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!state of the rp

Congratulations! Doorway is three years old! It’s been quite a journey and I know we can honestly say we’ve never been in a game like this with a community this big that's gone so hard for so long (?). So party hats all around, Doorway is old enough for pre-school!

We had a few things to go over at the anniversary.


MCU Canon integrations

As of now we have also been AU from the MCU continuity for nearly a year and a half, which is more than half of our runtime as a game. That means as we have gone forward that integrations have become trickier to implement. While the MCU stays static between films, seasons, and episodes, and we are constantly evolving media-based, player- and mod-driven, and outside comic-based original plots on a monthly basis. Add in the fact that the MCU has radially exploded since the beginning of the game and we’ve been trying to keep up best we can but there is simply so much that at times it can be convoluted.

So we’re at a little bit of an impasse. Integrations based on character-centric arcs (such as Iron Man 3, Spider-man, Daredevil, or like Jessica Jones would be) have been run with mixed results depending on the property and players involved, but don't tend to be as successful as larger scale integrations that allow for fights and missions for agencies like SHIELD, SWORD, the Avengers, or the RTSF. However, of the dozen odd integrations we've run over the past three years (Seriously: Iron Man 3, Dark World, AoS seasons 1-2a, Winter Soldier, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Daredevil, Age of Ultron, Ant-Man, and the Fantastic Four, plus original plots like Agent of Nothing, Phoenix Project, and the White Event), we've definitely taken on a lot of constructive criticism and really feel that the strength and reach of integrations has improved as we progress..

Integrations are usually fairly popular plots, even if all players aren't necessarily 100% familiar with characters or plotlines. However, they take a tremendous amount of work to successfully write, and expand to include as many characters as possible given how large the game is. And often just as much work to run during integration.

Essentially, in the case of some fandoms, such as Agents of SHIELD, we have to admit that we are not going the same direction as the series SHIELD in the series due to decisions that were made during the 6 month hiatus between season for characters and plotlines. But we don't want the fact that the path might differ interfere with peoples' abilities to play these characters sooner rather than later.

This has led to some changes, such as moving Ant-Man to the East Coast to facilitate integration of Scott Lang or other characters into the Avengers when someone does express interest, but could also take the form of altered origin stories for characters such as Isabelle Hartley, or Inhuman or SHIELD agent characters currently portrayed on Season 2B & 3 of Agents of SHIELD (or other open MCU characters). We're more than happy to work with you guys and help figure out a way for bringing in more minute MCU characters, but will ask if you do want one that you talk to us about ideas you might have for bringing them in in a way other than.

Jessica Jones

Additionally, while it's still in the two week holds freeze currently, at the moment we are considering running with the plot of Jessica Jones as read. This will hopefully avoid potentially triggering lines and largely individual plots by characters not on the network. But also means that characters can be integrated in sooner.

Hopefully future characters can be introduced in a similar way that wouldn’t necessarily translate well to a large gamewide integration as they have a more personal plot.

Future Integrations and YOU

So we don't have any large pending integrations planned between now and Civil War at the end of next spring. This does leave a little bit of a vacancy to explore more original MCU villain origins, Inhumans, and adaptations of 616 villains, or Tesseract villains and things that you guys might want to see.

We are always available to work with you if you have an idea you might like to see happen, particularly if it's an idea that can extend beyond your character's immediate fandom/group/etc. You can contact us through the dropbox or our email with as much or as little as you have, and while it might take a month or two to get onto the plot calendar, we're fairly confident we can get something to work :)

So if you have ideas for action or social plots, we don't bite probably!

Activity Check

We also wanted to discuss making some changes to activity check. Activity is always a contentious issue and honestly it’s a pretty stressful time of the month going through everyone’s posts while writing the plot calendar, maintaining our game documents and lists, and keeping up our adds schedule.

What we want to do is change the cut off. While you will still be able to post your activity on the post until the third, only posts from the activity month in question will be allowed. So if the post is in September (1st - 30th), it would counts for activity for September whereas under the current system, activity between September 1st - October 3rd counts and there's a weird overlap on the first three days of the month that people have accidentally double counted pieces before.

Now we understand life always comes first and we are pretty open when it comes to hiatus’ and working with people when they have issues with activity. But given that we have such a high character limit now with people regularly maintaining it, we're pretty confident that this shouldn't be a problem for nearly everyone.

But first and foremost, we want everyone to have fun here and at some point that has to include us. This really feels like something that would alleviate a mountain of stress on our end/start of the month workload. Unless people had strong objections, This would go into effect starting with activity for December's Activity check (December 28th - January 3rd). So we aren't changing the game with a week left in November.

So there's basically an impromptu State of the RP. We've still got a thriving and energetic game and we have you guys to thank for the creativity, enthusiasm, and willingness to tag along you've all shown for the past three years and let's hope we can keep this ball rolling!