Awards & Prizes

Minty Jade (AKA That Otaku Galaxy) who plays Drem, Nicole, and many others participated in our NaNoWriMo contest; for which I am very grateful. Since it was only myself and her who contributed, she is the top contributor to the story and has thus been awarded her $25 gift card from Amazon. A heartfelt thanks goes out to @jade for adding her flare to the story, which I will be continuing after finals week is over.

For a while now I’ve been doing participation awards, those people who contribute the most, I believe, deserve to be recognized.  However, recently those participating have all been staff members, and I believe that we should focus on non-staff members for such awards.  It isn’t that I don’t appreciate our staff, I truly do, however the idea is to draw people to participate and contribute which staff members usually do anyway.

Whether it is due to multiple languishing storylines or due to everyone being busy with school, work, and/or life the server has seen a drastic dive in the amount of activity.  I am not very concerned with this, activity comes and goes and while I hope things don’t die off, if they do they do.  I wouldn’t be the first time I had to rework things and start again.

That all being said, my contribution / participation recognition has not gone as well as I’d hoped and I am actively looking for other options to accomplish that goal!  Please feel free to contact me with any ideas on how to increase participation, and such awards are on hold until I figure out a different way to do things.

NaNoWriMo Contest Results

This year I did something I’ve thought about doing for a while and opened up a new thread and a challenge.  That is, I wanted the server to write a novel!  There have been other crowd-sourced projects like this, my favorite (and perhaps the most funny) was put on by a guy named Brian Brushwood and was to troll the novel 50 Shades of Gray.  It’s a hilarious idea, while I didn’t want to troll anyone, I’ve seen first hand how creative everyone is.  To give some incentive, I said I would pay money to the top two contributors to the thread (excluding myself of course).  The thread can be read here.  While I do plan on continuing the thread with anyone who wants to participate, I was disappointed in the number of people who took me up on the offer.

Of course, Minty Jade (AKA That Otaku Galaxy) who plays Drem, Nicole, and many others did participate; for which I am very grateful.  Since it was only myself and her who contributed, she is the top contributor to the story and has thus been awarded her $25 gift card from Amazon.  A heartfelt thanks goes out to @jade for adding her flare to the story, which I will be continuing after finals week is over.

Moving Forward

I talk a lot about moving forward, I want to find out what everyone thinks we should do to increase our activity.  We’ve had some new players join, which I hope that they submit characters, and I know it is pretty standard on Discord to join a server and forget about it.  I’d like to try and refocus our strategy, we’ve got a lot of members, and it’s clear that our core people (staff mostly) play really well together.  I ask that everyone try to do a story with someone they don’t play with often, time permitting of course.  The more people we have playing the richer and more developed the setting and its history will become.

Thank you to everyone; happy gaming.

Contribution Awards

Once again, it has come time for our contribution awards.  I have been largely absent from the server recently, for a number of reasons.  I am pleased to pass out recognition to our players for their contributions this month.

Server Contributions

Our top 3 contributors to the server this month are:

  • Dr. Winterdawn
  • Minty.__.Jade
  • Cyber ★

Thank you to each of you for keeping things alive!

Forum Contributions

The top 3 forum contributors are:

Thank you to all of you who keep the forum going!

Wiki Contributions

This month we only have 2 non-staff contributors to the Wiki, so here they are:

Thank you to both of you for enriching our collective role playing world.

Storyline Awards

The following people are getting recognition for running plot lines this month:

  • Cyber ★
  • Archer Red the 15th
  • ks
  • Chaos Sorcerer Spartan889
  • Buckethead

The above people have been running plots through the month of October, in particularly, Chaos has turned a character introduction into several successful threads on the forum, something which I heartily congratulate.

Final Awards

So our final award tallies are as follows:

  • Chaos Sorcerer Spartan889 gets 2000 points
  • Cyber ★ gets 1500 points
  • Dr. Winterdawn gets 1500 points
  • Minty.__.Jade gets 1250 points
  • Archer Red the 15th gets 1000 points
  • Buckethead gets 1000 points
  • ks gets 1000 points
  • AscendingCanadian gets 750 points

New Score Board

darktrooper501374964
Archer Red the 15th318872
Uther Tibbs261116
ks174654
The Chubby Gamer161909
Buckethead148479
Dr. Winterdawn119531
Minty.__.Jade109540
JumpingScript89322
Cyber ★64592

Thank you, again, to everyone for all of your contributions to the game, keep it up.

Contribution Awards for September, 2018

The server runs on stories and without them it dies, the fact that we’re still around into our 3rd year is proof of the creativity of everyone here.

We’ve seen a lot of increased activity in the last half of September, something for which I’m very happy.  We just had our elections for staff members, in case anyone missed it.  Before I announce the winners of each contribution awards, I’d like to point out that some of our highest contributors are of course the Staff members, particularly our Moderators.  Even with the new activity from Staff, we should all be striving to involve anyone and everyone who wants to play.  I would like Staff members of all kinds to consider seeking out and checking in with players who have not posted in a while to see if they’d like to join in.  We have a lot of very creative people out there who sometimes don’t know what to contribute or don’t really know that something is going on.

Players who have been fixtures of our server for a long time such as Haladur, Left4Cake, Chanree, and Rain Lily are exceedingly good role players (as is most everyone who is on the server) and it wouldn’t hurt anyone to just drop a DM or a ping at one of them to see if they’d like to join in.  Our new faces such as Chaos Spartan and Ascending Canadian are prolific on the Forum and collaboration with them on that medium is certainly encouraged.  Our new player katteé is also quite good and I’d love to see more of what they have to offer.

Without further ado…

Contributions for the Discord Server

Our top contributors on the Discord Server (excluding Staff) are:

  • Dr. Winterdawn#8966 (Awarded 1000 Points)
  • 🍃💎Minty Jade💎🍃#8682 (Awarded 750 Points)
  • Cyber ★#2063 (Awarded 500 Points)

Congratulations, and thank you for all that you do.

Contributions for the Wiki Site

Our top contributors for the Wiki Site (excluding Staff) are:

  • Spartan889 (Awarded 1000 Points)
  • Carl C. (Awarded 750 Points)
  • Dr. Winterdawn (Awarded 500 Points)

The Wiki contributions are something that I especially appreciate, these are how we store a good chunk of our site’s past, through the character bios and technology descriptions that get entered and never go away.  This is one of the biggest reasons why I don’t delete old characters and the like.

Contributions for the Forum

Our top contributors of replies on the Forum (excluding Staff) are:

The forum has always been a special place to me, forums contain so much more of the role play and story that goes on than a chat site, even one as awesome and amazing as Discord.

Contributions to Plot Lines

The server runs on stories and without them it dies, the fact that we’re still around into our 3rd year is proof of the creativity of everyone here.  Sadly my school schedule (and that of others) has restricted some of our major plot lines from moving forward as fast (or at all) as I’d like them to.  As such we do a special thank-you to those who have continued to run significant plots or assisted in keeping plots going, for those our Staff is included in the awards.

  • Cyber ★#2063 (Awarded 1000 Points for Ongoing Plot)
  • AscendingCanadian#4800 (Awarded 500 Points for Plot Assist)

Final Tallies

So, finally, we come to how much everyone gets in total:

  • Chaos Sorcerer Spartan889#7660 (2000 Total Points Awarded)
  • AscendingCanadian#4800 (2000 Total Points Awarded)
  • Dr. Winterdawn#8966 (1500 Total Points Awarded)
  • Cyber ★#2063 (1500 Total Points Awarded)
  • 🍃💎Minty Jade💎🍃#8682 (750 Total Points Awarded)
  • Left4Cake#6713 (500 Total Points Awarded)

So, the new scoreboard looks like this:

Imperatoris Lacerta343398
Red the 15th281639
Uther Tibbs255097
ks171187
The Chubby Gamer158592
Buckethead129726
Dr. Winterdawn113945
🍃💎Minty Jade💎🍃103790
JumpingScript88471
Cyber ★56955

As usual, thank you to everyone for continuing to play in my game.  I enjoy reading your stories and writing with you all.

Play on!

Participation Awards for August 2018

Another month has passed and again we come to awarding those who have kept the creative light burning. In August we saw a good increase in our third-party plots being run by others when we opened up our Wordpress site to be used by anyone. In that we’d like to give special thanks to Tim, Liz, KS, and Bucket who all kept everyone up to date on what’s going on currently – thank you.

Another month has passed and again we come to awarding those who have kept the creative light burning.  In August we saw a good increase in our third-party plots being run by others when we opened up our WordPress site to be used by anyone.  In that we’d like to give special thanks to Tim, Liz, KS, and Bucket who all kept everyone up to date on what’s going on currently — thank you.

As a sad note, one of our long-time players have left the game.  School has started for many of us (myself included) and as such it has become increasingly difficult to find time for many to role play.  That makes this list especially heart-felt from myself in particular, since it shows people who continue to participate and keep the server alive.  Our fellow player, writer, and friend t0l has left the game, however, and while he has said that he will be back some day we all know that things don’t always go as planned.  His character Tal Ravis was not only central to many of the plots that took place but was also a refreshing take on a soldier with a gritty realism that highlighted the talent and skill of his player in bringing the character to life.  T0l had the unique ability to write both long-form of several paragraphs even several pages in a sitting and short-form keeping things brief and to the point, to suit the role play situation he found himself in.   I hope that we get the opportunity to read his writing again.

Forum Participation

On the forum, counting by number of replies posted over the last month we have the following:

We thank them for their help in keeping things moving!

Wiki Participation

The Wiki site is really one of the biggest assets of our entire game.  It stores all of our in-game information and really makes it a lot more accessible for everyone to play in.  The participation scores for our Wiki users are:

  • Darktrooper501
  • T0l
  • Dr. Winterdawn

Now, sadly t0l has left the server and as such we cannot really award points to him, but a hearty thank-you goes out to him none-the-less for his extensive contributions to the Wiki and the game as a whole.  Since staff is not counted when giving out these awards, the 30-day list doesn’t have enough listed for Wiki participation to replace t0l, but since we can’t award him I’ll look into the top contributors of all time, which shows us that Ryu ketsueki (formerly Lilac) receives recognition for his contributions to the sum of knowledge stored for our game.

Plot Awards

As usual we are also awarding special points for running plots.  Bucket deserves a lot of points for his multiple parts taken in multiple plot lines.  He played the majority of the roles in a lot of the recent plots, especially that involving the Operation Gray Angel and the corresponding Operation Succubus, playing both sides of the fence effectively well.  For this he gets an addition 1000 points.  Tim is also awarded with 500 points for his continued help in pushing along our political pressure / racial tensions arc.  Along those same lines, Liz gains also an additional 500 points for his creation of the entirely new character and broadcast, he did an absolutely superb job with it!

Final Awards

  • Imperatoris Lacerta#8924
    • 1000 each for both the Forum and the Wiki
    • 500 for Plot Awards
  • Buckethead#3038
    • 750 for participation on the Forum
    • 1000 for Plot Awards
  • Left4Cake#6713
    • 500 for participation on the Forum
  • Dr. Winterdawn#8966
    • 750 for participation on the Wiki
  • HaruyamaX5#0002
    • 500 for participation on the Wiki (see note above)
  • timot1066#8017
    • 500 for Plot Awards

New Top 10

So here are the new score tallies after awarding points.  This will also be the final entry which lists t0l as a member.

UserScore
Imperatoris Lacerta311682
Uther Tibbs249093
Red the 15th243671
ks167603
t0l158699
The Chubby Gamer, Sloth Boi155986
Buckethead110151
Dr. Winterdawn109135
🍃💎Minty Jade💎🍃98184
JumpingScript87965

Thanks again to all of our players for keeping the server alive.

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

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.

Contest – Sexiest Ship

So we’re doing a contest to decide on the sexiest ship. The winner of the contest, the person who submitted the ship that is voted to be sexiest, will get the opportunity to write a plot line where a character of their choice gets to obtain that ship. Of course, standard caveats apply to maintain balance of power in the game. If, for whatever reason, the ship is in the game already or impossible to add the award will be discussed with the player and a suitable replacement will be agreed upon.

Submissions will end Monday the 4th by 5pm Eastern US Time. Right now we have 6 submissions pinned in the media channel on Discord. Once 5pm hits on the 4th, we will open a poll for users to vote on what they believe the sexist of the presented ships are.

Ships must be starships of at least 100 meters in length or a crew of at least 100 people.

May’s Top Contributors

Here are the top contributors for May 2018.

Forum

  • Titan Shadow (64 Replies)
  • Buckethead (38 Replies)
  • Red_the_heretic (32 Replies)

Wiki

Contribution Score combines new pages with revisions.

  • Cyclope (Contribution Score 93)
  • Darktrooper501 (Contribution Score 29)
  • Neo Akazuli (Contribution Score 15)

Awards

  • Titan Shadow#1701 gets 2000 Guild Points
  • Buck Approves#3038 gets 750 Guild Points
  • darktrooper501#8924 gets 750 Guild Points
  • Red the 15th#2304 gets 500 Guild Points
  • JumpingScript#4310 gets 500 Guild Points

New Top Guild Scores

New scores directly from Tatsumaki:

User Score
darktrooper 224033
Titan Shadow 220951
Red the 15th 165881
t0l 151836
ks 146883
The Chubby Gamer, Sloth Boi 138390
Dr. Winterdawn 96528
(Thatotakugalaxy) Jade 83808
JumpingScript 80865
Buck Approves 71531

Thank you for all the help everyone!