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.
