Question Where does Chaos go from here?

[Dorthea Dobson]

'When Tefka saw the breadth of his work, he wept for there were no more issues to conquer."

But well I like the idea of map expansion and adding the satellite galaxies... most of them are there and have nothing in them and only like 2 had worlds known. With an expansion like that maybe a colonies type feature. Where dominions within the secondary galaxies by a major faction are possible allowing them to expand there without being connected since the space in between would be largely blank space.

And I would like to add that this could add something of a “strategic landscape” feel to the map. Like in how IRL warfare is fought around mountain ranges, untravellable seas, isolated continents, etc. Right now, with the exception of the galaxy arms and the space-lanes, the map is a giant oval, and the strategic landscape is defined almost entirely by the shape of the MF clouds in it. Adding satellite galaxies and… (maybe some fancy corridors?) might entice writers to think critically about the environment more.

 

[Tefka]

It’s mostly just self-serving to think mechanically about the map, but I do it too. I have to remind myself occasionally though that our “pvp” system here at Chaos is fake and breathing my usual brand of fire into it can leave a wake of toxic PvP-mindsets and leaders.

Group mechanics, starting with Annihilations and UCs, have been our greatest modern successes at Chaos. I’d rather focus on that than creating new PvP mechanics for a cooperative writing environment, despite my enjoyment of watching MFOs backstab each other.

 

[Dorthea Dobson]

That’s certainly one way of looking at it and you certainly have the experience to project possible outcomes in that way.

But for the sake of discussion, philosophically speaking, anything in the hands of anyone is either a weapon or a tool. Marxism, capitalism, atheism, creationism, (all of the stupid “isms”), can be argued to either save or destroy lives by being in the right or wrong hands. Things like ideas, tools, and words are not inherently corrupt, but the people that implement them can be.

If you throw a stick into a room full of savages, you will likely find at least one that wants to build a cook fire with it, and another that wants to sharpen it into a spear. The thing that I’ve always respected about you, Mr. Tefka , is that you never struck me as the type that was unwilling to throw the stick and see what happens….

 

[Tefka]

Well if you want something to dislike about me, the minute anyone says the M-word I immediately begin making several uneducated and overconfident assumptions about how many parties they avoided growing up so they could message board debate.

 

[Kitter Bitters]

Maybe now is the time to do something big since we are so harmonious. Like a map wipe or a giant story or expanding into the satellite galaxies. Everybody seems to be getting along well enough to have no rp judges and the staff seem pleased with the MFOs so maybe we should focus on something IC since our OOC is solid?

It’s like on the one hand don't rock the boat but on the other hand don’t get stagnant.

 

[Dorthea Dobson]

Well if you want something to dislike about me, the minute anyone says the M-word I immediately begin making several uneducated and overconfident assumptions about how many parties they avoided growing up so they could message board debate.

I meant that as a compliment and as an expression of civility. My tone was meant to be philosophical.

 

[Tefka]

I would say “pleased with the MFOs” is a bit of a stretch lmao. I’m way too experienced at this point to ever be happy with that lot.

Pulling Staff back is more of a response to the community’s demand that we always be accessible 24/7 and the escalating expectations for how we act. We’re just dudes, rpers, writers. It feels to me the virtuous woke people expected flawlessness along the way, rather than the status quo, and pulling the RPJs is me signaling “Cool, idc, figure it out yourselves.” I don’t know where that road takes us, but I do know I’m not spending my time nor my Staff’s time facing an endless barrage of that escalating expectation. When Valiens and I first discussed it, the original proposal was just “no reasoning nor writeup, just declare winner/loser for pvp and move on”. We landed on “force them to sink or swim.”

 

[Tefka]

I went on a tangent there but my official stance is “OOC already takes up too much of our valuable time, rocking the boat is not in the plans.”

 

[Tefka]

I meant that as a compliment and as an expression of civility. My tone was meant to be philosophical.

It’s difficult for me to engage philosophical commentary on a SWRP roleplay forum without being an nerf herder, its a character defect written into my core programming.

 

[Dorthea Dobson]

As I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, my mouth is perfectly engineered to comfortably fit my feet in there, so I appreciate the sentiment.

 

[Gwyneira Vizsla]

Expanding into satellite galaxies sounds like an awesome idea! And detailing areas of the current galaxy left more devoid.

 

[Inanna Harth]

ok yeah I like the map expansion idea

But at the same time it's not something I'd campaign for, just something that sounds like it could be fun.

 

[Vesta]

Expanding the map to maybe include the satellite galaxies (or just straight up expanding the scale of the current galaxy map) or possibly some area/content created by staff and/or the members (like a chaos-canon satellite galaxy) would be super cool. Really anything we have right now I'm pretty content with, but more areas on the physical map would be just about the only thing that comes to mind right now that would require staff to do anything.

 

[Onrai]

Could we maybe have another major event that leads to a near-wipe and frees the map up again? I recall it working rather well before in encouraging activity. If we’re looking to expand the map, maybe into Otherspace? The satellite galaxies come to mind as well. The idea of custom planet creation has somewhat wound down, so opening up areas to the map that have few if any known canonical planets would certainly encourage people to bring their creativity to the front.

Also, could we actually edit our own approved factory subs? Still have a dozen or two that I need to swap pictures out on since the old ones are dead, and if submissions are automatically approved and usable upon being submitted to the factory unless denied, making “approval” approval a formality, would make sense for us to be allowed to update them according to new factory templates, with new pictures, etc.

 

[Tefka]

Just resubmit factory submissions and learn proper versioning. I don’t speak for John and the Factory boys but I can tell you an Admin discussion for removing approvals would go south instantly, so just learn proper versioning is your best bet to take control of the issue from a player’s perspective.

Event that wipes the map… It always gets brought up, I’m always reluctant to even engage. There’s never a good reason to do it. Promotes activity? There’s a thousand things we can do to promote activity, and 999 of them don’t sabotage or wreck ongoing plans and storylines. Even if I just absolutely loathed every faction and the Map game and just had some weird hate boner, it seems like the endgame “wipe the map” is the only reason it would be done. I don’t like doing things for the sake of doing them - if you remember, the one time we did it, we had the community vote like twice on it. It wasn’t just a “Tef wants to do it”, it was a community backed endeavor.

I feel like most people vote wipe the map these days because they don’t like the status quo of cliques and Major Factions, or want more chaos. I back more chaos, I don’t back using Staff to upset the status quo. Y’all can easily form new factions if the effort is really there. There’s been a Galactic Alliance and an Empire for nearly 2 years now, and how many Rebel Factions to oppose them? If I wiped the map it’d just be me telling them to arbitrarily do more dominions. I don’t think they’d find that very fun.

 

[Aether the Iron]

I think a "Season of QoL updates" would do the site good.

Like, the big patch between major expansions that keeps people playing for a long time. I feel like, as a community, that's where we are. We just had major changes to the way PvP is conducted, site culture has been evolving rapidly for the past couple years, and the Underworld update was huge. I think the site's due for a heap of small updates that, cumulatively, improve the experience of the players.

Off the top of my head, I'm thinking greater customization and addressing pain points. For example:

• Adding additional BBCode functionality to the site for posting.
• Adding a mountain of new rank titles and flair options.
• Adding new postbits and the like for players to dump their UC into.
• Slightly adjusting the signature height limit to allow taller graphics.
• More site background options.
• Improvements (if possible) to the registration/email confirmation process.

I think now would be a good time for staff to put their heads together and to pool what "pain points" are received from the members. And what popular requests are that don't involve a constant staff investment. This would be an ideal time for these.

Changes like these, leading up to a map expansion of some kind in the future, strike me as a solid direction forward.

 

[Kitter Bitters]

I feel like most people vote wipe the map these days because they don’t like the status quo of cliques and Major Factions

I think this is the reason, at least for me. Its just so hard to break into some of them where as starting from the ground up maybe you would be able to carve a place for yourself. But honestly we could find a place with a small new faction ‍that is a start from ground up. Don’t really need to be a major one for stories.


Expanding the map probably makes more sense than clearing it. Maybe new factions could then have their own little areas If they go major and do the dominions.

 

[Tefka]

I think a "Season of QoL updates" would do the site good.

Like, the big patch between major expansions that keeps people playing for a long time. I feel like, as a community, that's where we are. We just had major changes to the way PvP is conducted, site culture has been evolving rapidly for the past couple years, and the Underworld update was huge. I think the site's due for a heap of small updates that, cumulatively, improve the experience of the players.

Off the top of my head, I'm thinking greater customization and addressing pain points. For example:

• Adding additional BBCode functionality to the site for posting.
• Adding a mountain of new rank titles and flair options.
• Adding new postbits and the like for players to dump their UC into.
• Slightly adjusting the signature height limit to allow taller graphics.
• More site background options.
• Improvements (if possible) to the registration/email confirmation process.

I think now would be a good time for staff to put their heads together and to pool what "pain points" are received from the members. And what popular requests are that don't involve a constant staff investment. This would be an ideal time for these.

Changes like these, leading up to a map expansion of some kind in the future, strike me as a solid direction forward.

I like this more than the rest, yeah.

 

[Cotan Sar'andor]

Rediscovery of the ancient (read: pre-Gulag Plague) planet-rebuilding terraforming tech that enabled planets like Alderaan to be brought back.

Six months after a planet is successfully annihilated, interested factions can make an announcement of a Rebuilding thread or w/e people want to call the mechanic where they ally together to work to restore a planet to its original state/literally just to existence and put it back on the map game, while opposed faction(s) are able to jump in and try and sabotage the efforts and keep it dead.

Reverse-Annihilation ruleset for more chaos and PvP and stories and stuff.

I'm fully aware that this is a bad idea and I'm dumb, I'm just hoping that by saying it here somebody smarter than me can see something in it that they want to work with and make into an actually-good idea along a similar vein that fits in with the purpose of this thread and spitballing possible new group mechanics and other enhancements for the future of Chaos.

 

[Tefka]

The problem isn’t whether it can be done, but if it’s entertaining. Building is never gonna be as exciting as exploding.