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tushanshu_ooc2014-02-14 11:01 pm
ironwood) wrote in tushanshu_ooc2014-02-14 11:01 pm
Entry tags:
State of the Shell | Game Developments
'Lo, Chelonauts!
Tu Shanshu has officially hit its year-and-a-half marker! For those of you just joining us, when we hit certain milestones we put up posts of this nature to announce changes to the game and invite feedback from our members.
Our biggest changes rolling in this time around are to our Activity Check and our App Format, as well as to the overall tone and pace of the game. We're also delighted to announce the incorporation of a new gameplay element, Missions, which will greatly expand players' ability to interact with many worldbuilding elements of the game. Finally, we are also pleased to introduce our newest members of the app team!
NEW APP MODS
It's time to say goodbye to our lovely app mods, Chel and Claire! They will of course be remaining in the game, but their time as app mods has come to a close. Marie has decided to stay on to help our new team out, which leads me to the drumroll portion of this announcement...
Carolyn and Eri will be coming onboard with our app team! Give a big round of applause for these ladies, they'll be helping out for the next four months!
SUITABILITY SECTION
Our app format is being tweaked! Instead of the 'reaction to Tu Shanshu' section, we are going to instead include a Suitability section. The two things may seem interchangeable at first glance, but this new section is going to be designed to ask how a character will adapt, change and assist the world of Konryu in Tu Shanshu's final year. This section will have an important impact on the overall acceptance of the application. The new app format can be found here and we will grandfather apps written in the old format until March 1st, after that point the new format will be required.
UPDATED REQUIREMENTS
Our AC is going to be restructured in some new and exciting ways that we hope can accommodate our players in Tu Shanshu's final year of its life cycle.
We are going to be shifting our focus away from logs and network posts and onto threads, with the overall comment requirement of 20 comments by your character remaining the same. Comments are able to be counted from up to four threads per AC, with reaction spam comments (like 1/4... etc) only counting as one reply. The standing rule of being unable to use the same character for a sole comment count across multiple months (as outlined on the Gameplay post) remains unchanged, as does threads from IC inboxes not being usable.
In the instance of closed logs (or locked network posts with no public content), please note that only one thread from these entries qualifies for the AC's overall comment count, including the entry itself. For example, if you make a log locked to two people that accumulates one thread with 10 comments and a second thread with 10 comments, you can only use one of them rather than the whole post counting as the required 20 comments. However if the same post were to have two people reply but one of the threads hit 20 comments by that character in itself including the entry as a "starter comment", that could be used. This is to prevent people from submitting a closed log with three tags and having a technical 'pass'. Again, this only applies to closed logs that limit the number of participants; multiple threads from public network posts or from open/catch-all logs can be used towards the 20 comment quota.
To summarize:
• 20 comments across a maximum of 4 threads
• on a locked post or closed log, the entry counts as the "starting" comment and only 1 thread is eligible
• open posts and logs/catch-alls are exempt from the 1 thread per post
These changes will be going into effect starting March 1st (to be used for the first time on the AC posted April 1st) with requirements for February's AC (posted Mar 1st) remaining on the former system. (We're not switching the AC format halfway through the month, so the AC that goes up in 2 weeks is still 1 post/log OR 20 comments as it had been.)
ADDITIONAL FOCUS
We are also going to be tightening our focus and attention on people who are regularly making only bare minimum AC, take strategic hiatus exemptions, or who we notice happen to consistently hold up plots or threads beyond what is reasonable. As this becomes a visible issue, we will be speaking to the players in question to rectify the situation.
GAMEPLAY ATMOSPHERE & EVENT CALENDAR
I'm sure you guys are all excited to know that OPTION C WON our voting poll! As noted in the voting post, the tone of Tu Shanshu is going to transition towards a darker overall theme relating to Malicant's growing influence and the steps taken to resist this. This does not mean the game will become grimdark or all-out survival/horror. The core themes of the game revolve around hope and change, embodied in the baby turtles, and that theme is what will carry the game on to its resolution. However, some tonal tweaks are necessary to drive home the severity of the threat posed by Malicant, and we will announce these changes as they become necessary.
Due to the malleable nature of the coming months we are no longer going to be updating the event calendar three months in advance. Instead, to allow for a greater scope of influence accomplished by the missions and character actions, we will be updating the calendar on a monthly basis. This is to promote flexibility and hopefully a greater sense of being able to impact the game, as missions (see below) will change the course of what's coming, for better or in some cases – worse.
Additionally, due to the strong showing of preference for option A in second place during our poll, we have elected to incorporate an element of that option into our overall changes in order to best represent the greatest majority of what our players would like to see. We believe this will give players the widest range of ways to interact with the setting as well as an additional way to create more varied CR opportunities.
GAME CHANGES
The Police Academy will be opened to the foreigner population for the first time in memory! Evandau will be overseeing admittance into the Academy and eventually the force (with a three month turnover time due to the Malicant's pressing influence) and will accept candidates over the age of seventeen, which is the majority age in pre-Keeliai law. There will also be an increased police and military presence in the city. Crime will become more sophisticated and complicated, gangs will move into more 'white collar' industries, and more and more kedan will be 'disappearing', either killed in altercations or recruited to Malicant's cause, although these will remain unsubstantiated rumour.
There will be checkpoints at every major city gate between the Sectors, and characters will be required to have a passport with them at all times. Of course, those that can fly or otherwise avoid detection are free to do so, but there will be consequences if they're caught.
The city is safe, for now. But there are whispers about it being merely the calm before the storm.
The heightened NPC involvement promised in option C will come in the form of solely mod-planned missions per month. At the beginning of each month, an OOC post will go up where players can sign their characters up for missions, and we will be asking for the preferred nature of this mission so that we can work with each player individually to craft something for them to do that is both interesting and engaging. As this is a rather large undertaking, it is very important that communication be clear and effective and that everyone is being met halfway.
These missions, which require between two and five character volunteers and will be decided by RNG lottery, will be announced by one of the in-game NPCs and will have a strong focus on combating Malicant's cause with an equal chance of success or failure. These undertakings are not all combat related! They might be diplomatic, exploratory, investigative, or even goodwill related so that characters of all walks of life can have equal input and impact on the overall plot. In addition, Evandau, Eva, or an as-yet-unnamed NPC will accompany these teams into the field and will provide limited oversight during the mission (limited so as not to leave people hanging and waiting on NPC tags in the event of mods being busy, etc) and will have impacts across the game. It is strongly recommended that players form off into pairs or trios during the course of these missions in an attempt to expedite the threading process.
In addition, we encourage players who want to create a mission for their characters that isn't pre-supplied as these can and will still have plot impacting elements, so don't think that the mod-guided ones are the only way to discover more about Konryu!
The sign-up window for missions (both mod planned and player generated) will be in the first week of every month only, though the missions can be undertaken at any time in that month once approved. After that window is up, you'll have to wait until the next month's plotting post goes up before you take a crack at it.
MISSION CREDITS
Missions can either be handwaved or threaded out, a handwaved mission will result in a half-credit, and a threaded mission (minimum of ten comments per your character) will result in a full credit. Credits can be cashed in for goodies, with greater rewards being offered for a greater sum of points. (ie: if you log five missions over a five month period, you will have five credits to bank, if you log three missions and handwave two you will have four credits, etc.)
Credits can be exchanged for IC favours with Evandau or from Eva, and we will strongly consider anything you would like to see for your character at this time! Examples of such rewards might be items with magical properties, monetary compensation or special possessions, access to plot development information, etc. We would really like this to be a viable reward system for players to take advantage of, so we welcome any and all input on this.
For organization purposes we are going to be adding an 'extra credit' section to the monthly Activity Check that is separate and unrelated to the revised pass/fail requirements, which will result in IC incentives (of your OOC choice) to be handed out to characters for the completion of missions.
---
As always, we value your thoughts and feedback and are here to answer any questions you might have!
Tu Shanshu has officially hit its year-and-a-half marker! For those of you just joining us, when we hit certain milestones we put up posts of this nature to announce changes to the game and invite feedback from our members.
Our biggest changes rolling in this time around are to our Activity Check and our App Format, as well as to the overall tone and pace of the game. We're also delighted to announce the incorporation of a new gameplay element, Missions, which will greatly expand players' ability to interact with many worldbuilding elements of the game. Finally, we are also pleased to introduce our newest members of the app team!
NEW APP MODS & FORMAT CHANGES
NEW APP MODS
It's time to say goodbye to our lovely app mods, Chel and Claire! They will of course be remaining in the game, but their time as app mods has come to a close. Marie has decided to stay on to help our new team out, which leads me to the drumroll portion of this announcement...
Carolyn and Eri will be coming onboard with our app team! Give a big round of applause for these ladies, they'll be helping out for the next four months!
SUITABILITY SECTION
Our app format is being tweaked! Instead of the 'reaction to Tu Shanshu' section, we are going to instead include a Suitability section. The two things may seem interchangeable at first glance, but this new section is going to be designed to ask how a character will adapt, change and assist the world of Konryu in Tu Shanshu's final year. This section will have an important impact on the overall acceptance of the application. The new app format can be found here and we will grandfather apps written in the old format until March 1st, after that point the new format will be required.
ACTIVITY CHECK CHANGES
UPDATED REQUIREMENTS
Our AC is going to be restructured in some new and exciting ways that we hope can accommodate our players in Tu Shanshu's final year of its life cycle.
We are going to be shifting our focus away from logs and network posts and onto threads, with the overall comment requirement of 20 comments by your character remaining the same. Comments are able to be counted from up to four threads per AC, with reaction spam comments (like 1/4... etc) only counting as one reply. The standing rule of being unable to use the same character for a sole comment count across multiple months (as outlined on the Gameplay post) remains unchanged, as does threads from IC inboxes not being usable.
In the instance of closed logs (or locked network posts with no public content), please note that only one thread from these entries qualifies for the AC's overall comment count, including the entry itself. For example, if you make a log locked to two people that accumulates one thread with 10 comments and a second thread with 10 comments, you can only use one of them rather than the whole post counting as the required 20 comments. However if the same post were to have two people reply but one of the threads hit 20 comments by that character in itself including the entry as a "starter comment", that could be used. This is to prevent people from submitting a closed log with three tags and having a technical 'pass'. Again, this only applies to closed logs that limit the number of participants; multiple threads from public network posts or from open/catch-all logs can be used towards the 20 comment quota.
To summarize:
• 20 comments across a maximum of 4 threads
• on a locked post or closed log, the entry counts as the "starting" comment and only 1 thread is eligible
• open posts and logs/catch-alls are exempt from the 1 thread per post
These changes will be going into effect starting March 1st (to be used for the first time on the AC posted April 1st) with requirements for February's AC (posted Mar 1st) remaining on the former system. (We're not switching the AC format halfway through the month, so the AC that goes up in 2 weeks is still 1 post/log OR 20 comments as it had been.)
ADDITIONAL FOCUS
We are also going to be tightening our focus and attention on people who are regularly making only bare minimum AC, take strategic hiatus exemptions, or who we notice happen to consistently hold up plots or threads beyond what is reasonable. As this becomes a visible issue, we will be speaking to the players in question to rectify the situation.
TONE & GAME CHANGING ADVANCEMENTS
GAMEPLAY ATMOSPHERE & EVENT CALENDAR
I'm sure you guys are all excited to know that OPTION C WON our voting poll! As noted in the voting post, the tone of Tu Shanshu is going to transition towards a darker overall theme relating to Malicant's growing influence and the steps taken to resist this. This does not mean the game will become grimdark or all-out survival/horror. The core themes of the game revolve around hope and change, embodied in the baby turtles, and that theme is what will carry the game on to its resolution. However, some tonal tweaks are necessary to drive home the severity of the threat posed by Malicant, and we will announce these changes as they become necessary.
Due to the malleable nature of the coming months we are no longer going to be updating the event calendar three months in advance. Instead, to allow for a greater scope of influence accomplished by the missions and character actions, we will be updating the calendar on a monthly basis. This is to promote flexibility and hopefully a greater sense of being able to impact the game, as missions (see below) will change the course of what's coming, for better or in some cases – worse.
Additionally, due to the strong showing of preference for option A in second place during our poll, we have elected to incorporate an element of that option into our overall changes in order to best represent the greatest majority of what our players would like to see. We believe this will give players the widest range of ways to interact with the setting as well as an additional way to create more varied CR opportunities.
GAME CHANGES
The Police Academy will be opened to the foreigner population for the first time in memory! Evandau will be overseeing admittance into the Academy and eventually the force (with a three month turnover time due to the Malicant's pressing influence) and will accept candidates over the age of seventeen, which is the majority age in pre-Keeliai law. There will also be an increased police and military presence in the city. Crime will become more sophisticated and complicated, gangs will move into more 'white collar' industries, and more and more kedan will be 'disappearing', either killed in altercations or recruited to Malicant's cause, although these will remain unsubstantiated rumour.
There will be checkpoints at every major city gate between the Sectors, and characters will be required to have a passport with them at all times. Of course, those that can fly or otherwise avoid detection are free to do so, but there will be consequences if they're caught.
The city is safe, for now. But there are whispers about it being merely the calm before the storm.
MISSIONS
The heightened NPC involvement promised in option C will come in the form of solely mod-planned missions per month. At the beginning of each month, an OOC post will go up where players can sign their characters up for missions, and we will be asking for the preferred nature of this mission so that we can work with each player individually to craft something for them to do that is both interesting and engaging. As this is a rather large undertaking, it is very important that communication be clear and effective and that everyone is being met halfway.
These missions, which require between two and five character volunteers and will be decided by RNG lottery, will be announced by one of the in-game NPCs and will have a strong focus on combating Malicant's cause with an equal chance of success or failure. These undertakings are not all combat related! They might be diplomatic, exploratory, investigative, or even goodwill related so that characters of all walks of life can have equal input and impact on the overall plot. In addition, Evandau, Eva, or an as-yet-unnamed NPC will accompany these teams into the field and will provide limited oversight during the mission (limited so as not to leave people hanging and waiting on NPC tags in the event of mods being busy, etc) and will have impacts across the game. It is strongly recommended that players form off into pairs or trios during the course of these missions in an attempt to expedite the threading process.
In addition, we encourage players who want to create a mission for their characters that isn't pre-supplied as these can and will still have plot impacting elements, so don't think that the mod-guided ones are the only way to discover more about Konryu!
The sign-up window for missions (both mod planned and player generated) will be in the first week of every month only, though the missions can be undertaken at any time in that month once approved. After that window is up, you'll have to wait until the next month's plotting post goes up before you take a crack at it.
MISSION CREDITS
Missions can either be handwaved or threaded out, a handwaved mission will result in a half-credit, and a threaded mission (minimum of ten comments per your character) will result in a full credit. Credits can be cashed in for goodies, with greater rewards being offered for a greater sum of points. (ie: if you log five missions over a five month period, you will have five credits to bank, if you log three missions and handwave two you will have four credits, etc.)
Credits can be exchanged for IC favours with Evandau or from Eva, and we will strongly consider anything you would like to see for your character at this time! Examples of such rewards might be items with magical properties, monetary compensation or special possessions, access to plot development information, etc. We would really like this to be a viable reward system for players to take advantage of, so we welcome any and all input on this.
For organization purposes we are going to be adding an 'extra credit' section to the monthly Activity Check that is separate and unrelated to the revised pass/fail requirements, which will result in IC incentives (of your OOC choice) to be handed out to characters for the completion of missions.
---
As always, we value your thoughts and feedback and are here to answer any questions you might have!
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We definitely don't want to penalize players who (myself included) find it easier to do a mass log for the month to avoid clutter in the comms!
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Obviously, this rules out Zatanna and Midii, but for Aya...when they say seventeen, do you mean physical/mental age, or actual age (which, in her case, would be 1)?
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For example and I hope you don't mind that I dug through some of your threading for references, in December you tagged this post on Dec 7th with 15 comments and this post on Dec 8th with 6 comments, totaling 21. In just two days, you started enough interaction to have passed you for the whole of December under this new system.
eta: omg I'm so sorry for the edits I can't spell for beans today
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I find a lot of the time my comment count is actually stopped and doesn't continue due to other characters and it feels like this change shifts the focus of the AC by the player themselves onto other players.
I know I won't really struggle much with Kon (even though I don't always make the 20 comments needed with him either and if I do it's always with the same characters which I wouldn't be able to use all the time, which not bothered by due to it being a rule already in force). I know that I will struggle with Dinin and Kurt however. I just think that as a player that doesn't have popular characters and loads of CR with everyone, that it's a little unfair taking away a source of AC I know I can use to actually pass. I know I'm not the only one that feels this way, (and I do understand the change in order to stop people scraping by by just tossing up a post) but I also know nothing that's said is really going to change anything. But I just wanted to voice the fact that I'm not actually happy with the change as a player in the game, who knows they're now going to struggle (not every month but enough that I'm worried and disappointed because I shouldn't be worried/stressed about RP). I know this is also sounding a lot like 'wah wah wah' but eh, I don't want to just sit back without actually saying something.
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I agree with your observation that the direction of this AC is to generate more CR between players as opposed to resting on an individual poster. In fact that's exactly right, that IS the purpose here because games like TuShan need that inter-connectivity to really get the most out of them. The point of having a very in depth setting like this one is to explore it with other characters and to do that you need to interact with them.
But I don't see how that success is going to be limited to, as you say, only players that "are popular IC or OOC". It might mean that you (a general you, not a specific you) have to tag out onto other people's posts in addition to having your own, but that's the point of roleplaying.
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I was thinking about apping in an OC, but won't be any more because of this change. It means that activity no longer depends on how many comments I do, but how many people actually respond enough for me to have long threads. With a small/unknown canon character or OC, this can be really hard because people have a tendency to not tag those kinds of characters as much as characters they know.
It's putting a pressure on interactions that has the potential to make the game harder for certain players.
I do understand the reasoning behind the changes, but I feel it hasn't taken into account those players and characters that are active but do not receive as much attention as those popular characters or those in large casts. Short of bringing back posts as a form of making AC, could it not be allowed that people provide proof from more than 4 posts?
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The thing with characters is that they don't come with pre-written CR success or failure. I'm just going to draw a little on my own time playing here, but when I app'd Jack I had no idea he'd be able to build so many relationships. Being a LCW and from at that time, a brand new canon, I would never have in a million years have guessed his posts would regularly break 100+ comments. Yet when I app'd Raven, I thought she'd do really well here. Even from being an animated DC character, I felt that there was a huge pool of ready-made CR for me to tap into because of the large DC cast and yet I struggled to keep a lot of threads going with her, which really surprised me.
My point is that no one should assume their character is going to have easy to get CR or hard to get CR, until they try with them. I would love to see new OCs in the game, and I don't think you should shoot down the idea of apping one preemptively.
As for allowing to take threads from more than four sources, that's actually the highest that I've ever seen for comment-based AC requirements. This doesn't preclude the possibility of us looking at it again in another few months but we're going off the people who have been using this system as part of the existing AC check, this isn't something new. Let's start with that and give it a few months, see how it goes?