Hello everyone. I wanted to address the current Board Battle rules, and the pace of the current Epic Board Battle.
The current rules were put in place post-Eye of Terror, because I believe that for people to be adequately invested in the story/boards, the main plot needs to move forward at a semi-reasonable pace. During the Eye of Terror we would often only have one post every few months at best from the Battle Host, and we saw a number of people drop off the boards during this time - I believe the two were related. The Board Battle is a tandem story, and meant to be a collaborative thing: if one person is holding everyone else up, then that isn't fair on everyone else and makes them feel disengaged. The situation was made worse by the fact that there was also no effective way to deal with a situation where the Administrator is the one holding things up.
I felt it was necessary to basically come up with a way of enforcing a "at least once a month" posting schedule for the Battle Host (and the same for all the players). That's effectively what the current rules are asking people to do.
Let's fast forward to now.
Previously I've been chasing people up to post, but to be honest that's really something the Battle Host should be doing mostly, not just me. After Veldanya's post in June I let things play out to see what would happen.
Between Veldanya's last post and the one before, we had a 3 month gap.
Other than myself, everyone took more than 1 month to reply to the post.
If we'd followed the rules (which we didn't), the following would have happened:
- Every player (except mine in this case) would have had their character god-modded by myself or Veldanya, and would have been put on 'Probation' (so they would have had to post within 3 weeks after Veldanya's next post
- I would have stepped in after 1 month had passed to God-mod the Battle Host
- If I didn't step up and do the above within 1 week, anyone could God-mod the Battle Host
Of course, this would be a bit of a ridiculous situation - it most likely would have meant that Veldanya or myself would have had to God-mod 75% of the active players.
Vedanya has made it clear to me in a private conversation that they have a lot of stress on them at the moment, so the Board Battles are low on their list of priorities, and the current inactive battle rules just feel like an additional deadline/stress for them on top of everything else. This is fair enough. However, they have also made it clear they do not want to hand off posting responsibilities to someone else, as they understandably want to see their own plot-line through.
This leaves us, one again, in a very similar situation as we had during The Eye of Terror, which is a situation I personally am not keen to repeat.
So, an open question to both players and Battle Host: what do we do about it? I'm open to ideas, but here are some of my own. Most are not mutually exclusive:
a) Relax the rules. Let things play out as they do. The purpose of the rules was to "make the board battles fun again(tm)" by making sure people actually posted, not to stress everyone out and make them miserable.
- Personally I don't like this idea, as I do firmly believe the slump in interest directly corresponds to a lack of posting.
b) Give Veldanya a hospital pass on the rules, given their difficult circumstances, for a timeframe they propose. During this time hosting duties won't be given to anyone else and Veldanya can post as little (or as much) as they want. Agreement to this would be by majority vote in a hidden poll. Once the time is up they'll let us know if they need it extended further, and we vote again. I'll add such an option to the rules for the future.
- I think this is a fair option and workable given the number of active players we have. This is a collaborative thing, so people should have their say, and it also means we have an option that will give Veldanya the breathing room they need right now.
c) Change the rules so that the Battle Host doesn't have to post within 1 month of their own last post, but rather within either 1 month of their own last post or within [timeframe] of the last PLAYER'S post, whichever is longer.
- This reduces the stress on the Battle Host if people drag their feet with posting - which has been happening regularly. The longer [timeframe] is, the less stress is on the Battle Host. On the other hand, it also results in slow-posting players possibly leading to an even longer month gap between Battle Host posts, which gets worse the longer that [timeframe] is. While I can see some benefit to this rule (having myself had a couple of occasions where people only post a day or so before my own 'host deadline' was up), it does reduce the pace further.
d) Since Veldanya has other priorities, I make it my job to remind people to post. If they've posted, I'll probably start bothering people to get their posts up within a couple of weeks or so (please let me know the best way to contact you so I can do this).
- This places more responsibility and work on me, but I'm not under as much stress as Veldanya right now.
e) I enforce the players' side of the rules myself and will god-mod people that take more than 1 month to post from Veldanya's post. This is so that when Veldanya DOES want to post, they don't run into a situation where there are still other peoples' posts pending.
- Again this places more responsibility and work on me, but I'm not under as much stress as Veldanya right now.
or, the option that IS mutually exclusive with (a), (b) and (c):
f) I enforce the rules as written for everyone.
- This would certainly ensure better pace, but based on my observations of the last set of posts, would make this a one-man show, with me basically posting for everyone, which isn't really what this is all about. Not my favourite option.
I'd like everyone's opinions on the above and any other ideas that you may have. Once I've got everyone's feedback we'll decide how to proceed.
