As we're sure you noticed, we implemented an impromptu hiatus over the last couple of months due to general holiday chaos and illness. (Aeryn ended up being sick for the majority of December, on top of dealing with her retail job.) We hope that because of this, you were able to enjoy your holidays and had fun with friends and family. However, now that the holidays are wrapping up, we'd like to get back into the swing of things! Before we do that, we feel that there are some concerns to address as a group so that we can progress and make the most of the game. We apologize in advance, this is probably going to get TL;DR-y.
A lot of what we're going to say all bleeds into one another, but something that we noticed a lot of in 2018 was the amount of hiatuses that were requested. Not only were there a lot of hiatuses, but there were quite a few long hiatuses and a lot of hiatuses that were asked simply at the last minute. Since RP is a collaborative process, it's difficult to progress storylines when the collaboration slows down or becomes stagnant.
This stagnation we feel, however, isn't entirely due to the amount of hiatuses that happened in 2018. We get that hiatuses are needed — Real life is always more important, especially when it comes to work and spending time with your family. As Mods, we've tried to do our best to anticipate the needs of everyone by posting activity checks as close to the beginning of the month so that everyone has the chance to check-in with their activity. That said, we would genuinely like to know if there is anything else we can do to help make the check-in process easier, if that is something that's hampering your RP experience within the group. We'd also like to hear any feedback you have regarding activity checks and the handling of hiatuses. Some of the ideas we've tossed around regarding this issue are:
Quarterly check-ins
Monthly soft check-in - to see who's home, so to speak
Characters you'd like to focus on instead of monthly activity check for all your characters
Personal reminders (do you want us to personally remind you?)
Numerous hiatuses weren't the only aspect that we believe lead to reduced activity. It has been over two years since we instituted delayed time and set the in-game time as July 2016. While we value the group being able to explore stories and develop characters at the leisure of our writers, we agree that this is entirely too long to limit play on one month. Overall, we kind of feel that we've lost active engagement as a group, which has lead to the slow-down of thread progression. Our concern here is the issue of in-game time: How can we can keep the casual pace we need, but still progress toward the next month and not stagnate things? How can we engage you to be more active?
Would you like to see the occasional town-wide plots, mini-plots, or events?
Should we try short-form group event RPs? That is, responses which are much shorter in length, in order to keep the pace moving?
Would you like to try group RPing on the Discord server?
Would you like to see more interactive things such as polls or prompts/memes, etc?
We are currently in the process of revamping our comms and the mod journal, and would love to inject new energy into the game in this new year. To that end, we hope that you all will give us your feedback and ideas, as well as your personal thoughts on what you want from this game. What are the aspects you enjoy? What would you like to focus on? What do you want that you don't currently feel that you're getting from the game?
We will take everything you say into consideration, and are willing to make changes we think would be suitable for the group as a whole. We love the world we've created here, and that includes all of your amazing writing and characters! They make Willow Creek the magical place that it is!
Thank you so much for your feedback and thoughts and we hope you have a great new year!