A FEW ANNOUNCEMENTS, 2 QUESTIONS & MOD APPLICATIONS

[theearth]

Hey, Earthlings! You have no idea how happy I am with our first week. That's what I call an explosive start.

A few announcements, mostly about clean up and clarifications across the game;

• Our FAQ has updated a little to explain a few things. If you think there are questions replied to in the comments that should be on the page proper, tell me and I'll do so. If you have other questions you think should be in there, ask them.

• I have added an expiration to reserves. I personally think it's pretty generous and might shorten it later if it proves to be too much so.

• We now have an info post guide. Take a look, there are some aspects I have made mandatory (but I think everyone in game put them in there anyway).

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A couple questions for yah.

• I want to test the waters on a matter that has been brought to my attention. Specifically, challenge apps. I've never been in a game that allows them (or if they did, I never noticed/have forgotten) and I wanted to ask player opinion of them. At present I'm inclined to allow them once I have other mods to discuss challenges with and only in unreserved applications. Opinions on the issue are most appreciated. I'm not opening a poll on it as such, but I want to see some potential angles I may have missed for or against I might have missed. Thanks!

• As many of you know we have a test drive community, saveyourbrain. It hasn't seen much use yet, but I wanted to see what people thought about having a regular date for a meme to go up to encourage its use and enable people, knowing you lot. I'd probably do it in pairs, an IC meme setting up a scenario of some sort and an OOC meme for asking advice or getting feedback on ideas. Good idea? How often would you like to see it?

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• Speaking of other mods, goddamn my respect for mods has increased at least two million percent just from setting this game up and one week. I am pooped! In a couple of minutes I'm going to open up applications for assistant mods in a separate post so that they can be screened. It'll probably involve an informal interview and everything, because I've gone mad with power. I've been really impressed with player involvement so far, so I doubt I'll be disappointed. At present I am looking for two more mods to ease the workload or a number of deputy mods and there's a good chance that later seasons will require (more) deputy mods to keep this boat afloat, because I promise it's going to go crazy.

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Peace out, Earth.

Comments

[really8adegg]

I'm enthusiastically in favour of challenge apps, personally. I think having a reserve should just mean that you're guaranteed until the duration of your reserve is up to get your app looked at; that seems sufficiently fair to me. I'd much rather give people the benefit of the doubt about being able to act like adults about someone else's app getting in over theirs than not allow something basically useful on the off chance that someone might kick up a shit – plus, you know, the majority of the time the person who got rejected won't actually be in the game, so they can sulk all they want but ultimately it's not really the game's problem unless they're the kind of colossal wanker who's willing to get all grudgey about that kind of thing ... in which case they're still better out of the game than in it, really.

(I can get on board with what you said about apping being less "who is the ABSOLUTE BEST" and "are you good enough for this ok then that'll do", that is a perfectly sensible approach – but sometimes you get a really mediocre app that technically meets your standards of good enough and you ask them for revisions and yeah okay they did it but it's still kind of meh and you find yourself wishing there was a better one you could turn it over for because there is no real concrete reason to reject it but it's just kind of unengaging and you sigh heavily as you reply with the acceptance message) (you get me)

I think a month for reserves is fairly decent, although, blaaahh sorry to bring this back to challenge apps again but if you're not allowing them then I'd say it's too long, just because of cases where someone will reserve a character and then just never bother apping, thus putting that character effectively on lockdown for no reason for an entire month.

Regular test drive memes sounds good – I'm a wee bit leery just due to past experience at games where every time a test drive meme went up everybody would immediately abandon whatever in-game threads they were doing for several days where all anybody would do was tag the test drive meme, often with characters they had no intention of apping, but given the nature of this game I wouldn't anticipate that being quite so much of a problem just because it's more effort to work a character out and you can't really just fling them in on a whim? Plus there are definite huge benefits to having the chance to test characters out in a game where you have to basically AU them!

Query, though – is saveyourbrain going to be exclusively for test drive memes, or will it host other kinds of memes as well?

PS WHILE I'M HERE i think you are doing a great job on the mod front, the plot stuff is amazing and you've generally come across as really accommodating and helpful from what I've seen – thank you for running this game!

GOSH IM SORRY THIS IS SO LONG I GUESS I ... AM PLAYING THIS CHARACTER FOR A REASON ...

[shendude]

Some more good points. Collecting as many as possible is very useful for making my decision.

Mmmhmm, the basic reason I chose to have a community for it was because of that fact that it takes a couple steps more than other games and trying out a few things beforehand is always a good choice. It was Mayfield and one other, I think, that had a community for testing that had no memes at all and I liked that idea so I stole it. But, since it seems out of fashion now test drive memes have become common a best of both is fine by me.

On your query- This. I never intended it to be used that way but it's as good a place as any for memes to go. I'm not going to penalise anyone for using it that way and I'll just let that do as it will for now.

Thanks. The appreciation is much...appreciated. I need a thesaurus.