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Every Vala/Head before me had some ideals, but I now want to formulate a few points that seem important to me and are things I feel we can still work and improve on. Please also note that I by no means want to achieve all of these goals right away in a perfect manner, but just have them as direction towards we will bring this project.
These goals have been presented to the staff team and have been accepted without opposing opinions that were voiced. Thus these goals shall also apply on all members I am supposed to lead, namely the Artists and Designers, but also all other members of this community are welcome to move the project towards these goals as much as they can.
These goals have been presented to the staff team and have been accepted without opposing opinions that were voiced. Thus these goals shall also apply on all members I am supposed to lead, namely the Artists and Designers, but also all other members of this community are welcome to move the project towards these goals as much as they can.
- Community
Our goal is not to recreate Middle-Earth. Our goal is to recreate Middle-Earth together.
I am aware we officially proclaimed that the main goal of this server is to recreate Middle-Earth over things as role-playing and survival that much rather oppose that goal. But I think we have to rethink this again and lay more focus on less efficient but more fun and community-stimulating techniques. In the recent past the community part grew less and less important and with old members retiring and leaving vital parts of the community were gone. The topic is one that is also being worked on by the Guides, while they may focus on things as events and advertising, as Designers we can work on bringing more community action into the building process. This may be with more classic jobs as we do them already frequently, build days, maybe some more nostalgic jobs, however with the common knowledge about WE and Voxel these jobs will stay nostalgic and won't be able to be grown into normal jobs anymore.
Additionally to that there are other possibilities to involve community better, two things I can think of so far are scheduled jobs (glaciers, roads, swamps and similar) that instead of spontanously doing them get postponed to either a generic "job day" (e.g. saturday evening) or that they get announced a few days in advance on the forums. Another idea is on-site plotbuilds. For that we'd need a plugin that would be a kind of enhanced TB plugin, which allows staff to create e.g. small plots inside a WIP city in which then anyone can build a house (or whatever the project is about). That would be a replacement of the Freebuilds we made so far, in my opinion being able to build on site would make a huge difference against having to build in a plotgrid, additionally we would not need to move builds anymore. The detailed specifications of that plugin have been worked out and have been presented to the Staff team. Now I have presented the idea to the developers to clarify both the technical and effort-wise feasability.
- Lore
Creativity can lead us anywhere, but we have to make sure that we all end up at the same place.
One of the things that were important to Credoo was to ensure people can be as creative as possible and I do support that too. I am completely aware of that not everyone can be as fascinated and dedicated to the lore as e.g. I am, and also it's completely fine that not everyone knows everything, although it seems to be a common misconception, not even I do know everything, and usually when you ask me about something I have to look it up aswell!
What I'd like to request from every project leader are two things: First off, take enough time to research about the lore, know what facts are given aswell as in which things no lore is available. Be more aware of where you can go nuts with your ideas without causing any conflicts, and where you need to use your creativity to recreate Tolkien's ideas as good as possible.
Second thing is maintaining the forum posts. This includes mainly two things which also I myself have to get used to again: 1. Maintain the main post and add changes if changes in plans are made. 2. Document the progress, make a post if a village/hall/part is done, make one if an external staff claims a new village/.., make a post if you plan on adding something else or change something, so other staffs can have a look at it and voice concerns or other ideas before the construction starts.
- Realism
In a fantasy world the inner consistency of reality is hard to achieve, but it is needed to make the world credible.
This concern does apply to both terrain and villages/cities, however for the latter the amount of realism we do put into the construction is already very good and the only thing to do there is to preserve and again excel the qualities we have achieved so far. Terrain is a bit a more nasty topic though. I fully understand that for most of the staffs terrain is by far a not as exciting type of work as building structures is. But many yet need to learn that with making terrain it is just as important to get inspired by real world examples as we do it often already for the villages. When you edit a certain terrain area, search yourself an IRL region that matches your imagination of that terrain, that can also be from the movies. I also gladly offer some geography lessons either through TS or the forums, the only reason for that being that it makes creating realistic terrain so much easier.