Communication: Oleis, Aetolia, and my hopes for the game

Rashar

@daskalos .. I think you completely and totally misunderstood that statement. It really was just a chuckle at how funny it was to have that conversation, ICly. Goofy ass Rashar and the Grim Reaper having a chat about things getting exciting and curing Undeath by bringing them back living (i.e. attracting players). There ah.. there wasn't anything more to it than that, man.

As for the rest, eh. Again, you're taking things out of context. And they're sort of just wrong, on some counts. Moirean is the one who asked me about the mutual allying, and the way she played it - as if it would prevent her from raiding - was worth bringing it up to the Council. We argued about it for longer than we should have, probably because I'm hard-headed and the reasons being given were sort of in the same catch-all 'nope just stupid' category as everything else.

Beyond that, I don't know what to tell you man. I used examples of my own brief stint because they're what I have, but I'm not trying to turn this into a Rash vs Enorian thread, here. I gave legitimate thoughts as to what I saw the problems to be there, and if you disagree you disagree. That's cool, but the purpose of this thread seemed to be to offer thoughts on things that need to change or could change to make it better. It is what it is, buddy. I'll bow out, I've said my piece.

Jayce

After reading all this I think it's become another "bash-fast" where one side starts bashing the other, saying they cry wolf, and I've seen it happen a lot on forums. We aren't getting anywhere by arguing internally, as is the norm, and I'm sure people are feeling threatened to post their opinions and communications for fear of being smacked down with a, "You're not working hard enough!" Can we play nice?

Moirean

I was told point blank that spending excessive money on Enorian would be a waste because of 'near future plans'. That was back in January.

I'm going to preface this by saying that @Damariel was awesome as guild patron and did everything and then some when I asked. That being said, we built the University out of city funds (actually, out of my own pocket). We did as @Moirean suggested and did a 'wish list' project, complete with pastebin links to completely described items to put in the University to help flesh it out. Things we couldn't do with regular development commands. Despite 3 different gods on our 'very active' advisory being told about it, it was never done.

These two are the meat of things, I think, and this gets back to the original point of the thread - there's a disconnect between player leaders and admin. Obviously, they can't tell us everything or do everything we want, but if player leaders are being explicitly told not to do big projects because of upcoming changes - and then those changes do not happen in a reasonable timeline - or stuff languishes forever waiting for implementation, that is a huge deterrence to activity and really undercuts motivation. IRE runs on crowd-sourced stuff and player government. This sort of thing, then, should be recognized as a problem.

Funneling things through a patron seems to be part of the issue, at least regarding the latter. One person is going to understandably be more bogged down, and it seems odd that they have to be the specific person doing the implementation if everything is already written. You don't call one specific maintenance man at a college, office or apartment. You call the central desk, they spread the workload out.

Regarding the first part, being told to just wait for upcoming changes is something I've long learned to just kinda ignore. For example, I was told ages ago to maybe wait on a tournament I was planning for Carnis because revamp stuff would be coming down the pipeline soon. I waited two months, held it instead, and now we're due for another one. We hold the tournaments every 25 IG years. I've learned that expected timelines and actual timelines are drastically different here in Aetolia and being a builder who's slacked on projects due to RL stuff or simply lack of motivation, I understand that these things happen. I'm not upset as I know I've been the cause for delays at least once myself - however, I think Aetolia needs to stop operating under an idealistic mindset when it comes to timelines and start planning for these delays, and not pass down things like what Daskalos mentioned.

Daskalos

I was told things would happen, told not to do things so I didn't, and I got stuck in a holding pattern for 8 months. Where are factions? Ylem Mines? It's not just Enorian, but the rush to work after 'we're going to eliminate coming soon (tm)' has disappeared. I mentioned in my previous post how things were. I don't know what else to do, I can't do these things myself.

Moirean

Just want to add, Dask and I have been exchanging PMs on stuff. And agreeing. You know there's an issue if he and I are civilly sitting and agreeing and discussing things...

Haven

I find this discussion to be a little frustrating because I feel like there's nothing that's been said here about Enorian or even the game at large thus far that hasn't been said already numerous times in the past. In some cases, like several months ago recent.

Daskalos

Coming Soon (tm)

Eleanor

This is almost forum roleplay, but Elea's approach to things, and mine in a meta sense, is that if you want something done, you do it your own damn self. So you get told there's development happening! Where's that chart about valve time? In the meantime, do the thing anyway, stuff what they told you. It's only gold. If/when the fun new thing shows up, you've got it AND the thing you did in the meantime, which is better than a vaccuum and a bunch of people who are bored.

Moirean

I agree with that, Elea, and as noted I tend to take dev timelines with a grain of salt - but isn't that a symptom of a problem? It's not that stuff gets delayed, it's that dates are consistently cited far before they actualize, which is a likely root of a lot of the discontent and frustration people are expressing. If @Oleis is genuinely asking for ways for things to improve, imo a better system of gauging timelines, reporting them, and planning around those releases (such as with communication to player leaders on what's ok to do, what should be sat on) would help a lot. I could discuss more about this, but I think it would be breaking my NDA, so I won't say more on the forums. (Edit: I don't mean that like "oooh shady secrets" but instead just thoughts on the process of being a mortal volunteer and what tools could be helpful to do better/more productive work.)

Eleanor

Problem with defined release schedules is, the team is almost entirely volunteers who have real lives and no paycheck to make them slog through 'just not feeling it'. Until IRE starts paying more people, it's completely unreasonable to expect them to be able to produce a release timetable and stick to it reliably.

And 'just not feeling it' is kind of common when 90% of the feedback they see is people crying and complaining, just gonna throw that out there. If you act entitled or say things like 'totally not discounting the great work you guys do it's just the game really sucks these days', they are not going to feel like pouring hours of their lives into stuff that's just going to make them feel like crap when people rip it to shreds and make more unfocused demands of 'make it fun plz'.

And before the argument of 'well they're the admins, they're SUPPOSED to want to spend the time to make it good' arrives; if you think they're doing such a bad job, have you considered applying for celani to replace them?

Daskalos

It's also a lot easier to be burned out and not care if you've been there before. We have a high retread rate with our administration. From personal experience, when I hire people who have left in the past and bring them back, yes there's a shorter training period but there's also a much higher chance that the same old feelings will come back. My issue is that I pushed Enorian in the direction indicated... and then was met with silence.... and until this thread I haven't publicly complained about it, because why? It just sets a prejudice against me -by- the administration, which makes it far less likely I'd get stuff done in the future. Now that I've quit Aetolia, I'm not worried about people holding grudges against me, because as much as I've tried to change the perception, nothing -will- change.

Yes, IRE should pay more people, but we can also do a better job of using the tools at our disposal. I can write progs that are almost 100% drop and go for the webOLC (and have in the past). I have no issue building things or designing things to make events happen, to make things advance, but when no one is willing to do even that for you and you can't get someone to cut and paste from pastebin? The problem at that point isn't us, it's a volunteer team that's burned out, overworked as Oleis put it. They're not doing anyone any good at that point - not the players in their orders, not the orgs they patron, not the game. They're figureheads who pop in when they want to.

I used to have a boss like that, who would sit in his office and let us basically run the place, but once a month or so he would 'descend from his throne' as we put it and decide he didn't like what we were doing and make us change things. Moirean and I have been talking a lot about various things - cutscene RP between gods, burnout rate, the fact that both of us are frustrated at the stop and go pace of development and lack of oversight. And we're agreeing.

Do you realize how incredibly rare and next to impossible it is that Moirean and I agreeing?

Something is really screwed up for this to be happening.

Moirean

I'm not saying they should have defined timetables. I'm trying to offer constructive feedback, which is what Oleis asked for - we all know that delays happen. It's not really the delays we're frustrated with, but the lack of communication or misinformation about dates. I'm saying factor that stuff in for initial estimates and communicate when timetables change. In QA, a good project accounts for back and forth dev-testing-fixing-verification time when estimating release dates. We assume stuff is going to go bad. When I worked at a company that didn't plan that stuff out well, there was tons of crunch time to meet release deadlines. When I was at a company that accounted for it, we were able to prepare a lot better and had far less overtime and delays. We did things like factoring in estimated turnaround time, assessing how long projects took to make projections on future projects, building secondary task lists to work on during downtime, as well as putting aside time to develop tools, test cases, etc to make the work itself easier and quicker. There's been some of that visible in Aetolia recently with things like the builder bounty board, and I really like the direction that's leading things in - it makes it easier, at least as a mortal volunteer, to work more efficiently and productively.

Slyphe

Daskalos said:

but when no one is willing to do even that for you and you can't get someone to cut and paste from pastebin?

I kinda just want to point out that I have not been asked to do a single bit of prog/feature work for Enorian yet in the last year I've been playing.

Phoenecia put together a wish list project by my request, and I saw to getting each of those implemented until the list was up to date - if that's been added to since, I haven't been alerted of it.

I'm also in the midst of collaborating with Areka on building an outpost for Enorian that's a direct result of a meeting I had where I specifically asked people pretty much, "What do you want me to do for you?"

Areka with this outpost is the only response I've gotten out of that.

It's not entirely fair to be making claims that nobody is willing to do anything when you're not actually stepping up to ask others that may be interested in helping out, but that's just my two cents.

Daskalos

The wish list a few things were done on, but much was left undone. Last I checked, nothing had been done in the University, for instance. The meeting you mention you held after I resigned, which honestly felt like 'ok, Dask is gone we can help Enorian again'. Additionally, in the past when I approached other gods I was told 'work through your patron, that's what they're there for'.

The only thing I asked for, was granted, and then didn't do was the orphan stuff @Damariel agreed to because when I went to do it the person who's idea it was got upset and said she wanted it to be an order only thing (at which point I stepped back, though why you come to the city leader for an order only thing confuses me). The descriptions were written, the quest idea laid out it just needed progging and implementing. I'm not saying we've been completely ignored (@Omei did some nice work with @Damariel for me) but there were also some really frustrating things. Honestly, you say 'no one from Enorian has ever said XYZ'... I was CL for most of the last year, and you never sent me a message saying you were available. I worked through what I had in front of me. I asked, -repeatedly- for a meeting with @Razmael, going so far as to get up early in the morning and stay up late so that hopefully I could get said meeting asking about some of the stuff he said would be launched, to see what I could do to help push things along. I was willing to work. I never got a response. That was almost a year after he told me he would find ways for me to help out more substantially and never came through. It all comes back to communication, which quite frankly sucks.

Nobody was a bigger proponent of Razmael becoming producer than I was. I obviously care about the game, or I wouldn't be Hadoryu'ing up the forums. Yet I've hit a point where I honestly feel like nothing would be done. Where's our revenge for Laesae? When are we going to see something other than a cookie cutter event for Enorian? Surely @Nola and @Ciarelle aren't dreaming it as well. That's two of the GM's of Enorian's guilds saying 'hey, enough is enough'. After I've said it for years. I had discussions with -Galleus- about this propensity and he said things would change, but all I've seen so far is lip service and broken promises. Yes, you apparently had a meeting and I applaud you for that. I hope they use you, I just wish I had you available as well when I was trying to get stuff done. I've given Aetolia 150% every time I've been in leadership, but that's not enough. I've given away tons of credits to other players solely to try and keep them interested. I released a combat system -for free- to try and retain players. A system that previously had sold for $70. Please, someone tell me again that I didn't do enough.

Valenae

Eleanor said:

This is almost forum roleplay, but Elea's approach to things, and mine in a meta sense, is that if you want something done, you do it your own damn self. So you get told there's development happening! Where's that chart about valve time? In the meantime, do the thing anyway, stuff what they told you. It's only gold. If/when the fun new thing shows up, you've got it AND the thing you did in the meantime, which is better than a vaccuum and a bunch of people who are bored.

What Dask said about exhausted gods and limited roleplay becoming an issue over time resonates with me. I don't think god involvement is as arbitrary to the player experience as expressed. To say that fun is completely up to the player to manufacture is not only silly, it's shortsighted. If a player could solely conjure up their own fun without systemic influence why do it on Aetolia? You could do as much on IM or Skype. The systemic influence in Aetolia draws players and the player base is what keeps them rooted in the game. So, if we loose part of that systemic influence through exhausted volunteers and the player base starts disappearing as a result of that loss, it is only logical that Aetolia starts to fail. Yes, players should try to 'make their own fun', but I don't think we should underestimate how much of an influence an active god/order/godly influence on an organization can have in player inclusion and, therefore, the amount of people who will actually stick around.

I can say from personal experience that my god is what made the Paladin guild feel like a multi-layered environment and that was further perpetuated by an active guild.

Maghak

There are several important issues raised by this thread overall that need to be addressed, but I can promise with the perspective afforded by looking at the entire game and dealing with the people involved in building content for the cities, Enorian is not being left behind in terms of event numbers or event quality. There are issues with pacing and thematics, primarily the fact that the setting and the choice of morally grey event content tends to force Enorian into a reactionary role, but these concerns have been noted as of a few weeks ago and we're already working on building the next wave of world events around them.

It's not my place or field to comment on overall administrative structure issues, so I will leave it at that. Please keep in mind when considering what volunteers are or aren't doing for cities that you do not see a lot of what goes on behind the scenes, and it is never going to be primarily about the specific players involved. We have people from every facet of the game represented upstairs.

Ishin

@Valenae - I disagree strongly that a God is necessary to make your guild feel 'multi-layered' in any form or fashion. How long has it been since there was a Severn? Yet the Syssin are fantastic, and we're probably one of the biggest guilds in the game. I think some nights we net around 13+ people online.

Daskalos

I never once thought that it was because of who the mortal players were that bias happened. A question, Maghak, if you will:

You say the choice of morally grey event content forces Enorian into a reactionary role, how does that coincide with the decision to force tethers and black and white on everyone with the Spirit\Shadow divide? Both are administrative decrees, through mechanics and through roleplay. Do we have neutrality and shades of grey, or don't we? Conflicting messages are being sent, and where that is felt the most harshly is in places like Enorian that is bright white. Dark black doesn't care about gray, they can take it or leave it.

If any of the volunteers feel as if I'm attacking you, that isn't my intention. There's a lot of frustration pent up right now and I've held it in for months and months because I felt as a mortal leader that others followed it was my place to carry the company line and try to make things the best I could for the other players. However, since it was brought up (by others) I am venting.

Daskalos

Ishin said:

@Valenae - I disagree strongly that a God is necessary to make your guild feel 'multi-layered' in any form or fashion. How long has it been since there was a Severn? Yet the Syssin are fantastic, and we're probably one of the biggest guilds in the game. I think some nights we net around 13+ people online.

The Syssin are also historically a popular class, presently one of the (if not the) strongest in PK, with the best evasive abilities and spying abilities in the game. It's one of the guilds that I truly believe you have to try hard to mess up.

Moirean

I just want to say that I am appreciative for and enjoy the work the volunteers do - I hope my posts didn't come across as otherwise.

Phoenecia

When it comes to getting neat stuff for your org, you really have to put in the effort, and really have to follow up.

When I was a Dhasan in Spinesreach, I noticed that a bunch of places were still bombed-out and ruined, so I got to asking a divine if I could rewrite some of the descs, have a few object features put in, and in some cases, they went out of their way to code in a few neat extra things I hadn't thought of. It took a lot of correspondence, but also a lot of work on my part (which I didn't have to do) since I wrote nearly everything myself, but nothing would've ever come of anything if @Niuri hadn't been gracious enough to be willing to plug everything in.

Ditto for some of the extra things in Enorian's university. I was in the process of writing a bunch of NPCs, items, and quests for it that I was going to ask to be put in. Of course, there's not always a guarantee . People have schedules, people forget, things get lost, sometimes you have to nudge every so often. Even @Slyphe was understanding enough to let me nag him (I still kinda feel bad about that) every once in a while to check up on things, or to see what was doable and what wasn't, or what would cost the city money. Most of the stuff got dropped after I left, and I don't think anyone really bothered to pick it back up since no one else was really adding anything to the project or offering any ideas to add.

Another thing I did in Enorian was completely overhaul the museum and had new exhibits added to it. There's even a neat little pedestal in one of the rooms for displaying player-made artwork and sculptures. The museum curator NPC even interacted with me and cooperated on a bunch of stuff. They were all things that didn't really need to be done, but were anyway for the sake of adding some extra depth and character to the area.

@Daskalos: You complain about not getting stuff, but I've never had any problems with asking for stuff to be created for orgs when I've done it, and from the looks of it, neither has Spinesreach. The admins are more than happy to put in stuff and do stuff for you, but maybe it has to do with what you're asking or how you're asking it.

Maghak

The primary impetus behind tethering was down to mechanical issues with class access and the RP concerns preventing Enorian and Duiran from making use of Bloodlochian classes with no counterbalance, not the intentional overall segregation of lore or world roleplay. I'm not comfortable answering your question in more detail when I was not involved in the decision.

Ishin

Daskalos said:

Ishin said:

@Valenae - I disagree strongly that a God is necessary to make your guild feel 'multi-layered' in any form or fashion. How long has it been since there was a Severn? Yet the Syssin are fantastic, and we're probably one of the biggest guilds in the game. I think some nights we net around 13+ people online.

The Syssin are also historically a popular class, presently one of the (if not the) strongest in PK, with the best evasive abilities and spying abilities in the game. It's one of the guilds that I truly believe you have to try hard to mess up.

Hey, I think you missed the Syndicate period in that assessment.

Plenty of people get the class and don't join the guild. Or they did in the past. Either way.

Popular class or not, you don't get 13+ people online in a night.

Slyphe

@Phoenecia, I think you hit the nail on the head.

If you're not getting a response from one of us, please, do feel free to message us again until you get a response. Use common sense with this mind you, 10 messages without a response in the same day is clearly not acceptable, but if you don't hear anything for a few days, please by all means ask again.

It's not an understatement to say that most of us are absolutely swarmed with messages, so it's easy to lose them in the fray. Heck, sometimes I log in, check a message and make a mental note to follow up as soon as I'm all situated, and then end up working on something else and completely forgetting.

If it's for a city matter and a particular god doesn't seem to be responding after a week or so, move on to the next one on your DA and explain the situation and I'm sure they'll be more than happy to either help, or let you know that it's not something they're able to help with and hopefully point you in the right direction.

We're here, ultimately, to make this game a better place. I can confidently say that I speak for the rest of the administration in saying this, because when you guys are happy and enjoying yourselves, so are we.

Daskalos

Maghak said:

The primary impetus behind tethering was down to mechanical issues with class access and the RP concerns preventing Enorian and Duiran from making use of Bloodlochian classes with no counterbalance, not the intentional overall segregation of lore or world roleplay. I'm not comfortable answering your question in more detail when I was not involved in the decision.

That's fine, just as someone who was nudged rather hard into helping the polarization along, before tethering but when everything was initially divided spirit\shadow (vs the old dynamic of light\dark), it confuses me to see these morally gray issues being thrown at Enorian and us having to figure it out, when we used to be much more gray and we purged it out. I think, honestly, you'd have a much better Enorian if another option came out, the counter to Spinesreach. Duiran is off doing their own thing, caring about nature (I miss anti-civ Duiran). Loch\Eno are opposites, but Reach really has no opposite. Now, I realize with a war system there becomes an imbalance if you end up with 3 orgs vs 2, but that's why I think anti-civ Duiran worked so well, because you could get them to play neutral only caring about nature. But, I dunno anymore.

Nola

I just want to say I haven't had any issue with getting things done/discussion for the improvement of the daru when I have asked. the admin have been fantastic and quick! The guilds pillar was installed within hours of my presenting it to them, and @Maghak really outdid himself with that. @Dhar has been very helpful too, and consistently available. My point was solely about the event trend of recent times.

Ciarelle

To clarify a couple of things, and I hope the language filter does its job:

1) My own post was intended as feedback regarding the plots that the gods control. I do not expect anyone's hand held into the Age of Dawn or whatever bullshit you care to come up with. I'm aware that writing rooms and designing cool things is often player-orchestrated and that's why I didn't mention them in my own posts. More about that in a minute.

To put it in Daskalos' terms, I was and am pretty explicitly addressing the large-scale plots that are a bit cookie cutter. I'm not talking about Fred the guard of awesome or whatever, I'm talking the god-initiated events when they rely on tired tropes and seem to more mad libs than legitimately having outcomes that can be affected by player action or inaction. The corrupting of Laesae in Enorian happened, what, 18 months ago? There was a lot of criticism about it. I know Dhar went and stormed the temple afterwards. I wish I hadn't been asleep for that consolation prize and it sounded cool. As I noted originally, however, that's still reacting rather than antagonising. Worse, despite the valid points that were made back then, here we are now, still facing the same issues.

I'm not trying to look at plot issues to make anyone feel bad or because I'm expecting a free pass if I just complain hard enough. I didn't say I'd like to see more antagonising for the lifers because I wanted to blame or prod at the people who don't have mains on that side, or to awaken anyone's inner troll. It's because that's the side my dealings have been with and whether I'm talking about Enorian or Duiran, there's the been a similar pattern. If those issues have already been noted and are being addressed, then that is wonderful and I'm looking forward to the results.


2) I'm going to say this again - if I'm not writing something, I'm not blaming the gods or the admin for not doing it for me instead. Guildwise, if I want something done and need divine help, I've had no problem whatsoever with dropping @Dhar a message and he gets it done. I'm NOT going, "hey, I want a Liquid Steel fountain because Spinesreach has one, no fair!"; Moirean designed it, paid for it, etc., it's her thing. I'm not expecting a replica of it just because I think it sounds cool.

I'm actually more enthusiastic than I have been about Aetolia in months at the moment. I'm focusing on the things I can control, not spending time or energy on the people and things that I don't want/need to, and I have some great people in the Ascendril who are actually keen on not just developing ideas but making things happen. Positive energy creates positive energy. Looking for more ways *I* can do things was a motivation behind a lot of my original questions.

I am going to take Ishin's post that was apparently for me and agree that yes, work creates work. If the powers that be get inspired by me doing stuff, however, then it also goes the other way - I get inspired by you doing stuff. If you are up there being a Celani, then I am crediting you with not just more power to shake things up but also more ideas, broader vision and, hell, even with a tougher hide than I've got. If you show enough interest to initiate something, then that is really great. Do it in a way that makes us more than a prop for someone else's story and show you've at least read HELP ASCENDRIL before going in and I know I'll get excited.

I'm fully aware that criticism and negativity without even a supply of ideas to go with them has the opposite effect of motivating people. Hearing crickets when you have an idea is nearly as bad. I am legitimately trying to look at the problems I can see that I think players cannot just work out and trying to offer some thoughts, and if not quite solutions, ideas on where you can look for them. I'm genuinely sorry if that didn't come through.

Phoenecia

On the topic of Enorian continually being stuck between a rock and a hard place, I think the reason for that is because of the expectation that because they're a Light org, they're automatically the good guys, and that everything in the game is black and white, and in things like that, the good guys always win. Also, Enorian in particular subscribes to the whole 'Light is Not Good' trope. Yeeeaah. If you're going to strictly adhere to that, you're probably going to have to suck it up and accept that you're not going to be the 'good guy', and you're going to be presented with situations where you aren't seen as the good guy because, hey, Light is Not Good.

Enorian gets presented with morally grey situations because, surprise surprise, the game world isn't completely black and white, and neither is every scenario that goes on within it. If Light is Not Good, then consequently, there can be instances of Dark is Not Evil. Choices aren't meant to be clear-cut and easy, and the conflict between having to choose to be Lawful or Good (to use some D&D flair) when you're Lawful-Good creates depth and struggle. Black and white is arguably cheap and uninteresting, and is something overly simple.

You think you're a good guy just because of the org you pick? Wrong. Some actions taken by some Light side orgs are definitely not good or nice. You want people to side with you and fight for you and keep them fighting for you instead of jumping ship to the other side? Make them like you, and keep doing things to keep them liking you. You want to beat the undead? You're probably going to have to accept that you're going to have to be pragmatic in regards to certain things, or you'll find yourself continually losing. Why shoot yourself in the foot and give the darkness an edge? You can be a good guy, but, y'know, you can be smart and pragmatic and still be a good guy, but you can just as easily be a bad guy. Likewise, you can be pious, passionate, and zealous, and still be a good guy, but you can easily be a bad guy that thinks he's a good guy.

Ingram

Ishin said:

Daskalos said:

Ishin said:

@Valenae - I disagree strongly that a God is necessary to make your guild feel 'multi-layered' in any form or fashion. How long has it been since there was a Severn? Yet the Syssin are fantastic, and we're probably one of the biggest guilds in the game. I think some nights we net around 13+ people online.

The Syssin are also historically a popular class, presently one of the (if not the) strongest in PK, with the best evasive abilities and spying abilities in the game. It's one of the guilds that I truly believe you have to try hard to mess up.

Hey, I think you missed the Syndicate period in that assessment.

Plenty of people get the class and don't join the guild. Or they did in the past. Either way.

Popular class or not, you don't get 13+ people online in a night.

Ugh, don't remind me, that idea shouldn't have gotten off the paper phase.


Incidentally, when I came back to this game and more specifically to the Syssin/Spines, the guild was dead. Leadership finally had transferred over to Ishin, then Fae, and before those two started doing things in the guild, there were -very- few people logging in. I think we'd be busy if it was five at once.

Alexina

I went to bed, and suddenly, more than twenty new posts.

I'm a bit reluctant to get into the whole Enorian debate, but it's obviously a main concern of the playerbase. So. To Bloodloch/Spinesreach: the leadership (or maybe the former leadership) of Enorian is voicing their discontent about how things were managed in regards to events and how to develop their city. It's a bit presumption of us to say that 'no, you're not trying hard enough' or 'no, you're not doing it the right way', or 'no, your complaints are not valid'; the people responding in this thread are longstanding members of the community and dismissing them in a smug or patronizing way is not going to do anything except create a feeling of alienation towards the rest of the playerbase. To @Daskalos (and whomever else it may concern): I've had a hard time following the back and forth in this thread because it sort of went from constructive feedback to a debate about particular happenings that I don't have detailed information about. What, on a more general level, is it that you feel is not working? That could be improved upon by Oleis or Razmael or whoever else reading this thread? Because right now, I have this vague feeling that you just want 'better admins/more attention/win in events', and I'm not sure if there's anything else behind all these posts in the last two pages of the thread.

I also wanted to respond to a comment made by @Eleanor regarding the following sentence: "Until IRE starts paying more people, it's completely unreasonable to expect them to be able to produce a release timetable and stick to it reliably." Other muds - without paid staff - both produce a released timetable and they stick to it reliably. I've thought really, really, really hard about how to express my feelings on on the matter in a constructive, positive manner and not just come across like I'm whining. Basically, Aetolia's development process does not make me feel as excited about the game as other muds (whether IRE or not) or even other games in general do. It takes years for some projects to reach completion. The development posts stopped. So. I suppose my feeling in regards to Aetolia's content development process is not as engaging as what I see over in Achaea's forums or when reading about most other games that I'm playing (Europa Universalis, or pretty much any MMO, or even the non-IRE muds I used to play before coming here). Even small things like 'this weekend, we've planned an event that involves Slyphe's order and the Daru' or 'on Wednesday, the Grecht will be up to mischief' generate a lot of buzz and interest, but there's nothing like this either. And then, when things get put on hold for whatever reason, we hear nothing about it, or why, or what is being worked on instead. I think the playerbase is mature enough to be told that the developers have new priorities, or that a volunteer retired, or that something was simply not working as it should and there will be some delay and the war system/factions/dungeons/carnifex/whatever is not currently being worked on.

Essentially, please keep the playerbase a bit more in the loop. It's a great way to generate interest for the game. If bad things happen and something can't be completed, tell us about that too. Because when nothing gets said and nothing gets done, it's easy to lose interest and head over someplace else.