Staff Priorities

From FiranMUX

The senior staff (Chiefs, Seniors, and area assistants) meet every so often -- typically every month or two -- to determine the priorities of the entire staff. Each area lists two or three items that are their highest priority. Then the entire group prioritizes the list of things that need to be done across all areas. Next, we ensure that the staff has allocated personnel and other resources to the right areas and shift staff around as necessary.

We share these priorities with the public so that players will have a better understanding what we're working on.

Please also see: Help on Setting Goals and Priorities.

General Priorities

Last updated: Adam 17:56, 29 March 2007 (EDT)

FiranCon

Our annual RL convention, FiranCon, is Memorial Day Weekend (May 26-29, 2007). Lisa is tasked with organizing this huge event, which has almost 60 players registered for it already. Steph is busy writing the Firan LARP that will entertain everyone for four hours on the Saturday evening of con. If you don't see her as active on the game as usual, she's busy writing 80,000 words of LARP characters and background! FiranCon is our highest priority, since it has a firm deadline.

Tinyplots

The continuing focus on-game is on running tinyplots for the players. We feel that fun and exciting plots are what keep players coming back. As such, the game's #2 priority is to run as many plots as possible. Amber has been given full reign to steal people from other areas to GM events and run plots. Several staff have written or are writing new tinyplots and Amber will review these.

Database Bloat Reduction

Firan's a huge game with a lot of players. Those players have characters who love to make and buy things. As such, our database tends to grow and grow. Right now, it's around 175,000 objects large and we've been encouraging players to @junk stuff they don't need anymore. The staff has also spent time looking at object classes and figuring out what kinds of things fill up the database and consider alternatives for storing certain things like scrolls and keys. We'll move some things to SQL when it makes sense. In the meantime, we've imposed an energy cost penalty to the make command until we reach our goal of reducing the database object count by about 5%. It's a short diet and mostly we need to lose water weight!

War Season

It's a long way off (August 2007) but we've been saying that Firans should be thinking about the enemy year-round, not just during the battles. As such, the staff has planned a series of three military missions. Each mission which the Firans complete successfully will contribute an advantage during the war battles. Celeste is heading up a team of staff whose alts are totally uninvolved in the war and they will be the GMs for these missions.

The actual war season must be planned and prepared. We hope to simplify many things about war this year including IC and OOC rules. We want to give military leaders real decisions to make. As such, expect to see discussion about war season on the web forum and Public channel. Formal discussions will be scheduled on the @calendar.

If possible, war season this year will use the new combat system that is currently in development. Adam is coding this complex system and hopes to complete it with enough time to test it thoroughly before using it in war season. The new system will reduce the amount of OOC knowledge about the code a player needs to have to fight effectively. Some planned extensions will allow some tactical maneuvering and positioning on the battlefield (lines of defenders and so on).

Wiki Help and News

Some time in the future, we want to move our help and news files to the wiki. The staff will be able to write and edit them here and the changes will automatically show up on the game. This involves some magic by Jeanne, who will write a bit of code that can turn wiki formatting into plain text and generate "See also:" links at the bottom of help files based on internal links in the web pages.

Staffing

We've lost a few good wizards to RL lately, so we need to replace them. A few Honorary Wizards seem to be popping up out of the woodwork, so if they can fill in, we're about where we need to be. In any case, we'll probably recruit at least one new Trainee soon.

Current Priorities

After every staff meeting, the admin shall update our Staff Priorities for This Week page.