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.