Wow, we’re well into February and before you know it, Christmas will be upon us again!

Every year, we look back the year before to reflect on our strengths and weaknesses. I asked leads to submit detailed feedback on their perspective of 2013 – all of which provided a lot of great insight. I then took that, along with general feedback I have been receiving via forums and IM conversations and came up with a strategy to help solve some of the common issues we see in CD, and overall, create an even more engaging and creative experience for everyone!

We have a lot of new initiatives in progress and in the planning stages, however I wanted to highlight some key goals for 2014:

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We need to reboot Columtreal. We rolled out a new evolution system that allows both students and faculty to track their participation on campus and rewards them accordingly.

Columtreal has long had a cult following and led by GMs who have stuck with it since 2008. I began developing tools, long overdue, which expands on the Character Evolution System and offers students and faculty a broad range of features to make the campus experience more sticky:

• Classrooms and common learning areas on campus will be fitted with a “Class Registration” projector which will allow faculty to quickly start a class; then, students who wish to attend can click on the same projector to “enroll” in the class currently held at that location earn credits based on the time they spend in that class.
• Students will have their own transcript which will track the classes they attended, the credit they earned, and view advising reports. Advisors will be necessary to meet and create reports with students on a regular basis in order to progress to the next class level.
• Students earn Freshman → Sophomore → Junior → Senior → Alumni titles in the CU Student Body group by attending classes, time spent on campus, affiliations to student orgs, and time spent working on campus.
• Renovate classroom, office and various areas of the campus.
• Faculty earn Instructor → Professor → Sr. Professor → Dean titles for time spent on campus, the number of classes they hold, and number of students they advise.
• We are looking for a new GM.
• New rosters will track active students and faculty.

The above features have been developed and rolled out. We hope to achieve a steady flow of classes and traffic by end of March where I can confirm any existing bugs in the new systems fixed and we can move on to working on more RP opportunities/activities there.

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We need to focus on creating a more sticky experience for new players. We’re launching a new feature of the character evolution system which will automatically and randomly offer missions/quests for both new and existing players to stimulate role-play and help get acquainted to the city.

As of 2013, we had a total of 11,475 total new character applications submitted between all ALTERSCAPE communities; 9,492 of those were accepted. On average, we process about 100 apps per week in CD alone.

This year, I wanted to put heavy emphasis on retaining those users who go through the process of joining but don’t expose themselves long enough to discover the benefits of staying. In 2011, when I rebuilt the Hathian sim, we had a number of hunts and missions that were wildly popular. After the successful launch and growth of the Character Evolution System in the past two years, I’ll be expanding features and add the ability to design quests/missions for new and existing players. The successful completion of a mission would be part of the evolution towards achieving new role titles.

Imagine being a new player who just joined Hathian. They will receive missions with various complexities (ie. visit the Hospital and get a full check up, “A relative dies and you’re feeling a bit sad; go drown yourself at Lou’s”, etc.). Using the various ways we track role-play on sim, we could automagically stimulate optional role-play opportunities and reward players who participate in it - both new and old.

I’m hoping to launch ~25 missions this by the end of March, followed by another 25 missions by the end of the year between both CD and CU.

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We need to establish a Mentor program. We’re looking to recruit seasons role-players who are willing to be accessible to new players and to run orientations once a month or two.

Welcome Orientations and Workshops are a great way to bring new players together and educate them on the community. It’s also an opportunity for new players to find other new players to start up stories. I’d like to expand on this and start a group with one or two people who are willing to take full ownership of the concept and work with me.

I’ve developed an easy copy/paste transcript that can be used by anyone who wants to volunteer an hour of their time every month or two (with enough volunteers, ideally we can schedule one every 2 weeks). Each orientation would be promoted in the form of an IM to every new players when they are on the sim the day of it.

If you’re interested in leading this new initiative, please let me know - there may be an opportunity for a new GM role to help cover this. I’d like to get leads and a solid base of volunteers in place by mid March.

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We need to expand on community security and protect more efficiently from griefers. We’ve launched the next generation ALTERSCAPE Security HUD and reporting system.

The security system now features the following:

• warn players and log it
• teleport home players who don’t respond and logs the incident
• estate ban for 1 week players who are griefing or continue to ignore security requests and log it
• automatically return non-group items of the avatar when they’re sent home/banned

The ability to estate ban from the HUD is a more efficient way of tackling griefers - they are banned on all sims regardless of private parcels. Additionally, I want to expand on the telephone information booths we have around the city to allow people to submit abuse reports on CD/CU members who are harassing them and to also automate the banning of non-members who are griefing (ie. CD member could report a non-member for griefing, and if X number of additional members also report the same name, the security system will automatically kick in and ban said griefer and flag an admin).

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We need to work on making the role-play environment more efficient and lag-free. We’re going to do an object audit and make sure we standardize as much as possible on common decor items.

Mesh is pervasive in today’s SL culture. While clothings and furniture looks amazing, the textures on multi-face mesh objects are commonly large texture files (1024x1024). That’s 4x to 8x more than the standard 256 or 512 textures I launched the rebuild with.

We will be standardizing on common furniture and retexturing objects where possible. To minimize your objects being returned, I’ll request that leads and staff share their object rights with me. I’ve already rolled out a new object detection system which keeps tabs of all rezzed objects on sim and generates a simple report of those who are not a current tenant, part of the security team, or a group lead.

I am also considering rolling out a new feature which will warn users whose avatar is consuming too much resources (wearing script-heavy attachments) and providing some education around that.

My goal is to complete the full audit and roll out of features to help maintain a low-lag experience by March.

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We need to make the new character registration process more efficient. We’re adding new features and improving on existing - consider the following:

• since last summer, processing turnaround on character registrations have consistently been done within 72 hours - more often than not, they’re processed within 48 hours.
• 2 weeks ago, I updated the BLUE reinviter board in the OOC area to now allow players to automate a group invite if they were accepted within the last 30 days (increased from 5). The board also notifies the user if the bot is down and to try again later, no longer leaving them wondering why an invite didn’t come.
• I will be adding an email field to the character registration portal which will allow users to receive a copy of their submitted fields as well as notification when their app has been approved or denied. The email will include instructions on where and how to use the reinvite board in-world.
• when an application is approved or denied, users will receive an IM from the bot AND a message from an in-world notification system. This is an additional failsafe I added last week from just relying on SL to process a group invite and IM via bot.

With a better notification system, we could make the joining process a lot less painful for users who don’t receive word if they were accepted or denied due to frequent SL technical issues.

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We need to keep group leadership fresh. We are going to do our best to revitalize stale businesses and leadership based on your responses in the survey sent out earlier this year. We found great advice in the ideas and criticism brought forward such as:

• Re-purposing and/or replacing old businesses that have been for the most part "silent" in our community
• Allowing current leaders to pick new ventures and giving others a chance to run businesses. 
• Making it clear that ANYONE can apply to lead or help a business they feel is 'dead' and how they can do it if there is a current leader who they view as inactive.
• Reinstating Leader staff meetings
• Providing a live forum every 3 months for the community as a whole to discuss how business and the community can improve.

Have more suggestions for us? Just fill out the survey! We have been trying to discuss ideas to heavily in IM exchanges so that we can have all of your ideas in one place! https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JXRTN8H