Post by Wolfe on Nov 3, 2020 23:19:57 GMT -5
Okay, this is a giant update basically so I’m going to break it up and talk about one thing at a time. One thing I do want to say is thank you to Kitten4u and Serpentarius for their help with all of this. None of this would have been possible without their assistance, and I am eternally grateful for their help in this major overhaul.
The first and most obvious change is the skin, which Kitten4u has decided to make that fixes all of the bugs that were present in the original skin as well as being a lot more convenient, at least on my end due to things like Private Messages/Notifications not being hidden anymore. The old skin is still available to those who prefer that, but the new skin will be the new default and will be have active development in terms of bugfixes. If you find something that doesn’t work or is hard to read/interact with or your template broke, please reach out so we can document it and get it fixed if we can. We’ve been trying to test it for the past week and have uncovered some bugs and Kitten has been kind enough to fix those, but frankly we don’t go to every thread on site and see every template/interaction.
The second change is the complete overhaul of the events system. The long form explanation can be found right at this link for those interested but I want to talk about why this overhaul happened in this announcement thread because I think context is important.
This site has run for a surprisingly long time with DM-style events with me running a lot of threads for basically everyone on the site every few months. I haven’t been able to do that myself for a good six months now, and efforts at bringing in other people to run some threads have not worked out for one reason or another. Events were stalling much more than usual, and some threads never even got completed. While I was open at not being able to step in and salvage threads due to lack of time due to being in final semester of grad school/job hunt mode, the fact of the matter is that the Vytal Festival did not live up to the hype and that was ultimately my fault for letting it happen in the first place.
The old system always carried a risk, with my decreased ability to do threads for every PC, that a mid-stream event death would happen again. The way that event ended was obviously a huge disappointment for all of us, and an overhaul was necessary to make sure it never happened again. The new model of event will be much more frequent, running basically all the time with only small breaks in between. There will be roughly one a month, lasting for an entire month with three-day periods between DM posts.
You are under no expectation to post in every round, and can happily just do one or two cycles out of the month when you can without disrupting the flow of the event as long as that is communicated. The first site event will be the White Nights Festival in the capital that is meant as a low stakes test of the system that will be linked in the discord and also here when it’s posted up a little bit later on.
EDIT 11/05/20: As compensation to those who spent EP in the last system, there is a one-time refund of 150 of the 250XP invested via that format if you had spent EP to unlock a B rank skill in the past.
The third change is factions and how we’ll be handling those. Basically, we haven’t had a lot of success with factions in the past. That may not change moving forward, but I did want to give tangible goals to work towards and allow people to build up their groups from scratch. These changes are explained in the new event doc, and basically you’ll use event currency to level up your faction over time.
The TL;DR on those is basically you’ll use the event currency for three things – the first is experience, which is just a conversion from the new event currency to XP just like we’re used to. The second is using them for what we’re calling Renown Skills which come in three flavors: Individual, Group, and Faction. We’re using the noncombat XP progression system here, so half normal cost.
Individual is your character being known for a skill like Lebron is known for being a basketball god. People will listen to you, and you can use your pull in events/securing income/social settings because in your field people respect based on your rank. At first rank you might be the best ball player and famous on your city block, and at max rank you’re a global icon and people from Vale send you DMs asking for you to mail your autograph.
The next categories are Organizations and Factions, and the distinction is simple. A faction can send an armed group of angry people to kick down your door and Organizations can’t. Organizations have no hard power and no ability to wage war on their own, and rely on soft power and influence to accomplish goals. When you piss off Schnee Dust, you get a law suit not an aircraft carrier blasting your house. They’re a huge corporation, but they will never have an army. A Faction is a group that doesn’t have businesses or money-making built in, but does have a door kicking force able to exert physical influence over an area via beating up people who don’t want them there.
High levels of organization let you grow your business to be the Schnee Dust Company where gain enough soft power to extort governments with armies that rely on your product to do what you want. High levels of factions aim to take over the government with the army, or simply create their own autonomous structure where they are the government and the army. It’s basically a decision as to whether at S rank you want to become Schnee Dust or the Council.
Participate in events -> Gain event currency -> Spend event currency on group -> Get other people to spend their event currency on group -> Become big and strong.
The introduction of a new system where people can get groups and stuff like that a year and a half into the site lifecycle is a major change, and some characters have participated in a lot of events during that time. To compensate for that partially, I am going to do a one time bonus to characters who are past certain experience thresholds. This isn’t a perfect solution, but I’m not going to individually track which characters went to which events and track them through the multitude of XP transfers that have happened since February of 2019.
You will get roughly 50-90 event currency per event depending on activity and what actions you take, so everyone on the site starts with 50. 50 is enough to make a fledgling group or get an individual Renown Skill at F rank. Every tier you are above that threshold, you get 100RP because to get to that tier there’s no way you didn’t participate in at least one event along the way. Just post in your progression thread linking to this thread with the RP you’re owed and we’ll go from there.
The fourth major change is experience multipliers. Basically, events and mini-events won’t be double XP anymore since they’ll run almost all the time. Storyteller bonuses are also gone given that the new system doesn’t require them to post enough to get any real XP from it as well. Events will now grant 150% XP in addition to the new event currency, and many of the smaller modifiers that were conditional for certain threads or never used (like the IC Chat Event XP bonus, which was used once and never again) were also removed due to being obsolete.
So yeah! There's also a ton of smaller changes like the Roster having sick new art and coding, along with a bunch of other smaller upgrades that will be present throughout the site (like your profile and the mini-profiles, check 'em out). Any glitches/typos/suggestions will be very appreciated because we did our best to get this live early to quality test everything before the new season of RWBY started. It's almost the time of the year where we get our influx of people, and I wanted something to make them go holy shit when they searched for a RWBY site to join after watching the first episode and getting hyped.
Well, this is the holy shit. Thanks to everyone for being a part of it and here's to cruising to our two year mark in February before we know it.
The first and most obvious change is the skin, which Kitten4u has decided to make that fixes all of the bugs that were present in the original skin as well as being a lot more convenient, at least on my end due to things like Private Messages/Notifications not being hidden anymore. The old skin is still available to those who prefer that, but the new skin will be the new default and will be have active development in terms of bugfixes. If you find something that doesn’t work or is hard to read/interact with or your template broke, please reach out so we can document it and get it fixed if we can. We’ve been trying to test it for the past week and have uncovered some bugs and Kitten has been kind enough to fix those, but frankly we don’t go to every thread on site and see every template/interaction.
The second change is the complete overhaul of the events system. The long form explanation can be found right at this link for those interested but I want to talk about why this overhaul happened in this announcement thread because I think context is important.
This site has run for a surprisingly long time with DM-style events with me running a lot of threads for basically everyone on the site every few months. I haven’t been able to do that myself for a good six months now, and efforts at bringing in other people to run some threads have not worked out for one reason or another. Events were stalling much more than usual, and some threads never even got completed. While I was open at not being able to step in and salvage threads due to lack of time due to being in final semester of grad school/job hunt mode, the fact of the matter is that the Vytal Festival did not live up to the hype and that was ultimately my fault for letting it happen in the first place.
The old system always carried a risk, with my decreased ability to do threads for every PC, that a mid-stream event death would happen again. The way that event ended was obviously a huge disappointment for all of us, and an overhaul was necessary to make sure it never happened again. The new model of event will be much more frequent, running basically all the time with only small breaks in between. There will be roughly one a month, lasting for an entire month with three-day periods between DM posts.
You are under no expectation to post in every round, and can happily just do one or two cycles out of the month when you can without disrupting the flow of the event as long as that is communicated. The first site event will be the White Nights Festival in the capital that is meant as a low stakes test of the system that will be linked in the discord and also here when it’s posted up a little bit later on.
EDIT 11/05/20: As compensation to those who spent EP in the last system, there is a one-time refund of 150 of the 250XP invested via that format if you had spent EP to unlock a B rank skill in the past.
The third change is factions and how we’ll be handling those. Basically, we haven’t had a lot of success with factions in the past. That may not change moving forward, but I did want to give tangible goals to work towards and allow people to build up their groups from scratch. These changes are explained in the new event doc, and basically you’ll use event currency to level up your faction over time.
The TL;DR on those is basically you’ll use the event currency for three things – the first is experience, which is just a conversion from the new event currency to XP just like we’re used to. The second is using them for what we’re calling Renown Skills which come in three flavors: Individual, Group, and Faction. We’re using the noncombat XP progression system here, so half normal cost.
Individual is your character being known for a skill like Lebron is known for being a basketball god. People will listen to you, and you can use your pull in events/securing income/social settings because in your field people respect based on your rank. At first rank you might be the best ball player and famous on your city block, and at max rank you’re a global icon and people from Vale send you DMs asking for you to mail your autograph.
The next categories are Organizations and Factions, and the distinction is simple. A faction can send an armed group of angry people to kick down your door and Organizations can’t. Organizations have no hard power and no ability to wage war on their own, and rely on soft power and influence to accomplish goals. When you piss off Schnee Dust, you get a law suit not an aircraft carrier blasting your house. They’re a huge corporation, but they will never have an army. A Faction is a group that doesn’t have businesses or money-making built in, but does have a door kicking force able to exert physical influence over an area via beating up people who don’t want them there.
High levels of organization let you grow your business to be the Schnee Dust Company where gain enough soft power to extort governments with armies that rely on your product to do what you want. High levels of factions aim to take over the government with the army, or simply create their own autonomous structure where they are the government and the army. It’s basically a decision as to whether at S rank you want to become Schnee Dust or the Council.
Participate in events -> Gain event currency -> Spend event currency on group -> Get other people to spend their event currency on group -> Become big and strong.
The introduction of a new system where people can get groups and stuff like that a year and a half into the site lifecycle is a major change, and some characters have participated in a lot of events during that time. To compensate for that partially, I am going to do a one time bonus to characters who are past certain experience thresholds. This isn’t a perfect solution, but I’m not going to individually track which characters went to which events and track them through the multitude of XP transfers that have happened since February of 2019.
You will get roughly 50-90 event currency per event depending on activity and what actions you take, so everyone on the site starts with 50. 50 is enough to make a fledgling group or get an individual Renown Skill at F rank. Every tier you are above that threshold, you get 100RP because to get to that tier there’s no way you didn’t participate in at least one event along the way. Just post in your progression thread linking to this thread with the RP you’re owed and we’ll go from there.
[attr=class,basictable]
| Current Tier | Benefit |
|---|---|
| Freshman | 50RP |
| Sophomore | 150RP |
| Senior | 250RP |
| Huntsman | 350RP |
The fourth major change is experience multipliers. Basically, events and mini-events won’t be double XP anymore since they’ll run almost all the time. Storyteller bonuses are also gone given that the new system doesn’t require them to post enough to get any real XP from it as well. Events will now grant 150% XP in addition to the new event currency, and many of the smaller modifiers that were conditional for certain threads or never used (like the IC Chat Event XP bonus, which was used once and never again) were also removed due to being obsolete.
So yeah! There's also a ton of smaller changes like the Roster having sick new art and coding, along with a bunch of other smaller upgrades that will be present throughout the site (like your profile and the mini-profiles, check 'em out). Any glitches/typos/suggestions will be very appreciated because we did our best to get this live early to quality test everything before the new season of RWBY started. It's almost the time of the year where we get our influx of people, and I wanted something to make them go holy shit when they searched for a RWBY site to join after watching the first episode and getting hyped.
Well, this is the holy shit. Thanks to everyone for being a part of it and here's to cruising to our two year mark in February before we know it.