501warhead

I’m probably late to this conversation, and there’s a lot here that I cant really digest right now due to feeling like death (thanks cold, go away now) but I’ll write my thoughts here as someone with a unique perspective. I made the racial spawn system we used for vailor and axios, (mandated it’s use for non-main races and was generally ignored but I was kind of an ass so it’s fine), became an admin on the tail end of it, and ultimately fought against the systems re-implementation into Atlas. Why? I felt, and still feel, that the system has several major issues that are fundamentally flawed. However, that doesn’t mean the concept cant be reused. Allow me to reach this point after I explain the issues that I noticed with racial spawns. The first was always, always, always – who gets the racial spawn? Who is a racial nation when we have multiple groups? Can we reasonably make that call based on eyeballing it or is there more to it? What if two groups seesaw on activity? These are all major questions that have to be tackled independently by a form of think tank, and even then most solutions that come out of them will be wonky and unmaintainable at best, and at worst be down right subject to bias and not be healthy for the server at all. Maintenance – Following on the first point here, we lead into the next question; Who sets these spawns? How often are they updated? Are the people who are updating these spawns trained, even if they are trained will they be comfortable? Can they abuse setting spawns? Location – This is one nasty piece here, but essentially – is the location suitable for new players to spawn in? That is to say, a new player who spawns into an empty plains with nothing for 500 blocks is probably going to just log off the server, but the same might be true if they’re spawned in front of an eternally closed gate. There’s a lot of nuance to this one, and the “right” place to set a spawn could be debated about for hours. And, finally, most importantly – the woes of activity. This was likely the most important point that I myself witnessed in my time as an Admin that ultimately swayed my mind strongly against Racial Spawns. I configured and set up several spawns for nations that were struggling to rebuild their activity – Krugmar being a good example – during Axios. I was far, far more active then than I am now, and often would hang out in the help channel and the OOC channel to see if folks needed help, and tp around to new players to watch them. Players who spawned into cities that were empty very, very, very often either had to ask something similar to “So what do I do now?” or, as was more often the case, they’d run around for a few hours – find one person maybe – and log off (forever). We were hemorrhaging players in an attempt to sustain this spawn system. However, I couldn’t quite scratch the itch that there was a better way to do this. The idea of guiding players to capitals was a positive one, a good one – one that I wanted to facilitate as the health of capitals and nations is important to the server. The solution I wanted was a collection of monks who would teach a new player the ropes when it came to roleplay by setting a positive example and coordinating with nation leadership to keep the player involved in a stream of roleplay that eventually left them in a discord to mingle with the community. I still feel this is ultimately the best solution, but the amount of manpower and dedication essentially is something that few want to do – and even fewer can do. But I had an idea about halfway through Atlas that I was excited about and never really did (story of my admin career) that might serve as a solution to this problem, and a middle ground. It is as follows; Give all players an independent soulstone slot for cloud temple that can never be changed. This slot will obey the normal “slot 0” rules meaning that you’ll always have it up if you die, and potentially give it a shorter cooldown. The old soulstone “slot 0” will be shifted to a fairly active capital of that race by default, and new players will be told to use it early on via automated message. If they opt to it then they’ll be also instructed how to get back if they find no one there. This slot might also only incur half of a soulstone cooldown, but that wasn’t part of the initial idea. New players for the first few days of play will have a dramatically reduced soulstone cooldown, as to give them a bit of freedom when it comes to teleporting around. Reduce new player hunger by say, 80% for the first 1-2 days after play to encourage exploration unimpeded by having to find food every 30 seconds. This was an idea I pitched to the admins and we all generally liked the idea (more or less). Unfortunately, soon I got bogged down with a ton of other issues/duties/activities/etc and it flopped on implementation. This system however would give everyone a great opportunity to quickly go to their city or town of choice (as the “capital” slot can be freely changed to any green pillar) while also allowing new players to spawn into a more structured environment that has less opportunities to, for lack of a better term, suddenly not exist.

Greetings LotC! Today I come here to talk about what I briefly talked about on the FAQ posted this week; the Community Manager. I hope to break down this new role to the LotC staff for you today and announce who will be filling this role for the first time. What/Why The Community Manager is a role that we've come to believe we need that fulfills a critical role which we have not yet been able to fill properly. Often times the days of the Administration are busy with the daily tasks and goals we set for ourselves and in doing such we often find that we forget or even are unable to find time to organize events, make announcements, and gather feedback - all things that, while we view as critical, we have unfortunately left to neglect. The Community Manager is a role intended to assist with this subject, bringing on an individual whose sole focus is on the state and concerns of the Community. The hope is to work closely with this individual to try to increase our communication with the community and hopefully as well try to offer more events for the community as a whole to attend, both serious and non-serious. They'll be working with the Administration and Team Directors to remind us and encourage us to be more forthcoming with out ideas and passions while also organizing events for us to share our thoughts with you, the playerbase. Who When we were looking through the applications for the position one name stood out above all the others and I believe that many of you reading will already know why before I even explain. We've selected @marimbamonk (formerly BoogerBuster/BGBuster) as the Community Manager. He has gone above and beyond lately in his efforts, trying to bring together the community he loves and find ways to address issues within it. Even without holding this role he has pushed the boundaries of what we've been able to accomplish in the past while also fighting for what he believes in; accountability, communication, and unity. We're very proud of his efforts so far and hope that he will be able to go above and beyond expectations from both ourselves and the community as a whole. That will be all for today from me, expect more from @marimbamonk himself in the coming weeks!

> literally spent an entire day dedicated to increasing communication, works full time and yet comes home exited to work on/for lotc "No passion btw XD" XD my mans, XD. Glad you don't pick admins, you wouldn't know passion if it hit you on the head. I don't stick around because I want to stroke my own power ego, the power trip disappears after about a month on the team. About a month in you realize the scope of management as an administrator, realize how much you've got to juggle, and realize how much stress it is. Administrators without passion drop like flies. I'm here because of passion, because of vision. But of course, clearly I don't have passion and should step down - I'm contributing nothing to the server!!!!!

- We're currently attributing the retention issues to issues getting new players involved in the community (either through getting lost on the roads or not being interacted with by people), new players not finding anything to do, or new players not really getting into roleplay properly. The monk project was a big effort to try to resolve that which should hopefully start up again and get traction soon, being in-game people to guide folks and teach them the ins and the outs of the server. Then trying to promote community activity with a bunch of stuff so that they can find people to interact with. I think it's a pretty good summary of the retention issues. - We have a general idea for media team director but there arent exactly people chomping at the bit, the team is very small. You'd be surprised at how few really want to do this, it's been like pulling teeth. - Running rules like that would be a headache. Maybe a live stream? I'm not sure. We should do more community reviews though. - Because honestly there are, at any given point in time, between 0 and 2 good admin candidates. Often leans to 0. If we have to kick someone out for activity, then we've got to hunt a new pick which will likely be subpar to the person we put there originally. The pick might come in and they might be bias, inactive, or a combination of the two and then we've reset the cycle. Suddenly we're back to priorizing finding a new admin, and our time is once again consumed by that creating an infinite cycle of not getting shit done. I'd rather work with an admin I can contact over discord every now and again when I need them and they'll be there vs working with an admin who can't do the job, who isn't there, who is incompetent, who is unmotivated, and unreliable. I need an admin I can message, ask them to do something, and they'll get it done and I know they will. I don't need an admin who is going to brush me off, ignore me, or just forget about what they need to do - and all too often you'll find candidates of the latter but not the former. So fishing for new admins every month when someone has a real life change is just absolutely detrimental to the team as a whole and eats far too much time. They'll be around when their real schedule allows them to be around more, but it'll fluctuate.

Ya, honestly I could probably have worded this more professional but at this point I felt the community wanted something a little more sincere than that and usual "I'm super professional 501" weren't doing anything. I didn't want to spend 24 hours carefully drafting up a response and going through every nitpick detail to make sure I can't be misunderstood. I did that, it sucks. If we're going to start communicating then I'm just gonna start talking, and hopefully that honesty is at least to a degree appreciated. If not then oh well

Just to reiterate from my status update; No, I don't see the numbers draining. Actually, they're draining from their summer high sure but to say we're draining? Cmon. Literally 3rd best month of the year, 4 months of subpar activity and we're doing absolutely great now. And you were an asshole on staff, I wanted to tell it to ya but I respected ioannis and let him know my thoughts so that he could run the team he wanted to, because we let directors have independence. I express my concerns to team directors, but I don't force my opinion on them. But regardless, we're working on the mechanics & the rule set as stated here. Also flambo is a good lad, I'm glad he accepted our offer 🙂 ...What? We've accepted 1,600 people this year. 1,500 have joined and 200 of them are still playing, our retention rate is actually going up, currently at 28.5%. What is this flat line you're talking about? Do you even know what you're talking about? Because right now, looking at the numbers, it doesn't really agree with you. That rate can and should be better but we've been rapidly bringing in new players who are enjoying the server - while the retention is garbage it's not this so called "flat line". I do want to take more of the media team into our hands though, but media producing takes a while. I did a few livestreams of the Territories plugin development a while back kinda low-key to see what it would be like and boy I was exhausted after doing such. It's hard balancing all that out. I want to pursue this though, if you're interested in helping out though I'd love to reach out to you non-ironically so you could help out if you wished. I kind of explained the admin thing, we can't prioritize activity heavily. It's nice, it's important, but replacing an admin (I've had to do this way too many times) is stressful, time consuming, and often takes away from our other projects. We gotta choose between hunting a 5th admin or writing war rules, hunting a 5th admin or increasing communication. It takes time to interview people, and it's time we'd rather just use elsewhere if the admin is going to be at least semi-present. It seems backwards but that's my experience.

I mean, alright sure. I'll just not communicate anything next time, because it doesn't matter at all right? If it's useless then why bother talking at all? Why publically announce anything? I put in the effort to increase the communication because I feel it is an issue, and while my answers are very weak at times it's about all I can give. I apologize for being honest? Maybe I should learn to lie to the community more? It's not intended to "address player concerns". It's intended to answer questions, explain stances, and just communicate. Nothing is final here, but overall the goal was accomplished even if you read things you didn't like. Sorry? Playercount decreases every night after 2AM, and fluxuates throughout the days and weeks. I'll get back to you with some hard numbers though to see if I'm accurate on this front, we can parse exact player averages. Nations being inactive is due to a lack of being able to encourage people to come by. This can either be due to roads not being great or the nation not offering anything. Sutica is an active nation and it's position is far away. Haelunor is growing more active, and it has been dead. Some nations thrive, others don't. At any given time during peak hours there are between 20 and 30 individuals not a part of roleplay, either as 1 or 2 people. We can measure this, and have a command to do so; and about 10 are staff members (ET/GMs). I wouldn't exactly blame this on freebuild. And yes, they are at critical levels. But, that's why I'm making something like this, no?

My grandfather died of parkinsons (the really bad, falling kind) and my mother has been living with stage 4 for ~3 years after being diagnosed for 10. I'm allowed to make that joke

Added Nexus, as a plugin, is never returning. We may attempt to do some of the concepts it had however in a better, more RP friendly way. We will see if this is a reality we have the time for. But ya, nexus' code was like watching a stage 4 parkinsons patient try to paint within lines

Stay classy, LotC.

agreed

I write rules, not follow them 😏

As stated above, I want to see more levels of war that don't include destruction & support them with increased casus belli + casus belli system revamps. It's a matter of figuring out what those goals are that will take discussion, planning, etc.

I figured this was a good time to just go ahead and write down some of the questions & their answers that I've been receiving over the past week or so so that these inquiries don't have to be answered so often and folks get an idea about all of these different subjects. New Map?/Is Atlas close to being over?/Is September Prince going to end the map? No. The new map's development will be communicated well in advance and we are no where near the time to do such. Atlas will last for a while still. Sorry to rain on your parade Aesopian, wonks are pretty cool though Is X going to be in the next map? Can't tell you. It's far too early to begin any form of rule rework planning. The server is dying I already answered this one but the short of it is; it's only dying if you believe it is. We'll take steps to improve the playing of the game but to be gloom and doom about the server "dying" is really just your perspective on things, not a reality. War Rule changes when? War rule changes are something we'll be talking about hopefully soon when we finish up handling some internal issues (promotion of a few directors and working with the GM team to finish up a few of their projects). You should see more about this but it depends on my schedule & availability. Ideally we can have a nice, friendly conversation about it. Ok, but none of you are pvp admins so you're going to make terrible war rules like you already have That's harsh. The war rules were an experiment that we've maintained poorly, but we want to expand upon it. Our ideal is that war can happen but we would like to pursue lesser tiers of war and increase the amount of available casus belli, so not every war ends up with one side feeling insane amounts of stress and so both parties can enjoy it more. As stated above, it'll be something we communicate. Also, fight me. Territories when?/Nation Applications when?/Tile applications when? Territories is on hold until 1.13 is more stable and will potentially launch with 1.13 or shortly after. There will be public posts & the works explaining what the plugin does. In the meanwhile some GMs are drafting up ideas for how to handle a system for claiming land. When are inactive nations being removed? As soon as we get the tools to prove they're actually inactive because timezones are a weird construct that tend to not line up. We wanted to remove two nations when we launched the map but they were proven to be more active than initially thought due to timezones. So we're basically not removing nations until we can actually prove that they're inactive + give them a warning to improve or be removed When is freebuild being removed? Likely not this map, though aspects of it will change over time hopefully with territories being released. Territories may be a success, it may not be, but hopefully it is at least something we can try and will work for us. Why is the Administration bad? Why are you bad? Heh, gottem... Communication?/Wheres the Communication? You're looking at it For real though Ok, we're attempting to pursue a new idea that will be hopefully formally announced soon to kind of explain it but we want to pursue having a Community Manager (not an admin position) which will assist us with both communicating over various media (livestream organization, community meetings) but actually yell at us when we need to communicate more. Like a coach for talking. It's probably sad that we need this but it's fiiiine. Limited Creative?/LC?/Can we get a limited form of creative for building? For this map, likely not. We're trying to pursue a survival-focused aspect augmented with resource island. It's annoying, I know - but LC hasn't really shaped up well (dupe glitches, ahoy!) What about fly? We'd have to do it on a per-region basis like LC but it's something we're considering if the land claiming thing/territories comes out. The map is too large! We know What are you doing about it? Planning for the future, also looking into routes to make foot traffic better without falling into what, we believe, is a fast travel trap that causes some issues. But if it has to be done to improve the server it will be. The rules aren't that good!/I got banned for something not in the rules! The rules are currently being worked on to add more to them, but at times we enforce the spirit of the law over the letter of the law. It usually depends heavily on context and intent and is not usually applied to random cases, instead you might find that even though you're within the "rules" if you're approaching something in a toxic/terrible manner you may be reprimanded. Surprise surprise, acting like an asshole gets you in trouble. But I feel I was target banned! You can make an anonymous staff report or contact the Game Team Director. Anonymous reports aren't handled! Anonymous reports are usually handled in a timely fashion if they're on specific members of a team, we try to sort them as quick as we can (we dont always look at them immediately!). Reports on directors or administrators take longer as a lot of internal discussion has to happen between the directors or the rest of the un-reported administration as to the subject. GMs are shit you're shit That's not a response You may not always like them but the GMs are here to help the server. They enforce the rules they think are right and try to make the server a better place. If you think a moderator could do a better job you should provide them or their management with constructive feedback and you might find your words listened to a bit better. It's better to be a freebuild than a nation You aren't wrong and it's something that we want to resolve with territories which at this point in time is soon to be if it already isn't a meme. In the meanwhile just hang in there Give Aesopian region perms get off my account aeso and no, you're not getting them New admin? As stated in my 1.13 post (I snuck it in there, you should read more posts!) we're looking for a new admin. It's from within the staff, so apply if you wish. Being or having been in a moderation position (LT/GM/FM) is a plus. The selection will likely not be for a few months as school is starting soon. We look for candidates who have a strong motivating drive as the first priority as pulling on an Administrator who doesn't or can't pull their weight as part of the team causes us even more delays. No, we aren't looking for an echobox; if you have the work ethic you'll be considered regardless of your ability to type long sentences or click very fast. X should be admin The requirements for being an eligible candidate is to be on staff. Outside of that we get frequent recommendations but we are watching at all times looking for a proper candidate. It'll be based on those observations, not recommendations Unban X We stand by the bans we've made. Sometimes we don't communicate the reasonings well enough, and hopefully this can change for the future, but we've pursued bans for reasons we believe are very valid and very warranted. It's unlikely making forum posts will change someone's ban time unless evidence that absolves them of guilt is presented. That's dumb We wouldn't have made the decision in the first place if we didn't believe it was justified. You're dumb I don't like administrator X We're sorry that you feel that way but kicking admins off the team whenever there is unrest is counterproductive to what we aim to do. As much as you might dislike a specific administrator replacing such a member will take weeks or months, detracting from the over all work that we do as a team and ultimately causing more issues than the ones usually presented in such a case that is made in this way. Every admin fills a role and is a pick we spend a lot of time discussing, planning, and making; it's unlikely an administrator you dislike is going anywhere soon. Instead; provide constructive feedback to the administrator and do so with an open mind. There may be things you don't know that could change your perception. Oh wait, that's reasonable. Ya nvm, fuck that guy. But that guy is you Ya? Fuck him still. What did I ever do for myself? All admins have to put in 30 hour days on lotc to make things happen at the rate I want them to happen Unfortunately, our schedules fluctuate. While it's great to want to expect admins to be present all the time for lotc at the end of the day replacing an admin after a bit of inactivity would mean the team would rotate at a rate comparable to the Event Team. When an admin leaves it creates a massive vacuum of work to pick up for the existing members and constantly having a rotating administration would stall out and crush any hope of progress or change. When it comes to the role we can't value activity over dedication; if someone wants to continue to do the role and they at least put in a fair amount of time then that is preferable to starting the recruitment process over again. NEW: You're all unapproachable My discord is to the left (in a box to the left to the left). Add me if you need to talk, I usually respond when im not working (5PM EDT - 10PM EDT weekdays, ~8AM EDT - ~12PM EDT weekends). If I know what you're adding me about already and I know you're just coming to me to try to get a reversal of a decision that's valid I might not add you. That's about it. NEW: What does each admin do? Telanir: Telanir is the Administrative chairman. It doesn't mean he has more authority than the rest of us but it means he focuses the time he has on trying to ensure the administration runs smoothly and oversees the induction of new admins to the team after we collectively vote on our new member Me: Honestly nothing tbh I'm the guy focused on Strategy, which means how we can grow and improve as a server. New players are a big focus but it's also about improving retention. Flamboyant: Our lore administrator, he's focused on working on and maintaining lore while being our resident lore expert that we poke when all of us other admins have questions Knox: Knox has focusing on communication + strategy, filling in for me with my tighter schedule when I have to fly off into devland and fix some plugin stuff. NEW (Not admin but w.e): Bring back nexus Nexus, as a plugin, is never returning. We may attempt to retry some of the ideas of nexus but do so in a less invasive, more RP-friendly way. Time will tell if the dev team has enough time for this. Why are you still here? We've heard this before Yes, you probably have. Unfortunately, time is an important and often lacking resource that is taken up quite frequently by trying to micromanage the various explosions and fires that happen both on the server and in the community. Between fixing server problems (3-4 days of headaches and it's still not fixed) to trying to respond to the latest of the forum panics these things tend to drag out quite heavily. As things quiet down you'll notice our productivity usually goes up. We tend to value work over talk, so communication is often poor while we try to resolve things. I'm a bit of a sarcastic asshole, but I hope this answered some questions. Have a great evening, I'll be out for a few hours getting some much needed groceries. This may be expanded upon if I think of anything else.

Greetings LotC! 1.13 As many of you have likely seen, lately Minecraft has updated to 1.13, the Aquatic update. If you haven't taken the time to read through the changes or play them yourself you most certainly should - it is a massive update, the largest in Minecraft history, so getting familiar with it is a good idea! However, unfortunately I come being the bearer of bad news on this front. The 1.13 update is so massive and game-changing that it's going to be very difficult for us to update it in a timely manner, and that's not based on our own motivation. You can read the specifics on this spigotmc post (Spigot is the server software that runs Lord of the Craft) but essentially if we update now we risk corrupting massive portions of the map (50%+) - We'll be trying some conversions on a dev server to see if we can accomplish it but right now it's looking unlikely that we'll see an update for a few months while we wait for Spigot (and even vanilla) to fix some of the major bugs. In the meanwhile we'll be moving our code to work with 1.13 so that we're as ready as we can be for when it's ultimately possible for us to update. When we do update to 1.13 however you can expect a host of new features to accompany the big update, both integrating new mechanics possible with 1.13 and some projects that have been worked on for a while. We'll keep you in the loop as we get closer to the day when we can update, but for now hang tight! Wiki In other news, @2samspan has stepped down from the role as Wiki Team Director and for the time being I've taken it up until a future date. Working with the team and team management now we have some big plans for the future of the wiki to make it a better place for new and old players to learn things and understand how to use others. Keep an eye on the wiki and you might be surprised at how it changes in the next few months! The wiki is something that I hold in high regard personally as I see it as an excellent tool to teach players about some of the smaller pieces of lore we have on the server, as well as a resource for new players to easily learn about our expansive lore and complicated in game systems. I hope that we will be able to accomplish a lot in the next month toward making the wiki user friendly and up to date. If you aim to try to aid with this consider applying in the wiki team staff application forum! Administration @Harold has stepped down from the role as Administrator due to being unable to find the time for the position. We wish him the best of luck in all that he does, and in the next few months we'll be looking to bring on a new member of the team to fill the void. We aim, as a team, to float around the five member mark in order to allow our decision making to be (relatively) quick, as we've noticed a trend of larger teams causing us to stall out rapidly. To shed some light on the selection process for those interested the Administration chooses from staff members, often times looking for those who are communicative and show initiative. One of the strongest traits needed to be able to hold the position is a self-motivating drive as the team often focuses on individual projects, and we've felt that administrators who were promoted in the past without a drive to see change or improvement on the server often are unsure of what to do in their position. If you are interested in being a member of the Administration consider the above carefully, and if you aren't on staff and you want to pursue the role consider joining any team - all staff can be promoted to an Administrator, regardless of team. Experience in a moderation role however (Lore, Game, Forums) is generally considered a plus! That'll be all for now, we hope this sheds some light on a few questions you had!