Hi everyone,
Let me first apologize for my absence over the past weeks. Skyrim, Thanksgiving, getting extremely sick
after Thanksgiving, a busy month at work and ultimately the Christmas holiday have all conspired to keep me away. To be totally honest, there was more than a little burnout affecting me as well. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I didn't want to come back, but during my time off the boards I did some serious thinking about my expectations for Intelser and the current state of the forums.
I realized a few things that I needed to take action on.
- First, I was on the edge of hitting a serious burnout with the game. Back in September, at the time thinking that I had disentangled myself from the FGC campaign, I launched a new project in the form of the Intelser Adventurer's Guild. Of course, you all know what happened next: I ended up running two high-maintenance, high-involvement games. We've seen where that goes before, and unfortunately I just don't have the time for that sort of committment. This ties into the second point.
- Second, my inability to keep bailing out the proverbial lifeboat was killing the FGC campaign. Through a series of decisions that I take full responsibility for our membership has steadily shrunk to the point where the game itself is not really sustainable. The Turning Points project was designed as a short-term solution but its not sustainable. FGC needs a major refresh and frankly a serious rebranding if its going to survive.
- Third, the forums themselves are a mess. They're becoming a wasteland of abandoned games and dozens of folders, many of which aren't being used. This looks unprofessional and it just makes the forums that much less accessible for potential new players.
So what's going to happen?
First, a major administrative cleanup is going to happen. The impact of this on most of you is going to be minimal - you'll see a lot of the custom titles associated with user groups going away and the number of visible boards will be getting reduced. I won't be deleting anything, but many resources are going to be put in inactive archives for now.
Second, I'm going to be upgrading the boards to a newer version of SMF. The short-term effect of this will be that you'll see some features
temporarily disappearing, but they'll be getting replaced. I'll also be deleting a lot of inactive accounts. The database is clogged up with spammers and its high time to get them off the books.
Third, and this is the big one, my two active projects: FGC and Adventurer's Guild are going to start changing. FGC is going to be getting a major reboot-and-rebrand* and the Adventurer's Guild is either going to be substantially restructured or its going to have to go away. I'm not doing anyone a service by keeping these games on life support as they are now because they aren't living up to their potential and they are badly in need of changes.
As long as there is interest and the reboot isn't ready to go yet, I'll be keeping FGC running at least in a low-key mode to facilitate gaming and to avoid freezing out the community. AG, unfortunately, is going to have to be suspended until I can determine what its ultimate fate is going to be. The play-by-post format was an interesting experiment but it just isn't working.
Assuming everything works out perfectly, my goal would be to have the FGC Reboot rules ready by the end of the month, and then transitioning to the new campaign by the start of March or April.
Next week I will be on vacation from work and I expect to be available for extended periods of time on Skype if anyone wants to talk with me about future plans.
You should start seeing the first parts of the process - the board and infrastructure changes - over the next couple of days.
*For the record, when I say "reboot" I'm not so much speaking of dumping the entire setting as I am making a lot of directed structural changes to make the game more playable. This isn't a complete departure from what I had been planning anyway and had expanded upon in the FGC OOC area last fall, just implemented faster and a bit more agressively.
The first two stages of the infrastructure updates are complete. The forum structure has been consolidated and upgrade to the latest version of SMF.
Testing...
[roll]2d6[/roll]
OK, looks like some of the features (including the die roller) are not currently working. These will be re-installed in the next day or two.
Test 2
[blockquote]Rolled 2d6 : 6, 1, total 7[/blockquote]
Testing media integration
Fus Ro Dah Sparta (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qWnrqqdy-Q#)
I put some pretty pictures on the landing page at http://www.intelser.org/ (http://www.intelser.org/)
Just a quick FYI to everyone, the flashpoint and FGC orders email boxes are being taken offline tonight for archiving as they have grown quite large. They will not be reactivated right away; once the reboot happens, a new mailbox will be set up. Also, any inactive vanity accounts will be deleted at this time. If you had a vanity account before and want to reactivate it, just let me know.
Just an FYI folks, I have gone ahead and locked the FC62 wiki to prevent all outside editing. Removal of the unwanted headings and cleaning of the user list will commence when time permits, but for now the wiki will remain accessible in read-only mode. Preliminary review suggests that other than the main page the articles themselves were left alone and were intact. I will be installing a new wiki instance for the reboot that will be someone more tightly controlled in terms of access rights.