Activity Check Results / HMD

[lucetimods]

The results for the Activity Check are in. Please note that the following characters were either inactive, didn't post to the activity check, or failed to speak to a moderator about their activity. Also added were characters who have dropped recently, for your convenience.

Copy-paste the following here:

manage_circle del_read aero_dienamic manage_circle del_read amoreless manage_circle del_read fortherefreshments manage_circle del_read fullofhotaer manage_circle del_read hegemonic manage_circle del_read helltogether manage_circle del_read nocorsetsplease manage_circle del_read not_a_hero manage_circle del_read restazured manage_circle del_read seethrul manage_circle del_read selfdoubt manage_circle del_read tempts manage_circle del_read moezama manage_circle del_read hachikuji manage_circle del_read haveiliedtoyou manage_circle del_read ctrlaltdemons manage_circle del_read grumbling manage_circle del_read avaricious manage_circle del_read biteoffherhead manage_circle del_read honestapples manage_circle del_read see_wolf_run manage_circle del_read pantheraleo manage_circle del_read pherae_hope manage_circle del_read redhotmama manage_circle del_read selphie_t manage_circle del_read canterlock manage_circle del_read broji manage_circle del_read ivanyouidiot manage_circle del_read thestormishere manage_circle del_read theogre manage_circle del_read rageface manage_circle del_read sorethroat manage_circle del_read notimmortal manage_circle del_read talontrot manage_circle del_read infinitetime manage_circle del_read psichic manage_circle del_read samehere manage_circle del_read trustable manage_circle del_read deadpoet manage_circle del_read gomugomunopwn manage_circle del_read howsmashing manage_circle del_read barsburg manage_circle del_read dickmoves manage_circle del_read alkahestrykunais

A number of you passed the activity check, but barely. (You know who you are.) Try to pick things up, as it's no fun to character-squat.

If there are any mistakes here, please let us know! Additionally, if your character was removed and you're still active, feel free to appeal to one of us about keeping your character. However, please remember next time to stay active and post to the Activity Check. Thank you!

And as always:

HMD

How's My Driving?

This is a crit post for both the community and game and for your characters. If you have something you'd like to see us improve upon with the game, PLEASE TELL US HERE! Anon commenting is on, but if anything gets really nasty there will be warnings and thread-freezing. This isn't required but everyone is encouraged to take advantage of the advice of your fellow players!

Just some pointers: no taking cheap shots, no dragging personal issues into things and for the love of all that is wise and great, please double check your replies and comments before posting them. Sometimes a change in phrasing can make all the difference between a helpful tone and a condescending one.

ALSO: We'd like to clarify that HMD means HMD- which means it's okay to have both good and bad crit. Some people have expressed concerns about posting good/bad crit when a character already has bad/good crit posted. We'd like to encourage you guys to do it anyway! You can drive well or badly, and even good drivers make mistakes. So give it a try \o

ALSO ALSO: This cycle's Test Drive Meme is up :B Go use it or something.

Comments

[lucetimods]

1. I wasn't aware that IP logging was even an issue. I've removed it from the mod journal, so it should be turned off in future posts.

2. Getting kind of weary of addressing this issue over and over, so let me see if I can lay it out in a way that helps everyone understand the process.

The activity check has three options: a) you pass without a problem; b) you pass with mod approval, and c) you don't pass. Every AC, the vast majority of players pass without issue. But every AC we get roughly 20-30 players who don't have enough qualifying activity. A few of these players just forgot to comment to the hiatus post, so they would have passed, we just didn't know about their hiatus because it wasn't official. This issue is corrected when they contact us.

When a player doesn't have enough activity or a hiatus to justify it, we ask for more activity. This is where additional threads get involved. This is when players get to say (again, when they contact us), "I am playing in x other threads, this month has been slow, life happened, etc." It doesn't mean your character is immediately booted from the game. Players are given an opportunity to boost themselves up to a pass. Post an entry, start a couple of threads, get your character out there. Show us that you're putting some effort into staying in the game. We don't need you to do 30 new comments in less than a week, we just want to see that hey, you have things ongoing.

Very, very rarely do we force a player to drop a character. Failing to pass an activity check might mean you can't app another character the next app cycle, and if you fail frequently and play several characters we might encourage you to let someone go, but as long as you contact us and show us that you're getting more active, you will probably pass AC. At worst your name goes on a list and we keep an eye out for a pattern of fails. At which point more often than not we're dealing with a squatter anyway.

Three links are the maximum requirement for an immediate pass. 85% of the playerbase is able to accomplish this. Passing with a higher number of links requires mod approval. You're asking us to implement a policy we already follow.

In regards to your final point, I can only imagine the complaints we would get if we made the activity check harder (both for us and for the players), so while it is a very good idea, it's best not to complicate matters further. The majority of players do provide threads with different characters, actually! So it's not a widespread problem that needs to be fixed at this time.

Hopefully that clears things up for you!

[eyesofstrength]

1. I do appreciate the consideration for IP logging. I do think it was causing some hesitance to bring up things here because it doesn't allow a player to be anon. True, one could use a proxy, but it can be difficult enough to find one that allows a comment to be posted on DW that it does seem to deter people from bringing complaints up in valid means and instead complaining on anon comms.

2. That's really where my main issue comes. If a player has enough activity to make 30+ comments and just can't do it in three links, why do they have to go and post new activity when they could just provide another thread showing that they were involved and doing stuff? That is what isn't happening and they have to go and make new activity

Some stated in the anon discussion that the only way they even make AC is to find a player online to boomerang tag with them right before it because they wouldn't have enough otherwise. The game has slowed down considerably from two years ago when this policy was first made. Back then we had plenty of fast taggers to make it easy to get lengthy threads, and even some of us were faster back then. It's grown to the point that the requirement of a maximum of three links is slowly evolving to an unspoken post requirement because that's the only way some of us can get enough to pass within three links.

3. Also, something else I just noticed, even though this is more for Masa. I was just trying to doublec heck the maps on the locations post and some of the images seem to be broken/not loading. The one with the locations of houses and shops said it didn't exist and one of the house layouts was coming up with errors. Looks like LJ may have deleted some of the images.

[lucetimods]

We want to keep it this way - the three link limit - because the Activity Check is already a lot of work for us. The more we keep it to a minimum, the less of a pain it is to do, and it places the responsibility on the player to communicate with us and get more active if they don't pass immediately. In a game of this size, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect everyone to have a post or log participation every month, not every two months (or just threads for that matter). But instead we accept any kind of activity. All we ask is that you limit yourself to three links. This is not a difficult task.

The activity check rules were changed to set limits on the crazy amount of links we'd often get, to make it easier on us and on the playerbase as a whole. It works. It is not difficult by any means to pass the AC even if you initially fail. Additionally, let's say you have three threads going on in a month, the maximum accepted for AC. 30 days in the average month. You'd only have to tag once every couple of days to still pass AC.

By applying to Luceti, players accept the rules of the game. The activity check is part of those rules. Being backtag friendly doesn't mean we don't expect activity to be current - especially since we still accept backtagged threads as long as they have activity between the AC dates. We shouldn't have to change the rules for a set few number of players who typically still pass AC by following the rules of it. Most of whom do. Keeping AC the way it is ought to encourage activity; by extending the limit we'd just encourage it to get even slower, and that can actually kill a game. I don't want to see that happen.

I'm sorry, but the rules will not be changed.

Regarding the map, I actually noticed problem earlier - Jessie mentioned it on Plurk - we just haven't gotten the images moved yet. Should happen ASAP.