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

Oleis

Questions

• So, factions! Does anyone have any idea when they will actually be happening?
• Is there any point at all in mobmessages?
• In lieu of the above, is there anything OOCly that you can share about how plots get chosen and who gets involved?
• I almost don't want to point this one out, but I find it depressing and irritating that my guild can sit at the bottom of topguilds for ages no matter what the handful of awesome people logging on do, but it's only when we get a 24/7 afk-er who does nothing that the numbers shoot up. That seems, to me, to be the opposite of fun activity; when I talk to someone and get zero response, I actually get put off, yet that's what, according to the numbers, makes us a better guild. Is there any possibility that the mysterious formula by which topguilds gets calculated can be looked at?
• This is completely arbitrary, but is there any possibility, ever, that org leaders could do roomwide illusions without needing to rely on a particular class skill? I know I would be a lot more keen on emoting a mob doing something if it wasn't so blatantly obvious that it was actually me typing an emote and forever in the format of something along the lines of "emote (Iernos, the Eidolon of Spirit flaps his madly, his usual placid expression replaced by one of great anxiety.) , in the meantime, looks on and blinks in surprise". You could limit it to certain rooms or something like that.

I appreciate that this is more than the town meeting's couple of questions limit but I've already written a long post. Why not? Anyway, I'm done, and likely retreating back to forums-retirement. If you want to drag up personal problems with me from last week or 6, 12, 18 months ago directly, knock yourselves out - PM, whatever, but I probably won't give you the response you're looking for in this thread.

Sorry for the silence, all. I was out teaching all day today. Wicked v-neck tan intact.

Factions are mechanically supported right now. The problem is creating content for them. My fingers are crossed that we'll make player-visible progress soon.

Mobmessages are very difficult for us to monitor. Areka tossed out a command for sending in OOC event comments and indicators. Plots tend to evolve as they go. Whoever seems appropriate and convenient at the time is the person who moves on with the event.

Topguilds is terrible. We don't use it for anything objective, and frankly neither should you.

Most likely.

Oleis

Now that I'm back, I'd appreciate if we put the brakes on the inter-player 'discussion' in this thread unless you're using someone else's post as support for your own point. The back-and-forth that's taken place today is occasionally productive, but more often than not falls into the same traps of every other forum thread we have. Everyone has biases and pet peeves. If this is an opportunity for us to have an admin-player conversation, retreads of the same argument are not helpful.

I'm not going to cherrypick quotations from the past 50 posts, but I do want to address a point Daskalos, Moirean, and others raised about things being promised and <u>especially</u> work being delayed due to promises. This has been my biggest problem with Aetolia, wherein every project eventually falls to the wayside in favor of something shinier, and nothing gets finished. Pair that with a culture of information leaks AND official overshare, and we earn the giant list of failed promises that we're currently toting around as some sort of administrative millstone.

The flipside of that issue is telling the playerbase far too little about what's to come, which has its own pitfalls. Expect us to offer vague information about things which are already in progress or almost done. We'll have a number of those at the Town Hall meeting for discussion once Razmael and I hash out our internal timeline.

Thanks for your patience today. Please feel free to keep questions and feedback rolling, but let's not fall back into argument mode.