Community Building and Other Stuff Ahead of Omrazir(!!)

Heyo friends, acquaintances, and nemeses!

Just some general thoughts and recommendations ahead of Omrazir Time (hype!!!):

1. Clarity on queries, petitions, and quick attention requests – It’d be great to have a command to check the status of things pending. Something with admin options to update from “in line” to “working on it” to maybe “on hold for x reason” would be super helpful.

2. Discord for SoA? – I really think it’d be worth revisiting a Discord for the Alpha. The forums are fine, but they make casual conversation and community-building harder. I know managing a Discord in an RP setting has its challenges, but with our current player size, I think it’s worth the risk... and we could always tear it down before Beta. (This opinion is sponsored by Gen Z hatred of forums.)

3. More community-building events? – The showcases are super exciting, so what about a livestream day? Or maybe an Arena Ghost Day where we can dick around in Omrazir OOCly ahead of time? (Big ask, IK.) Basically, just more chances to connect as players would be great.

<3

Yay! I really like these ideas, personally! My own takes, below:

> Clarity on queries and such

Yeah, I've experienced confusion not knowing whether or not something is "ACK'd", essentially, and wondering if I was doing something wrong and should be navigating a situation another way. I also sometimes forget what I've submitted and so a way to view that (and see the status as you suggest) would be awesome.

> Discord

Amusingly, one of the things that attracted me to SoA back when I read the reddit showcase (and again, this as a newbie RPI-mud player and even a newbie RP-mud player) was the lack of a Discord. I've been in other RP communities and the OOC vibes can sometimes get bad, and so I was WAY down with a "We're not here for that" ethos. That being said, as things have slowed down, I do think it'd be nice to have a way to stay in more casual connection with the community. Sometimes I want to just post a silly thought, or say 'hey', but the mental blocker of a forum post or oocmail just to putter around is large.

So, I'd be supportive of Discord while we continue to be in low-pop mode, and then in my opinion it would likely be unnecessary once we reach further stages. (Certainly by Beta, if we as a community wanted to then fully commit to the no-Discord vibes). But I'd love to just hang with the group now and then, and post silly memes! It also might be a good way to arrange for times when people are available given it can sometimes be difficult.

> Community Events

Yes! Any and all? I'm not sure what forms this might take but I did really enjoy pof Ighlaf's "fite me bro" arena times. It'd be fun to do more things like that, maybe to do a community bug bash or something, too!

Thank you for your feedback on this, guys! These are my thoughts currently:

1. Clarity on requests. This definitely does need work, for sure, and on both the staff and player side. It's not always instantly obviously to staff either if someone has submitted a petition or a quick story request, or if one of us is already working on somebody's request, so it's easy to lose track of things. And it would no doubt be super helpful to you guys to have more clarity about what is going on with your requests and why. This is a very legitimate ask.

Right now, I can regretfully inform you a lot of the time there is nothing at all wrong with anybody's request, Pilgrim or I just haven't gotten to it yet. :( P has had a lot of RL stuff keeping them busy, and I will be the first to admit that I myself am not always the best at keeping track of requests, so I am sorry! We are hoping to be able to keep more on top of things and also work in some new request communication tools once we're in alpha-Omrazir, but in the meantime we can only ask (beg, plead) for people's patience.

2. Discord. I appreciate hearing people's honest feelings on this from both sides. I will say that it is very unlikely that we will change our stance on (not) having a Discord channel. However, P and I have discussed creating something more like an old-school chatroom linked to the website, where people can casually log in and out to chat and make comments. This would ideally give people a more casual way to connect and talk without getting as bogged down in the general toxicity of a 24/7 channel, or giving people the feeling that they NEED to be part of the channel in order to be part of the community. Neither P nor I are fans of anything that encourages people to be plugged into a game or virtual community 24/7; balance between game time and RL time has always been a vital consideration in our design of SoA and it will continue to be so.

3. Community-building events. Community building events are great! But I'm almost certainly not going to be doing any "early-access" OOC style events for Omrazir (yes, I know, I am being a real downer in this post). The nebulous region of the Faded Zone starter area aside, I really don't want to be blending OOC activities with IC zones, even as a special event. I would very much prefer for people's first experience of Omrazir to be as "real" as possible, in-character and without the mess and holes of the in-progress version. I feel like anything else cheapens the sense of Omrazir as a living world, and despite the fact that alpha-Omrazir will be rather drab compared to its future development, I still would prefer that people first enter it in-character and in its full-alpha-phase completion at least.

I know people feel like there is more that could be done, both in general and to foster our really awesome and friendly community, and I truly appreciate that there is such enthusiasm around the game still! All I can say in conclusion is that P and I have a TON of work yet to do in the next few months, in addition to continuing to manage real life obligations, illness, and all the other things both P and I (and I'm sure all of us at some point) have been wrestling with. Avaria is very much a labor of love, but there is a lot of the labor involved with the love, and we just try to juggle everything while doing the best that we can.

What helps us out is when players provide a lot of the drive for their own ongoings. Ighlaf is a really great example of this actually with the OOC Arena events as well as a lot of the impetus with events in-game related to painting the clinic. It's especially helpful on the admin workload when these events don't require a lot of oversight and special interaction or extra code. Something like the feast Firouzeh hosted is another great example. Otty has been an absolutely amazing SNPC with organizing mining events, too. There are in-built rewards like Presence for hosting events, but I think the clunkiness of the calendar makes it difficult for players to wrangle, and that's totally my fault.

In the pre-alpha stage it's inevitable that a lot of work needs to be done with the code in order to help these events along (for example, coding new art abilities involving throwing paint, or coding mine timbering) -- but I'm usually happy to work on code like this that helps players run their own events, and can be used more in the future.

Here are some hopeful code things I'd like to everntually add and/or fix that should help with community building in specific:
 

• A chatroom on the website, as Mistsparrow mentioned, for OOC community engagement
• A filter on OOCMail to make them smoother to use/search through, as well as the ability to have mass-OOCMails between multiple people and OOCMail threads so you can view the last reply
• An easily-interactable timeline that shows ongoing plots, both public and private, and allows for the attachment of stories to larger plots and the inquiry of players OOCly being interested in getting into a plot (ideally with coded random events involved, eventually)
• Better calendar use: coordinated forum event posting and rumors in-game with posted events, timezone support, and in-game text views of calendar events
• More built-in rewards and reminders for things like voting for other players, who all you can make relationship developments with, et cetera
• Forum support for organizations in-game, with private boards that also have an IC manifestation in the form of a bulletin wall or a disseminating VNPCGroup
• Maybe the forums being less clunky (I suspect some lag/timeout issues with the database filtering that I have an idea how to fix)
• Automatic, regularly-scheduled events that coordinate with holidays in-game, like obstacle racing courses, minigame tournaments, and so on (think the horseshoe game at the Greyleigh Manor, but held automatically on a festival day, with prizes and announcements for the winners)
• Player positions like SNPCs, eventually, that will be able to have more powers to do things like manage NPCs and deal with some admin tasks like crafting design approvals and so on (we're slow on this because we don't really want to give players too much formal 'work', as we'd like for players to be able to enjoy the story unfolding for themselves and discover the world's mysteries -- this kind of thing would probably be after players had already discovered the world's mysteries on at least one character)
• Opening for an alpha phase that will allow new players to join freely!

• And adding: better clarity on requests/petitions -- this could be served by a tool in the admin panel that just allows a quick comment/status to be set, and the status shown when you check your petitions on the website or in-game via PETITIONS.

Mistsparrow and I have discussed these features/fixes previously, and they're all kind of vaguely considered to be in-the-works, but it's just taken a backseat for me these days. I'd genuinely like to apologize for slacking off so much lately, but if I'm being entirely honest, it's just my personality and I can't really help what hobby I'm obsessing over at any time. I go through phases and then I get distracted by other stuff that I obsess over. That's why when I'm heavily around, there's usually serious hours of development going into the game, and sometimes even hectic and ill-considered mechanics. But despite going through other interests fairly often, I always come back to Avaria because Mistsparrow is a very dear friend, and the dream of this game is something I genuinely love.

Unlike me, thankfully, Mistsparrow is a steady and constant force that will never either slack off (even when super sick!) or produce lore at an inconsiderate rate. And Mistsparrow holds down the fort when my obsession wanes and then makes sure to keep my obsession restrained from ill-considered changes when I'm all-in. And that's pretty much how we've managed to keep working on Avaria for the past several years!

So, TLDR: I know it's rough now, with many of the mechanics that you'd be using to drive your own stories and events not working as fluidly as you might want. But if you want more of these sorts of events, it'd help us out a lot if you made them. 

I don't typically do a lot of weighing in on things here but wanted to add my 2c:

Discord and forums are mutually exclusive in my experience. Once there is a discord, ALL discussion happens there, and none happens on the forums. All the valuable information and discussion is lost forever to the ether because of this. Yes I am aware of discord's "forum" features, but I have been around for a while and people simply do not use these features in the same way as forums unless heavily policed to do so by mods. The discussion of the topic will take place in #general, and no one will ever think to copy it over/write a post about it, and the discussion will be scrolled and lost. The time and effort required to moderate severely enough to make sure discussions go into forum threads would take away a large portion of MistSparrow and Pilgrim's available time to work on the game itself.

For this reason as well as for the reasons MistSparrow talked about, I am 100% in favor of not having a discord server, and like tpb Yasin I consider it a major feature that this game doesn't have one. The necessity of joining a game's discord is a huge negative to me in other games; I have tried playing a game recently which assumes you will be in their discord server, and I did not want to do so. That game is almost unplayable without discord, because all of their guides are in the discord server rather than in the game or on the website, and although there is technically an in-game help channel, no one responds to queries made there, again because everyone assumes that every player will be in the discord and will ask their questions via that venue. I do not believe that the game intended this situation, but over time it has obviously developed that way and now the backlog of work to transfer all the guides to the website and/or the game is too great.

Speaking of OOC chat rooms and community-building events, while I do enjoy the idea of an in-website chat room, we could use arena characters as a "chat room" of sorts in the meantime if we wanted to run some kind of event together OOCly. It could take the form of eg playing pictionary or amongus or even some of the jackbox games that don't require voice or something else via a shared games website, or even could literally stay on the server by doing things like playing charades using emotes with arena characters.

Things like book/movie/cooking/etc clubs are also lots of fun and do not require synchronicity, and can be done via the forums easily, if anyone was interested. Just pick a book or a movie (or a recipe to cook or a scavenger hunt to go on etc) and read it within X time frame and discuss on forums.

I will conclude with a big thank you to MistSparrow and Pilgrim for all their hard work, and a cheer of excitement for the upcoming new content, especially Omrazir which looks incredible so far. :)

Love the engagement on this topic!

There's a lot said up above so I'll just chime in on a few random points.

First, looooooooove all of the mechanical suggestions around engagement that you listed, pilgrim. Definitely anything to help organize IC events (the organization ideas like private boards ICly or a VNPCGroup are ~FUN~ to imagine). And a huge +1 on the timeline idea, I think that'd be a great mechanism for players who aren't sure how to involve themselves in ongoing plot/story to do so.

I do want to acknowledge the sentiment that I gathered from pof Firouzeh's post, though, which is that I think in our current "state" it can be easy to feel a bit disconnected. I imagine that we've all felt it to a varying degree. My somewhat "double-sided" opinion on the discord really is informed by this current state of affaris, where the population of regulars is what it is, the pace is slower, etc. Once we navigate into open alpha and we have new players joining again, I imagine activity in general will increase which would alleviate the "need" (using quotes on purpose) for such a mechanism (and in that case, I suspect even the web chat experience would not be as necessary?)

There are a lot of good suggestions from pof Otty on alternative (non-Discordy!) ways to alleviate that. I will commit to noodling on some player-run things to organize, and I like the idea of in general some more chatter on the forums, and maybe some hangout sessions in the arena where people just vibe.

As a closing, I think it goes without saying that we are all super excited for the "journey forward" to alpha; I know I'm not speaking only for myself when I say we've been incredibly hyped for MistSparrow's Omrazir "teaser" posts (I have yet to reply to the great thread pof Marwa started because I, too, am a SLACKER, but I can't wait to sink my teeth into the Pillar of Tongues! ...hated that phrase, leaving it anyway for amusement), and I can't wait for the next Omrazir showcase reveal :D So of course, to add on to pof Otty, a huge thank you to MistSparrow and Pilgrim, I hope this discussion in no way takes away from our excitement as players!

Cheers,
pof Yasin

Thank you for the time and thought y’all put into these responses. There are so many fantastic ideas for upcoming mechanics and community engagement here. <3

I hope y’all know these suggestions come from a place of love and excitement... not just for this new phase of exploration in Omrazir, but also for welcoming a new wave of folks once applications open again. Admittedly, to Yasin's point, I’ve felt a little disconnected on a systemic level, which def shapes how I approached this post. That being said, I’d never discount all the incredible work being done mechanically and with lore. I’ve dipped my toes into another RPI recently and pretty often find myself thinking, "Wow, I wish this worked like it does in SoA."