to enforce this. And I don't think that the nations would like it if we started telling them what they can and can't do with their land. There could be, you know, differing opinions on this, I'm sure. You know, having you know strict requirements for a settlement to always be active while, you know, in a nation there could be 20 ghost towns. Personally, I can't think of a good way that we can enforce that while still making everyone happy and I'm not really sure it would be worth the trouble. You know, there I could see benefits from it, you know, centralizing role play, eliminating inactive places. But we kind of put that duty towards the nations themselves when they create vassals to manage that all internally. Squakhawk: I think first of all, I think that'd require a map dev level decision making because if we retroactively did that, we'd have to wipe so many parts of the map. people would not like that and I don't blame them. I also wanna add on to that part Daisy mentioned that NL's would not be happy about it. I think nations in general would be pissed off. I think most players would be pissed off that they're told their group isn't important enough to have land. I agree that it's bad to have all these husks around the map that don't do much. But ultimately it's just kind of a kind of a flaw of the system we're in. Daisy: Yeah, it would have to be something that's designed from the bottom up when a map is launched. I think like right it's already hard enough to get land in roleplay. Like, you know, even within a nation, getting a vassal, especially if you're kind of the main vassal on a tile, nations are cautious about who they hand that out to. I had more I was gonna say, but the only way I could see us doing something like this, this map, is if we shifted the nation activity requirements. So right now it's plus one percent per tile. If we made that so that your core tiles actually have to have that activity on them rather than just being part of your nation's activity whole. So like you have a capital tile with 10% of servers activity, but then like one, you know, a tenth of a percent on all your core tiles, maybe you lose a core tile. That's one change I think we might be able to make, but once again, I'm not sure if that's actually helping anything right now and yeah, since nations this map were operating under the premise that, you know, they can give a group of five people a vassal on a quartile and that's totally fine. It would be very counterproductive to shift from that at this point. And it would just be unfair. Squakhawk: Especially with the way some nations operate and have operated in the past. Some of them function off of giving land to anyone, race to the bottom. I think therein lies its own problem. I think that's kind of its more boros of like problems. but if you In roleplay, don't believe a place should get land talk to your NL about it. This is where the decision goes to it’s their decision on whether they allow a vassal or not so talk to them. I think if you wanna advocate for change in that regard, I would talk to your local nl about it. Q: Are there any plans to modernize the wiki page to be more smooth and user friendly? Currently it seems to be stuck in a stage of decay with it being difficult to find things, and difficult to read through due to formatting. I’ve seen some other wikis that come across so much cleaner and think something like that for LOTC would be amazing. Squakhawk: I Google lotc wiki and it doesn't come up to like the fourth result. Do you know why that might be? Daisy: It's bad search engine optimization. we would need somebody with some kind of knowledge of SEO to look into that. I could talk to XDK and see if you can take a look at wiki stuff. Squakhawk: In terms of wanting to make it look more clean, but I mean it looks pretty good now. It's pretty easy to find stuff. It functions like a wiki. Smol: I mean it's not that complicated. If there are issues of finding stuff like talk to us. We're not gonna bite your heads off. But yeah, looking at the conversation that saviors had with the person who asked this, it looks like something that's gonna need to have to be expanded on outside the meeting, because we're not really sure how we can really answer this much further, except from trying to make things as accessible as possible, which we are actively trying to do continuously for the server. Q: So you recently got rid of OOC teaching and said you plan to rework self teaching. Can we get some ideas of what your vision is for the future? Squakhawk: I have talked about the Teaching on another character thing and how I wasn't the biggest fan of that because I don't think it encourages much roleplay. I think it just gives you an app. It's something where it's quite unlike material nodes, it's not something that is actively pressed to be worked on or that we have a very analogous situation. There's other things, other methods we have. Like, the book teaching is still there and the event distribution is still there and teaching without a TA and all that is still there. Plus even teaching yourself without an MA is still there. But it's hard to find something that's a balance of encouraging and actively builds roleplay over just giving you an app. Q: Hey gang! I'm asking this on behalf of smaller communities that I'm not really a part of, but some bring up the great question of: "What if we don't have STs in our groups?" I'd like to put forward the idea of just having a survey people can fill out, so that their communities and ideas can be seen even if STs aren't a part of their group! It might help with inspiration, and could shed more visibility on them, or put them in the spotlight for a cool event line. This would also mean STs can make sure that they don't get overloaded with DMs and requests for events, and they can just peep the survey results once a month for a quick scan. They don't need to commit to anything, just have a look at community ideas. Squakhawk: I will say ST don't like to ever do event requests because players I mean the ET just don't want to do them. That's not like an enforced thing. That's just if people wanted to do them, they'd do'em. And I don't think I don't think we've ever done'em. But I mean we can look at our numbers. I mean we have the locations and numbers recorded internally. We could definitely evaluate and say like hey these guys don't get as many events but I mean I don't think we really need to name it. I think we kinda know. But if people wanna do the events for those, you're more than welcome to. It's just a matter of if people wanted to do them or not. I mean if ET doesn't want to run the event, then ET's not gonna run it. RaiderBlue: As just a general kind of thing in line with it there I do think there is some merit to listening to some of the lesser communities on what events they want to see. I would say that less so of a requesting thing and more of just a general feedback thing that we could do occasionally. I think we could just put out like a form on the forums and then see who responds to it and then we can assess it as like management and then get that information to like ST during a meeting or something. It's something we could do. But it's kinda more of a middle ground and not really I wouldn't say that force ST’s never work. so it is always more of a suggestion thing. Q: Lately there seems to be a large issue with people being bad faith or just straight up toxic either through major passive aggression or direct aggression towards other players. Is there any comment towards this or perhaps systems that can be utilized to work towards a better fix to ensure players are remaining in good faith? Perhaps moderation can be a bit more strict on these scenarios and perhaps (for a lack of better term right now) lock in and crack down on these types of actions? Last map it was in my opinion a bit more calm but recently tensions have been higher so it has crept through a bit more. Spoopy: I don't know if "mission statement" is the right word to use for it, but when I first got admin and had my interview with Telanier and then spoke to my team, this was one of the biggest points I came in with: I feel like, as moderation, we admittedly have been a bit lacking unless things are very blatant, like someone is just without question of a doubt harassing or being mean to someone. With minor instances we at most we just kinda say, Hey, knock it off and then move on from such and I think because of that we've kind of inadvertently fostered just a lot more people being passive aggressive remarks, bad faith in instances. And it's basically just come down to and we're something we're slowly working on. I think it's getting better, especially over the last week, recent conversations, but just cracking down and actually giving out infractions or even short-term bans for people acting in bad faith or just being rude or toxic, oocly because I believe that lotc has a bit of a problem in some mindsets where people kind of forget there's as much as you are trying to you're here to tell your story and do your thing, the person you are against is also doing the same thing and kind of starting to get a bit of oh ego elitism of just I deserve to win, you deserve to lose, rather than agreeing that at the end of the day, both sides should be having as much enjoyment as possibly can be made over situations where someone has to lose. So the short answer is this is something I'm trying to work on and hopefully we mods will be getting better at just cracking down on the small things and making sure issues don't brew or aren't left unchecked for long. Squakhawk: I think that's good. I mean I could drone on about this for hours. There's a really bad race to the bottom mentality a lot of Lotcers have and that's just kind of a cultural thing. We've grown out of it, but it's such a slow sliding scale out of it that people assume the worst of others so they have to be the worst version of themselves, there are the very enlightened few who don't do this. I respect the fuck out of them. Those are the people, that everything seems to go well for them. Love those guys. I think the best comes from those that just roll with the punches. Do the best story you can. It's not about you, it's about your character and it's not about them, it's about their character. My advice is don't let the character bleed overtake you because otherwise it's just you're just LARPing. Q: Team Updates? Squakhawk: Most of the reason we don't really post those very often unless we have something to say is because Just not much to say unless we have something to say. I'd love to fucking flex event numbers every month, but it pisses people off because the guy who logs on three hours a week goes, Well, I didn't get an event on the post So love those, but if I had someone who wanted to write'em maybe. I don't really want to write them very often unless I have something to say. I also love dropping shit. I love fucking just saying, Hey, we're doing this tomorrow. I love dropping status updates. Video out tomorrow. It's so fun. Instead of doing a quarterly update. Daisy: I think largely, you know, we used to do regular updates, and yeah, some teams still do them. I know the community one, a lot of it is just publishing the numbers for transparency but I think largely on stuff we've shifted our communication strategy away from just like, you know, nothing, nothing, nothing quarterly update, to more regular and open communication. So even quarterly, we're doing these community meets quarterly now. So, you know, that the goal of that is to keep people updated. We publish the notes for them and also, you know, it was a direct dialogue we see have with the admins and the staff on the issues that are at hand rather than just waiting for some post to happen and at the same time, at least with my team, you know, we were posting updates when we have something to update on. So there were a couple update posts that came with 1.21.11. kind of gave a big post at the start of the year setting out our direction things like that. So yeah, I and you know even like with Story Team you know Squawk publishes you know updates when they've made a big decision that everyone needs to know about such as with OSC oversight things like that. So yeah. I think that might be the answer. I think our communication strategy is a lot more diverse now, a lot more open to having to bundle everything into big updates every once in a while isn't as necessary. Q: It’s the third age Squakhawk: Third Age. It's the third age. It is the third age, Roger. Very astute observation. But there is a bug in the game where it says we're still in the second age. It's been a bug for about two years now. I don't know if it 's gonna be fixed. Daisy: It's not a bug, it's a feature and the feature is I disagree I disagree with your opinion. Squakhawk: You're a bum. Daisy: It actually makes me think of something that I've wanted to do for a while, and it's to add a sort of multi-calendar system to LOTC. So we can basically set a bunch of different calendars that have different start dates, different names for days of the week, things like that and then you know display the date according to that calendar when you do slash date, while also displaying the like canon date. Well not canon as in “The Church of Canon”, but like the official date that you know we ask everyone to like base anyways. You know, first age, second age date. So we could even have one that's so you would do like a slash date, and then you can select one of several calendars we've approved. So you can get like the Norland calendar, the Imperial calendar, whatever there are, all of those. I know some people you know track dates as if the first age never ended, and we can even have one that says what the date would be in the age of the dragons, things like that. I think that'd be a really cool feature for people that use the alternative calendars because I know a lot of people use them and have to figure it out on their own or do math every time. Whereas if you could just slash date imperial and see what the date in the imperial calendar is, that could be really cool. Squakhawk: Yeah, that'd be cool. There's that website, the Malin's Welcome website. Daisy: Yeah. Squakhawk: That's that yeah, something like that would be neat. Daisy: Yeah, but having it in the game would be really nice too. Squakhawk: Yeah, I think that'd be cool. You just have to avoid getting one vassal with three people in their extensive calendar system. I guess if you opt into it or something, maybe that'd be different. Q: Will there be any intention to add in recipes to craft leather, chainmail & gold armor now or in the future? Any plans or thoughts on functional bundle items? Cheezboi9: Yeah, so we've been, I wasn't around long enough to know exactly what happened with the bundled items idea. There was someone working on it and then it was dropped from what I remember there's nothing we have against having bundled items. I think there were just a couple of restrictions that we needed to be specifically careful of. One of them being, I believe, ST items so that we don't hide them. I think that was also a big I'm correct me if I'm wrong, Squawk, but I think that was a big condition for having these special bags is that we don't like to hide specific items for RP and whatnot, right? Squakhawk: Depends on what you mean. Cheezboi9: For example, you know, like hiding Marts or whatnot, obviously there would have to be a system in place to prevent that kind of stuff from being put into a special bag. Squakhawk: I think greehn was working on alchemy bags, like herb bags. I think that was fine. Cheezboi9: Yeah, herb bags should be okay. Specifically, I think someone was working on it. I think we can definitely add that to our Quality of life plugins, updates. we'll look more into that as well. But for the leather crafting, the chainmail, the gold and all the other armours that vanilla Minecraft has, balancing is one of the things Daisy: As we said, herb bags, super cool, we want to do that. And then vanilla bundles. We just basically want to restrict PvP gear and like certain roleplay items from being put in them for various reasons. We'd also have to think about how they'd work with slash inf search and things like that. And then yeah, PvP gear. So I think with the surge rewrite, some of that is going to be added, though I mentioned that we're working on rewriting a plugin that does a lot of our vanilla tweaks. one of those would be our Training weapons and training armor, so we could definitely have those added as craftable as well, just for people to like to make role play items or for aesthetic purposes. You know, there could be aesthetic variation so you could have iron or gold and they would be functionally the same. Iron Gold and Chainmail would be functionally the same, and just like different textures you could select when creating the item. Things like that. Squakhawk: Do you think we have right now, an ST shop with non functional versions? I don't know if that'd be doable. With non-functional versions of items that weren't added in the update, like lances and bags and stuff. Daisy: Yeah, we'd want that. Squakhawk: can we do armor maybe? I don't think so, because you can't wear fucking gas tiers. Daisy: Yes. We can. There's a way to do it. Cheezboi9: Yeah, you can, you can make it so that it's wearable. Squakhawk: Okay, I'll probably set that up then. Daisy: Yeah, the way that I think WowJ made those items was setting a custom model or over it which displays it like a gas tier to look like a lance. what but like when we take it into a plugin we can make it armor that does nothing. We can apply the attributes directly to the armor. So it's basically non-functional. Cheezboi9: I like the idea of tossing that into Surge. I think when Adele's up, me and Adele or we as a team, we should definitely discuss how we can add something like that for RP purposes as well. Q: Does the Geyserland ST event have any plans moving forward or is it Dead upon arrival due to losing the ST member? Squakhawk: I mean, he just wrote the lore. He didn't, he's not the event guy because he wasn't even on the event team. We have a doc with all the lore stuff on it and if people wanna if an ET wants to pick that up and do it, they can pick it up and do it. But I mean it's just up to if someone wants to run it. RaiderBlue: This is just referring to an ET that got removed because they got banned. Squakhawk: What? RaiderBlue: Yeah, they had a dwarf geyser land event. But it's the same concept where that wasn't like that was only a single thing. They were just an ET picking up that map war thing, but like another ET could easily write another event for it. Realistically for the moment, yeah, that obviously that one is not gonna get run because the player's no longer on the team. But another ET could easily write another event line and run it. Q: Dark green for Story Build? Squakhawk: Fuck those guys. Ignore those guys. Some of the people on build are hybrid teams, so it'd be weird to work them out. but probably not. 'Cause I don't want a different color of ST. We shall be green. But for you shadows maybe. You're one of my top guys. Q: Hey there, is there a list somewhere that one can leave their consent to ST staff to use ones Persona's? Like if someone wanted to yoink one of my persona's to use as a npc in a event and the like from the afterlife or are we not important enough? (Also tell smol to drink some water) Smol: I've run out of water. I'm sorry. Squakhawk: You gotta tell me to drink some water, bro. It's been twelve hours. I ain't had nothin'. Dry as a bone. Smol: Yeah, I think everyone needs to drink some water. Squakhawk: No. Diet Coke maybe. Is there a list? Not an official one. It's more so kept track just kinda by individual people. I wouldn't mind a list like there's like a couple of event spells which allow your character to be used that's like a maybe. An issue I think a lot of ET have with doing that is what you'd want least in the world is to be picking up somebody's character and not knowing who they are and worse if you did something that they wouldn't do or fucked up by some way. It's sort of disrespecting that character's legacy. Which is probably why you don't really see that ever done even though it's been a thing for years. It's just because it's really touchy, and it can upset a lot of people and ET gotta deal with upset people enough. I just don't think many people want to. If there's a particular ET who's shown interest or that you've worked with or that you trust, you can definitely talk with them, and discuss options with them. If they are interested, I will add on. But that's why in the past for people who've done similar deals, they mostly just talk to specific ETs that they know will do their character right. But if it's someone you have likeYou know, if you don't really know anyone or anything, it might be difficult'cause it'll be hard to do that. Otherwise just writing a post of what they're doing beyond your control of them would be fine. It's just that I think it's good to have character stories end. It’s just bad to kinda necromance it back and potentially mess it up and diminish their accomplishments. Q: Is there a chance iron shovels will get replaced by 1.21.11 spears for Lances? Squakhawk: If you want to re-sign items. You can buy stuff at the ST shop at CT right now and ask for a resignature if you need or make a resignature if you don't need an ST signature on it. No, I think they mean for surge if they'll the lance will actually be the spear model instead of shovel. Daisy: Yeah, that's gonna be done in the that's gonna be done in the resurge, right? Squakhawk: Also asked about Netherway horse armor, which Spoopy: My opinion is I just make it the exact same as Gucci horse armor, just so you don't have your horse being neon blue. You can actually have a cool color. Squakhawk: Ha ha ha. Cheezboi9: I like my neon blue horses. What the? Spoopy: I don't. Squakhawk: You don't like the Gucci horse armor? Cheezboi9: Yeah. Smol: I want a nice pink horse. Q:Are you going to make me defend my lord of the craft title this year? Trinn: But do I have to defend my title this year? Daisy: Yes. in fact you've had it for too long. Trinn: Oh. No no no no no Squakhawk: You had to say something, you had to say something. Daisy: Well, you were supposed to have the title for six months after the contest, but you were being a bum and not finishing the art. So I'll let you keep it. I let you keep it because I didn't want to piss you off. But yeah, we haven't, you know we've had some discussions about the 15-year anniversary, which is coming up next month. We're planning an admin meeting, I think this week or next, to put some more concrete plans together. And one of the things is yes, the Lord of the Craft title will be up for grabs. Trinn: Oh man. Cheezboi9: Wait, the Lord of the Craft title? Oh man, that's crazy. Smol: Yeah, it's very important. It's like our Oscars. Daisy: Yeah, it's like it's like a better version of the Creative Wizard title. We created it with our 14-year anniversary. Sorry, with our 10-year anniversary, with the idea that we'd do a contest, you know, once a year, once every six months, and somebody would be able to win that title and it would be exclusive just to them for that time period. We never really did that, but , you know, I think within 15 years we could kick off something annually that rotates that title. Spoopy: Good to work, Trinn. You had to ask. Q: Can we make this free and available to everyone now or would the server lose a significant percentage of its revenue without it? Everyone just goes around with (ignore race) in their descriptions anyway if their race doesn't match their characters. This also includes charging to swap persona genders ? Squakhawk: I think a lot of people wanna do race swaps, I think it's super lame. I think we need to stop doing that. Daisy: Technically the rules say that you can't play multiple characters on the same card and that that information needs to be set, needs to match. It's never something we've enforced really hard, but yeah, do not do that. But yeah, it's our current store plugin actually is something that is on our list of things to be rewritten because we don't actually have any analysis on it right now. Like I couldn't tell you how many of those have been, you know, how many race slash gender change tokens have been purchased ever. So that's something we're working on to get some insight into that though in terms of being able to freely change it, I don't think so, because the card is supposed to be for a character. Perhaps you know we could bundle them together and have a character reroll because there are some benefits from having an old persona and you know people like having the persona created thing. I don't know, it's a system that I think is a bit outdated and could be revisited, but I don't think we want to change it in the short term. Squakhawk: I think Drrandomk puts a good reason for it in the chat that I also agree with is the fact that the voting rewards, like the persona cooldown, you have to get per persona and not just for your account. And so that's probably why people hold onto personas and honestly, I'd be down for the quality of life change if it's just on your account rather than per persona. Cause I hate having to wait 14 days and then on the 14th day I'm accidentally on the wrong persona and I have to wait another month. Daisy: Yeah. Spoopy: Yeah. Squakhawk: I wanna keep my extra SS slots from voting. Yeah, I kinda feel that. Daisy: Yes, that's kind of the idea with the race and gender changes right now. It's so that you can re-roll a Persona card that has all the benefits to a new character. Daisy: Technically speaking, unless the character has the same race and gender, you're not allowed to use that card for a new character. But as I said, the whole system's a little strange not to mention that characters should be able to freely change their gender. That is my liberal belief. So definitely something that we'll think about when we look into improvements to the shop and persona plugin, which are on our laundry list after. Specifically when I say shop I mean crown store. so you know after cooking, after farming, after brewing, after shops, after banks, after auctions. We'll look at that. Smol: After everything in existence. Daisy: Yeah, it's just a small thing that's fairly low priority and just a bit of an annoyance maybe at the moment, but definitely something that will be thought about when a redesign of Crown Shop and Persona comes around. Q: War of Azuras Retrospective Thoughts? Squakhawk: I think something that shocked me and Spoopy and Trinn was not fighting a war claim, like not showing up. I don't think that was something we'd ever accounted for in War Rules. I don't think that's ever happened before. So we had to write something for that. Did that get put in, Spoopy? Spoopy: Done. We just made it like we talked about writing it in retrospect, but it felt way too weird to fully codify because it was such a weird situation that we kind of shadow ruled. Like we talked about it, but I'll go into the deeper of the question for observation. performance of the war. Basically every war during that minus like the last one we didn't have admin then, so roster uploads and stuff were reliant on Squawk and Daisy, but setup was basically me and Trinn every week and we were running it and performance-wise it seemed perfect. We had basically no hitches. Squakhawk: It was perfect. It was perfect. Smol: We'd have to wait multiple hours to get things fixed. Spoopy: The worst thing that happened was that someone forgot to drop the wall for like five seconds, so the Empire just blew up a wall instead of waiting for the wall to disappear before shooting. But there was, I did mention with the build rules things that we're gonna be targeting some war stuff in that too, because I think everyone who's there knew that there was a lot of debacle about forts and stuff so that and then there's a comment under this that just said the leader should have been nicer, oocly. I think Squawk specifically, but since we were still in the era of no admin yelled at us specifically for how we probably should have acted sooner on people In terms of the conduct of both sides of the war? But that's just a lesson learned. Squakhawk: Yeah, that was something I wanted to talk to mods about. I yelled at mods about that. We should have policed that chat more. Daisy: I'll leave any details out, but Spoopy and I did have a good discussion after the war about some changes we'd like to see with siege, potentially new siege weapons. Yeah, that's kinda what that is a mod decision though, so I will leave Spoopy to share any details there. But we are considering some new siege weapons, which could be fun. Spoopy: Yeah. I wanted to give the more tools some tools to the defenders more than just having siege equipment,'cause in a war, the attacker's job with siege equipment is to make a hole in, and the defender's job is to destroy every single piece of attacker's siege equipment so they can't make a hole in. So it feels like it's easier job for the attackers, so I've pitched ideas like the idea of being able to dump like cauldrons of lava on like people when they're climbing walls or whatever Or just some smaller things that they could put up to like just basically anti l better anti-ladder defenses more than just a ledge that gets shot out. Some things like that, but I'm game for a lot of ideas. I'm getting a lot of ideas with changes to siege defenses to see more dynamics in the battle and remove just yeah, the siege for longer than the actual PvP of the war claim is. Yeah, either the But yeah, Squawk said it he did yell at us, that is true that. Lesson learned for conduct, it just it it did suck all around and we were also in this somewhat awkward situation still of while we were left to our own devices to run the war, it did feel a bit off not having a our admin at the time to it kind of felt like at any moment we could just get sniped out from under us. So I think we were weirdly cautious just mentally in terms of running everything, but that war taught us a lot and the good out of it is that yeah, War Server like running and all that was awesome. And enough of us now know how to run it that we should never have issues. Q: If all the high ranking members of a magic die, to the point no one can learn, will it be re-grandfathered? How low do numbers need to go? What's the breaking point before that happens? Additionally, if something becomes so toxically gatekept, is there any freeing it? Or does it just become an irrelevant lore-piece that technically is still real and gets left as it is Squakhawk: We have a thing. I'll before I get to the next part of your question. Under lore criteria, general information threads and let's see if I go three for three. I think story team oversight, I think. or story team resources. One of those two threads covers an internal process we have called lore surgery. where I have a giant Google Sheet. I think I've posted it before. I think I posted it in Story Chat and it's pinned somewhere but it covers all the processes we do. When a magic falls behind or a certain process falls behind. Like an example, no one knew the recipe for Cockatrice's breath. So we did a couple of redistribution events of people being able to learn the recipe and self-teach books with the recipe. As well as a necromancy ritual for sealing which was locked down to like two people so we opened that up and did an event for a few people who could learn that. We usually it's if it's to the point that the community is like properly choking, that's when we start to redistribute. I will say, pretty happily, we haven't had to redistribute magic in a really, really long time. We haven't had to regrandfather people since 2022 or 2023, it's been at least three years. I've been very happy about that. But we will continue to do that stuff if we need to. The only thing I could see it potentially going into right now is like palm reading'cause not many people know it and most of the people who were grandfathered into it aren't around anymore. But it depends on the direction we want to take. That storyline as Satheel's not done there's still more to go. On that there's something coming up soon ish. That'll be exciting. But ultimately it depends on that. Additional question was: “Additionally if something is so toxically gate kept, is there any freeing it?”. Like I said with the necromancer thing, we did break that. If it's a community coordinated thing, as an example with frostwitches, this wasn't really a thing that was gate kept. But there was a thing where the two or three covens that were agreed to not revive one particular person. Cause you needed like three frostwitches to revive another frostwitch or something, and they agreed, we will never do this. We will never allow this, and obviously that could be kind of unfair towards that one character, but that's the decision the community made. That's a roleplay decision they're making. We don't really have much of a right over that. The difference is if it's between like two liches and they have the they're the only people that know this particular ritual and they're being in an ooc way really shitty about it, yeah, we'll break that gatekeep but if there's a proper roleplay reasoning or explanation or process behind it, like they've eliminated the other people who had that or they worked with them to lock it down. Unless it's becoming to a point where the community is beginning to suffer from it, and like players are actively being driven away or leaving or bullied out, it's a process, that's fine. Q: Why the fvck did werewolf take me to the backrooms at one point. My character has seen fluorescent lighting and wallpaper, and I kind of just decided to never even think about that Squakhawk: He just does that. There was a weird period last year for like two months where like five ET were doing backroom events. It was the new original Eldritch idea. They stopped doing that, but I don't think they're doing it anymore. Q: Is there going to be a difference from hidden redstone doors vs a regular redstone door that just adds more security or will redstone in general plan to be nerfed? Spoopy: Well, it’s something to talk about when I get the proper write-up for what I wanna do, but I think I wanna just kinda blank it in my mind. Like, it makes them kinda blanket, but I also do not want to punish people coming up with more creative solutions than just keys that I change every five minutes. But I'm not gonna give a concrete answer on this yet because I might or might not actually commit to it, but it will be noted. Q: Smol bean, when will we have the secret Wonk Island wtf? Smol: It wouldn't be a secret now, if I told you. Q: On a scale from 9 to 10, how badly are you taking Obok's death? Cheezboi9: Oh god. Ah, like a fifteen dude. Oh poor Obok. I'm glad he got to tell the story, though. He was definitely a titan amongst our dwarves. Squakhawk: Dude, when I heard Oblok died, I fucking I woke up. I had two messages. They were like, hey, this person says, hey, I have these two Carts now. And I was like, what the fuck? That was Obak Carts. I was like, how'd you get those? Like, did you ask him? And he goes, I killed him. And immediately, my hands on my head, no, no. Cheezboi9: Yeah, now they're being hunted, oh surely. Smol: Yeah, they killed my father. Now I've got the trust fund, but I don't have the items. I gotta go after them. Cheezboi9: You gotta go after 'em. Smol: Yeah. Gotta go after them. Cheezboi9: Yeah, no, he definitely told a tremendous story and I'm sure there will be a lot of community members talking about him for a while. Q: Are they able to use persona scale beyond the normal limit than what their base race is? Squakhawk: No, it's not real. Daisy: Yeah, that's not real. Potentially, we could look at that after we do magic integration, which comes after five other things I've already mentioned earlier in this meeting. Squakhawk: Yeah. No, I think that'd be totally cool. I'd love to give fucking effects to people with CAs on races, but there’s the two-parter of one, you have to standardise the apps, and two, you have to make sure the app is real. Because right now, you could set your CA as anything and put a YouTube link as the answer, because it doesn't check, it just accepts it. So we'd have to have some sort of verification. But I think it'd be cool. I'd love that idea. I'd love to have big Ologs and stuff. Q: ST Emote Colour? Squakhawk: I don't know if that was in the air. Bobbox: Would like to say it'd be tremendously useful because leb is sometimes too big for an event, and we have to use shout, and it would be very nice to be able to distinguish ourselves in shout from the normal person. Squakhawk: That would be cool. Bobbox: Besides just using bold. Daisy: Yeah, message. We can definitely add a custom color for ST. Squakhawk: Yeah. If we get a hex code, I'd be down to add it. If we can come up with one. Something that's easily visually identifiable. Just send me a hex code, and I'll take a look. Or a couple of hex codes and I'll work it out with Daisy. Q: Are there any planned changes with LT and how lore is submitted, read, and interpreted that may make it easier or quicker? MArts have always been things that take quite a while, just wanted to know if anything on this end was thought of. Squakhawk: Marts have always been a thing that takes a while. Just to know if there was anything on this thing that was thought of. Are there any plans to change? Well, right now we've been doing the advanced reviews a lot more, which I think has been helpful a lot. Palladium has been really, really on top of things, and as I said with the LT in general, we've been getting votes out. I'm really happy with the team. We're almost cleared out. As for the future, it's hard to distinguish how we could make it easier. I'm not really sure what we could do other than just lessening the number of people required to vote on things, but I don't think that's a good idea.'Cause already it's like not that many. I'm not sure. I'm open to ideas. That's been the great problem I've tried to solve for however long I was manager, two or three years, trying to figure out how I could make voting in Marts more streamlined and easier and less of a pain in the butt. But it's tough. Ultimately, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. I'm open to it. But it's difficult. If there's any suggestions, of course, you can message me. I don't know. I don't think it's a solvable problem in a system where we have to analog review everything. Q: Staff team kahoot match? Daisy: Staff team Kahoot match. That'd be fun. Someone organize that. Q: When will runesmithing be available again? Squakhawk: We haven't gotten a rewrite for it in like two or three years. Blood magic is unshitted, so all the runic stuff is gone from there, so that might be good. I will say if any big loreheads submit it. Like if I get a Pallodium rune smithing, I'm gonna frown bigly. I'm gonna be very upset about it. I did submit forever ago a couple of ideas I had to Captain Noobman cause he was asking me for advice, but I don't think he ever posted it. But I think it's doable. I think there's just a careful balance of a lot of things. I think it takes magic and runes and stuff are used. I think it takes understanding how much of a burden a magic should have on ST. An example is like Seers and Blood Magic, old blood magic, required ST for basically anything and everything, and it makes people loathe interacting with the magic. Both on both ends, because it's frustrating to have to do things every ten seconds with this magic. So that they can walk two steps forward. And it's frustrating to have to request to have to do that and drawing the line of where that's necessary can be difficult as well. It takes someone experienced with modern magic culture. With understanding on how magics work and interact with each other and how people use them and how people prepare with and around them. I will say very confidently, the lore criteria and the so there's the two things for lore submissions, which is the lore submission guide for dummies, written by Zulik, and then there's the entire lore criteria, which is like thirteen or fourteen like three to five minute reads which detail exactly how we look at lore, what our philosophy is on lore, what we think about certain spells or certain archetypes or certain tropes, certain meta things about magic like their versatility or how often they're used or if they're, you know, locked in a certain way. I highly recommend reading those for how many lore submissions we get, those posts are criminally not viewed and there's a pretty strong correlation between people who have read those and people who have passed pieces in the past, versus people who just go in with their lore and hope for the best. Strongly advised looking for that. So if someone submits it and it's well written, it's fine. But ultimately it depends on that. 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! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me via Discord (@smol), or the forums, and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible. Cheers!

Not near where I live

Never had it

COMMUNITY MEET [Posted May 2026] It has been about three months since we last held a Community Meet, so it's about time for another one. With a continued sense of transparency and communication with the community, we would like to announce the second of many Community meets as well as inviting you to participate, have your voice heard, and your questions answered. Date & Time Saturday, 9th May, at 3 pm EST/8 pm GMT LOTC Discord What is a Community Meeting? A Community Meeting is a public meeting held within the main LOTC Discord. It serves as an open forum where members of the following teams will: Share updates on what their respective teams have been working on. Answer questions posed to them directly from the community, which are presubmitted. Participating teams Administration Community Moderation Story Technical Questions If you wish to pose any questions, please leave them in the Discord channel linked below: Q&A Channel 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! If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me via Discord (@smol), or the forums, and I will try to get back to you as soon as possible. Cheers!

Changed Status to Accepted