A few people have been asking me for some updates from the staff concerning some things, most notably the LoT2, so I figured I'd make a quick post filling you guys in as we transition into summer. Library of Treasures 2.0: As you guys know, we started officially working on this at the beginning of April. Since then, progress has been slow but not nonexistent. With Adad's help we've been able to start working out the kinks in the LoT2 and planning some things for organization. Because Quill and I have been largely busy with finals and other things, though, the meat of the work still remains for us to do, namely going through every treasure and rewriting, repricing, and retagging them where necessary. Our goal is for us to get this done by the end of May. This leads me to the next point... Treasure Creation: TC will be closed for May, as it was in April. Besides the LoT2, closing TC gives us a lot more time to focus on other projects of the site like improving the layout, making the site's literature more concise and accessible, expanding on the plot/races/etc., and so on. These projects combined with the LoT2 we feel are elevated above Treasure Creation at this time. Unless something changes pretty considerably between now and the end of May, though, we do have some plans for TC for June and forward, though, that I don't mind sharing now. Summer: As some of you may know, Quill will be absent for most of the summer again this year, leaving sometime during the month of June. Since he is easily the most awesome staff member, it means keeping up with TC and other responsibilities will be more difficult for us without him. I expect to be more available, though I can't say how much, so that should help, but given the rates we've gotten in TC (sometimes up to 40 treasures in a month) we will be altering the system, for the summer months at the very least. Currently we've been using a system where we bottleneck all the treasures into the first week of each month. We've gotten both good and bad results from doing this, but for the summer it would be virtually unsustainable. Instead of this, for summer we will be limiting members to one treasure "in progress" at a time. Essentially, you can't post a new treasure until your current one has been approved or denied. With the current system, some members have felt the need to get as many treasures in through the window as they can, even ones they doubt will pass, and that is... not exactly what we're looking for. Hopefully with this we can alleviate some of the strain on the system by changing the type of bottleneck. Mounts/Companions: A very quick note on Mounts and Companions. Some of you may have noticed that we've removed Guy's thread that had a potential but not implemented metric for Mounts and Companions. From now on, though, if you want to have a mount companion that fell under something like Guy's terms, we want you guys to PM us and ask for pricing. The issue we were running into with having that metric as a public thing was that a lot of members misunderstood it as a guarantee for any number of the things in the list, provided they could pay for it, which led to some very... creative treasure choices. We're happy to work with you over your mounts/companions, but we'd prefer it be done directly. We will be using an internal metric to price mounts, to be sure that it's fair and consistent, but we want the process to be more individual and case-by-case based. This all of course will be officially explained in the LoT2, but for now this will suffice as explanation. If you guys have any questions about this (or other things that might be related) feel free to shoot me a PM or ask below! Best, Ribs
Bigtime. There's been a certain amount of confusion with new members lately about what on earth's going on, and that's not something we want. So, we're working to make everything more streamlined so that new members won't be discouraged by our lack of organization. It's hard to see problems like that when you've been here a while, but they do exist, so we're striving to fix them and make HC a more newbie-friendly place. Hopefully when we're done it'll be as easy as pointing them at a single page and going, "here you go! :) " Yeah... this is becoming a reoccuring thing with me No internet, once again. lol... sorry. That's me at every level
I wanted to step in here for a moment too and assert my dominance... no just kidding School had absorbed most of my life in the past few months and I was not here as much as I should have been. Ribs and the rest of the staff have been fantastic and I commend them for their awesome work, HC wouldn't be anything without them. I also wanted to give you guys some insight into what I plan on working on this summer. First on the list, as Quill and Ribs mentioned above, is to work on the tutorials page. For most of you (long time members) this won't be too big of a deal. However, it will be for new members who wish to role play here. Secondly, I want to start making HC more of a hybrid forum instead of a solely role play focused place. I want it to be a place that if you want to RP that's awesome, if not then I want it to feel like discussion is just as important. In the past the role play was the sole focus and all of the discussion would happen in the cbox, we even have several of members who don't role play who feel like the cbox is the only place for them to be here, and when we moved the cbox off of every page their livelihood took a blow. I am open to suggestions on how to accomplish this, so if you have any feel free to send me a PM. I am going to be working on all of the game pages this summer as well, trying to get maps, guides, etc... up for them. I want HC to be a great resource for all things Zelda, and doing this will help our image and up our appearances on google and other search engines. This will be done in hopes of increasing our visibility and our member size. I also want to create a "website staff" that isn't staff over the forums, but is over the website. These staff members will help me create content for the website and will be integral parts of HC moving forward. Anyway, that's it from me. If you are interested in being part of the website staff send me a PM and I'll get back to you ASAP! Any other questions you can send to me as well. Thanks guys!
