Category: Site News Feed

If it doesn’t fit in another category, it probably goes here.

Requesting Players for Murder Witnesses

So, I’ve been thinking about how to advance the plot in Angelic Sins. We have a murder mystery / supernatural killer plot going on there. A team has been assembled to work on it but I realized they have no work to do yet. Thus, we need to provide witnesses.

To that end, I’m going to be putting it out there for people to bring forward witnesses. We’ll do the RP for the murder’s on the server, live. Most of the witnesses will be NPC’s, more than likely, so people are free to bring a character into that without approval. Some of the witnesses could be full characters as well.

I’d like to get this rolling as soon as possible, anyone wishing to participate, let me know.

Contribution Awards for July 2018

Along with some of the other recent changes to how we do things, I’ve decided that staff members are no longer going to be able to get awards for contributions to the forum or the wiki. The idea is that we’d like to use these awards to encourage people to play in our game. It was recently noted by more than one person that almost all of the role play is done by a select few, mostly staff members. As such, we would like to encourage players to contribute as well.

As a recap, we will still be doing awards for anyone who assists or runs a plot but contributions to the forum and wiki will contain only non-staff players.

Plot Contributions

First off, I would like to thank Liz, Imperatoris Lacerta#8924, for his continuing excellence in assisting the story move forward. Recently Liz decided that he would rather not be staff anymore. For a lot of people this might mean that he stops playing or stops spending time helping with the plot. He hasn’t done that, so Liz gets a special shout-out with my gratitude for the good job he continues to do.

Moving along there are a few other players I’d like to give credit for their efforts. Bucket, Buck Approves#3038, has pushed forward with his villain plot and has been doing an excellent job of it. Both KS, ks#0908, and him have done a superb job of not only moving plot forward but creating their own sub-plots which tie into the major things going on. We also have to give credit to Tim, timot1066#8017, who has been of great help in moving plot forward and playing around with the idea of the racial tensions in the game increasing.

Last, but not least, I’d like to thank Red (Red the 15th#2304) for continuing to play in the Angelic Sins setting which all-too-often gets ignored by me when I’m trying to push things forward.

Forum Contributions

This award is based on the number of replies a person has posted to the forum.

  1. Buckethead AKA Bucket
  2. Darktrooper501 AKA Liz
  3. timot1066 AKA Tim

Wiki Contributions

This award is based on the contribution score provided by a MediaWiki plugin.

  1. Darktrooper501 AKA Liz
  2. Thatotakugalaxy AKA Jade
  3. NigrantibusAlis AKA Aytise

Awards

The following is being added to the guild scores of each person mentioned here.

For Liz, the breakdown is 1000 for plot contributions, 750 for forum contributions, and 1000 for the wiki contributions with the total then being 2750. Bucket gets 1000 for plot contributions and 1000 for forum contributions with the total then being 2000. Time receives 500 for plot contributions and 500 for forum contributions with the total then being 1000. Following that ks gets a total of 1000 (for plot contributions), Jade gets a total of 750 (for wiki contributions), and Aytise gets a total of 500 (for wiki contributions). Finally, Red gets 500 for contributions to Angelic Sins.

New Point Score Totals

So here are the new score totals.

Name Score
Imperatoris Lacerta 278293
Titan Shadow 241197
Red the 15th 212793
ks 159403
t0l 156906
The Chubby Gamer, Sloth Boi 151492
Dr. Winterdawn 104357
🍃💎Minty Jade💎🍃 93308
Buck Approves 90268
JumpingScript 87047

Hints About Stories and Participation

The subject of participation has been troubling me for a while. Specifically how to increase participation within the site. It was clear from the survey that a lot of people don’t participate not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t know what to do or don’t feel they have anything to contribute. That is why I’m going to attempt to put, at the end of every news post going forward, a little blurb about what the storyline needs or suggestions about how to participate. My hope is that people can read that and get a feeling for what they might be able to contribute.

Further, another comment on the survey was regarding people not knowing where to go with a storyline and thus people having to wait for me. Since my time is very limited this gets into a bad situation where storylines die when I cannot be on. I end up owing a lot of role plays and I, likewise, end up without time or energy to do them all.

I feel that we have a lot of very creative minds here and people with an extremely varied set of perceptions. No one on the server should feel they cannot or should not contribute to a story that is ongoing. I’ve been giving a lot of thought as to why people feel the way they do and I think a lot of it is because people have made a lot of seriously combat-based characters who are pigeon-holed into those roles and this gives us the current situation where you really can’t throw a rock without hitting someone who is a skilled fighter. I will be addressing this in a further posting and possibly with the staff about how to fix this problem.

In the meantime, these measures of putting information at the end of a post as to direction of a plot arc and the potential for participation in that arc should help with the indecision. No one should feel that their indecision about how to play a character or where to fit that character in is abnormal. On the contrary, it is extremely normal. I’ve talked about this before — the fact that a person is here doing role play means that there’s probably some social anxiety going on or some other kinds of anxiety and other issues connecting with people. That’s pretty normal too! Some of that boils down to not being able to figure out where we, as people, fit into the grander scheme. It is only natural to presume that this kind of feeling is going to cause issues deciding where our characters fit in.

I will being doing further posts on the Burning Sweetly section of the forum on this very issue in hopes of helping people overcome problems associated with how to develop a character. I’m by no means an expert so, commentary will be welcome.

Fresh News Area for Antagonists

Since we are finally going to start getting into a place where we’re having active play as antagonists for the story within Blazing Umbra, we need an area to keep those players informed. After our recent survey of players, it is clear that many players aren’t sure what’s going on or how they can contribute. This is going to be the first phase of an ongoing effort to keep players of both sites informed about the changes to the setting. Since these news posts are designed to be in-character and the characters not engaging in activity with the antagonist organizations such as Onyx and the Galactic Empire forces within the setting will not have access to information about what those sides are up to until things are already in motion; I have decided that there needs to be a separate place to post such information. This is analagous to the Solas Tempus COMs category only for the opposite sides.

In practice this area is going to take a while to solidify as to what is actually in it and will take some effort to get used to. As the story goes, things posted here and intended two fold, as previously stated we want to keep players informed when they can’t be on more than once or twice a month (or even longer). In addition to that, we’d like to foster creativity between players, posts here should also be seen as invites to consider how things can go and how people might contribute. Suggestions can often be replied to in one of these posts via the forum (a link to the appropriate forum topic is at the end of every post). In addition, a new topic can be started in the Phoenix Nebula section of the forum.

Server Reorganization

Coming from a background on IRC where one had a single chat room for RP and a single chat room for OOC talk to a medium where one can have nearly any amount of channels they’d like on a server it was easy to just make a channel for everything! However, as per the results of the user survey, I recognize that it can be quite overwhelming to do that. I know that I’ve got a number of issues there, specifically with the number of channels for a lot of the categories, many of which go unused most of the time. Now, an unused channel here isn’t a big deal, it can just sit there unused without a major issue.

That being said, it is a bit of an issue in that it becomes overwhelming for new players and even hard for older players to know where to play. Originally, 90% of the play was supposed to take place in the tavern on (at the time) Blazing Umbra station. Even when the tavern moved to Nimbus, that is where I envisioned most of the play taking place. However, that is still a hold-over from IRC days where one had a single RP channel – maybe you had auxiliary channels but usually not so much because people didn’t join all of your channels so a lot of times no one knew what was going on in the auxiliary channels.

Now we’ve gotten to the point where the RP is shifting around to different areas, the paradigm that everyone goes to the bar and that’s where everyone interacts is dated and doesn’t really work all that well. At the same time, having a channel for everything possible also doesn’t work very well. Thus, I’m trying to think of different paradigms to structure the server with.

Starting out, I’ve removed a number of channels, notably the starship-specific channels in favor of a more generalized #starship-1 and #starship-2, other than the #stellar-horizon channel which gets its own area as it is tied to the postings on the forum. I’ve also removed a number of channels that were not being used or somehow redundant. I’m still looking for ways that channels can be done and organized in such a way that it is easy to navigate for both new and old players.

I’m also considering creating just like 2-3 channels for each setting that get used as needed (so like #blazing-umbra-1 through #blazing-umbra-4 or some such, I’m not sure yet. When one looks at the server, we usually don’t have more than 4-5 RP’s going on at the same time and less than that in a particular setting. however, I am concerned that this would get generally confusing. As with everything, it is a balance.

Commentary is welcome.

Appeal for Patronage

I’m not one to ask for money really. I try hard to cover the server costs (web servers not the Discord server of course) myself as I dislike asking for money. However, as the use of the web services has increased my cost in providing those services has as well. I would also like to find a way to fund doing a contest with awards like gift cards and such to boost participation. As such, I’m, again, seeking those to become patrons of the server and what we do here.

I enjoy doing the work I do trying to create new content and help fit everything together but it does take a lot of time and energy to do so. Thus, I ask anyone who is willing and able to help to please do so. Here is the Patreon URL.

Thank you, everyone, for all of your support (of all the forms it takes). I appreciate it greatly!

Fallback Services – When Discord Fails

I’d just like to remind everyone that we have some backup chat services in the event that Discord fails. However, before getting to that, for those that don’t know we have our own site Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Twitter
Facebook

Those feeds should keep everyone up to date on site news. In the event of a Discord failure that lasts for a significant period of time, information will be posted to those sites first. I have configured all 3 of the following fall-backs for people to be able to regroup and continue RP or other such things in the event of an extended failure of Discord.

Slack

Slack is a business-focused chat service similar to what Discord does but it has no voice or video features and has pay-features which we will not be using (obviously). This is very easy to set up, and can be accessed simply from this complicated invite link. This link there dumps a person directly into the Slack server, which is basically at this team address. Slack is a bit different from Discord but should also function as a reasonable fall-back for a lot of people given it’s mobile application support as well as simple sign-in-and-go process.

Keybase

Keybase is a security and identity service which allows a lot of things, security, encryption, identity verification, but what we are interested in is the team-chat feature, which is a fall-back in case Discord is not operational. The team name is moltenaether, anyone may request to join the team and then have access to the chat as well as a lot of files stored in the keybase secure storage.

Keybase is a bit complicated to use, however, and not everyone is going to want to set it up. Thus, we have other alternatives.

Jabber / XMPP

Now I know that Jabber and XMPP are basically dead except for as an underlying technology of other shit (Facebook and Google both have used the protocol). However, we do operate a Jabber / XMPP server, to get an account one has to go to here. This is basically like any IM software and is mostly about presence and one-on-one chat, I can personally be found at cyclops@blazingumbra.com as my Jabber / XMPP address.

Stellar Horizon RP – Functional Vision

Alright, so, I want people to be able to do smaller sub-plot and even just one-off’s of the RP while we do this. Since the main story is going to take place on the forum there will be down-time while waiting for posts, thus on the Discord server I have created a channel for the ship.

My goal is to have the main story going on with the forum and allow for smaller plays to go on live on Discord, since that is what most people prefer to do. Most smaller stories don’t have to get summarized at all to the forum but we can adjust that as needed. If we find that the channel is used a lot, we’ll make others and make it a category.

We will also be making heavy use of NPC’s during the game, and I’d like to invite players to feel free to create NPC’s for the story.

As a final note, I know this is going to take a bit to pin down into something that really works, I’ve seen a few different methods of doing something like this so we’ll try a few as problems come up and hopefully settle on something that works and everyone is happy with.

June’s Top Contributors

First of all, I would like to start off by thanking our staff members Liz, ks, and t0l for participating in the recent storyline done by Bucket, if even tangentially. I will be posting more about that in an in-character post from the news service.

In addition to the scores posted about previously, since our top spots are entirely staff members right now, we will be adding a new spot for each (forum and wiki) for the top non-staff contributor each, which will be worth 1000 points each.

For Running Plot

Buck Approves#3038 is awarded 1000 guild points to his score for running his plot involving the Vex on Soteria un Blazing Umbra. Thank you Buck, we appreciate it.

For the Wiki

As previously discussed, this is based on the Contribution Scores extension for MediaWiki over the last 30 days.

  1. Cyclops
  2. Red
  3. Darktrooper501

The user Ks0908 is a close 4th place.

The user Spartan889 is the top non-staff contributor to the wiki.

Those users produced a combined score based on number of revisions and new content added to the wiki. We thank them for expanding our collective universe and helping to create a more robust setting.

For the Forum

These are awarded based on replies to threads over the last 30 days and does not take into account new threads started.

  1. Titan Shadow
  2. Red the Heretic
  3. TheChubbyGamer

With a close 4th place of Spartan_889, who is also the recipient of the new non-Staff award for participation and contribution, being the top non-staff contributor on the forum by number of replies.

Thank you all for keeping things going on the forum.

Bonuses and New Leaderboard

  • Titan Shadow#1701 gets 2000 points (1000 for Wiki and 1000 for Forum 1st Place)
  • Red the 15th#2304 gets 1500 points (750 for Wiki and 750 for Forum 2nd Place)
  • Imperatoris Lacerta#8924 gets 1000 points (500 for Wiki and 500 for Forum 3rd Place)
  • Chaos Sorcerer Spartan889#7660 2000 points (1000 for Wiki and 1000 for Wiki Top non-staff Contributor)

New Leaderboard Direct from Tatsumaki

User Score
Imperatoris Lacerta 252032
Titan Shadow 233498
Red the 15th 192832
t0l 155285
ks 153304
The Chubby Gamer, Sloth Boi 144860
Dr. Winterdawn 99202
Thatotakugalaxy 88248
JumpingScript 83913
Buck Approves 79577

Some Notes about Contribution and Participation

While our overall forum participation has gone up as well as wiki contributions, it is still mostly staff doing the role playing. We do like this! However, we’d also like our non-staff members to participate more. Thus, I would like to encourage all Staff members to reach outside of the bubble of other Staff members to new players or even players that have not participated in a a while to see if they’d like to participate in role plays.

We have some superb role players here and everyone has something to contribute to the game. This is why we recently put out our participation survey. This survey is here to help us (me) determine how to better run the server. We’ve got some great responses so far, but there is a lot of talk in the comments about plot and people not feeling like they have anything to contribute or not sure what to do if they do participate.

This is entirely normal! Putting ones self in a position to participate in a plot without the defined structure of a dice-based or video-game-based system is difficult, there are a lot of options. Thus, I would like it if any player unsure what to do would ask, just simply ask for help. I realize that the group has gotten a bit… Well, a bit less-than-supportive as we’ve gotten a core group of role players but we’re working on changing that. I invite anyone who has been here a while but hasn’t played in a while to pop back in and if you’re not sure what you can do or contribute, just ask. If any issues crop up, don’t hesitate to bring them up!

The strength of our community relies on the simple idea that everyone can contribute something and have fun doing so. Not everyone has to get along perfectly, not everyone has to have the same political or religious views, not everyone even has to agree on what morning is. The goal here is to have fun writing stories where the world can turn out better than the one we live in. I personally think that is key to staying sane in the times we live in, where so much is up in the air.

Again, thank you all for your continued contributions and support.