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intothepines2017-07-20 05:59 pm
officialnotice) wrote in intothepines2017-07-20 05:59 pm
Entry tags:
state of the game
Hey, Pinecones. Trace here, making this post after a lot of deliberation and with a heavy heart. We as a mod team have always done our best to be open and transparent with our playerbase, so we're bringing this to you despite not yet having a solid game plan or solution.
The problem: The mod team that we've had over the last couple of months have, despite their best efforts, not had the time or energy available to devote to the actual running of a game. While we had more than enough manpower to maintain pages, I've been soloing anything and everything plot-related for lack of any other teammates who felt equipped or comfortable handling that high-pressure task. For a while, this was difficult but ultimately sustainable, but the sheer quantity of work involved in turning over to Arc II largely by myself finally burnt me out altogether.
I can't keep doing this. I knew that I wouldn't be able to keep doing this when I put out a call for mod volunteers for the third month in a row, but unfortunately, the volunteers we received would only be able to do the same sort of work my current co-mods are able to do, and not the kind of work necessary to take the brunt of the game's weight off of me a little.
The solution(s): I don't know. Realistically, I can see a couple of possibilities.
The first possibility is that I hand the game over to volunteers in full. I'm not sure which of the team would stay on if this were the case — I know Mel is on her way out too, for similar reasons. I'd give you everything I have re: the future of this game, all plot ideas, all spoilers and world-building.
Frankly, this option isn't likely to succeed for a number of reasons. For one, any volunteers to run the game likely would have similarly volunteered to help run it over the last few months of urgent requests for co-mod volunteers, so I'm not terribly confident that anyone will step forward on this. Secondly, in the name of transparency: We may have already lost too much momentum for the game to recover. A large percentage of our playerbase has already bowed out, and a new mod team would need to troubleshoot how to pull out of this particular nose-dive or they'd just be flying this plane straight into the ground.
That being said, this game means a lot to quite a few people and I don't want to up and close the game down without doing what I can to work through a solution first.
The second possibility is to close down the game. This is not something I suggest lightly, but I've been fighting the necessity of this option for months now and the alternatives keep falling through.
This shut-down wouldn't necessarily have to be permanent. I just need a break, just a couple of months to reclaim some semblance of a healthy mental state, and if I were able to gather a sufficient mod team in that amount of time to run the game smoothly with the heavy lifting able to be divided equally between two or more mods, we could potentially reopen sometime this fall. This is not a for-sure by any means, and it's not something I'll actively pursue unless I feel like I'm in a place where I can take on this kind of responsibility again.
The third possibility is not one I'm very thrilled with, but it's only fair that I present it: The game could turn into a musebox, where characters are able to play within the setting unsupervised. This is not ideal, simply because it would be impossible to maintain any semblance of the current world-building progression we've set into place. Players would essentially be 'winging it' plot-wise from here on out, making up what exists outside of the fence and NPCing the town for themselves. Not an ideal outcome for such a plot-heavy game, but a possibility if this is what the majority of players would prefer.
I'm also open to discuss any possibilities not mentioned here! This isn't an official vote of any kind, but rather, a way to discuss with our core playerbase what the best possible outcome might be for the game as a whole.
Go ahead and leave your feedback here or in the relevant Plurk. And from the bottom of my heart, I'm so sorry for all of this.
The problem: The mod team that we've had over the last couple of months have, despite their best efforts, not had the time or energy available to devote to the actual running of a game. While we had more than enough manpower to maintain pages, I've been soloing anything and everything plot-related for lack of any other teammates who felt equipped or comfortable handling that high-pressure task. For a while, this was difficult but ultimately sustainable, but the sheer quantity of work involved in turning over to Arc II largely by myself finally burnt me out altogether.
I can't keep doing this. I knew that I wouldn't be able to keep doing this when I put out a call for mod volunteers for the third month in a row, but unfortunately, the volunteers we received would only be able to do the same sort of work my current co-mods are able to do, and not the kind of work necessary to take the brunt of the game's weight off of me a little.
The solution(s): I don't know. Realistically, I can see a couple of possibilities.
The first possibility is that I hand the game over to volunteers in full. I'm not sure which of the team would stay on if this were the case — I know Mel is on her way out too, for similar reasons. I'd give you everything I have re: the future of this game, all plot ideas, all spoilers and world-building.
Frankly, this option isn't likely to succeed for a number of reasons. For one, any volunteers to run the game likely would have similarly volunteered to help run it over the last few months of urgent requests for co-mod volunteers, so I'm not terribly confident that anyone will step forward on this. Secondly, in the name of transparency: We may have already lost too much momentum for the game to recover. A large percentage of our playerbase has already bowed out, and a new mod team would need to troubleshoot how to pull out of this particular nose-dive or they'd just be flying this plane straight into the ground.
That being said, this game means a lot to quite a few people and I don't want to up and close the game down without doing what I can to work through a solution first.
The second possibility is to close down the game. This is not something I suggest lightly, but I've been fighting the necessity of this option for months now and the alternatives keep falling through.
This shut-down wouldn't necessarily have to be permanent. I just need a break, just a couple of months to reclaim some semblance of a healthy mental state, and if I were able to gather a sufficient mod team in that amount of time to run the game smoothly with the heavy lifting able to be divided equally between two or more mods, we could potentially reopen sometime this fall. This is not a for-sure by any means, and it's not something I'll actively pursue unless I feel like I'm in a place where I can take on this kind of responsibility again.
The third possibility is not one I'm very thrilled with, but it's only fair that I present it: The game could turn into a musebox, where characters are able to play within the setting unsupervised. This is not ideal, simply because it would be impossible to maintain any semblance of the current world-building progression we've set into place. Players would essentially be 'winging it' plot-wise from here on out, making up what exists outside of the fence and NPCing the town for themselves. Not an ideal outcome for such a plot-heavy game, but a possibility if this is what the majority of players would prefer.
I'm also open to discuss any possibilities not mentioned here! This isn't an official vote of any kind, but rather, a way to discuss with our core playerbase what the best possible outcome might be for the game as a whole.
Go ahead and leave your feedback here or in the relevant Plurk. And from the bottom of my heart, I'm so sorry for all of this.