Staff Meeting Minutes

From time to time, the Staff of the Cleft get together and have a big ole sit-down to go over things. This page will hold the public minutes of those meetings. Not everything we discuss may be included in here, and somethings may lack more detail than expected.

Staff Meeting 2-29-2020

Generalized Topics

• As far as major Core-mechanics are concerned, the staff as a whole are fairly satisfied with most of the results we have seen. Currently we don't expect any more major changes for any core-mechanics, although we won't rule out further tweaks.

• Speaking of tweaks however; we will be taking a pass at Summoner and possibly Thief, with a goal of addressing some of the issues with those classes. The tentative plan for Summoner is to address the long standing camps of "Beastmaster vs FF-Summoner". This will most likely involve shuffling things about to re-split Summoner's subclasses, as well as addressing pet exploits and giving spells like Orb User and Big Boo a pass over. These tenuous plans are, of course, subject to change at a moment's notice!

Areas Report

• Moving on to the Area news; we have a total of six(Or maybe seven!) areas in various stages of progress. Several of these will end up in Shadmire, how do keep an eye out for some expansions to existing areas.

• As these zones get completed, the next goal will be getting the starting town for Shadmire up and running.

MTS Magic

• MTS has offically axed any further work on Project Tuna. This is mostly due to Java and the fact that a reducing number of players actually have such; thereby being a much smaller target audience.

• Instead, MTS is working on refactoring Tuna in MUDlet, using the black magic known as GMCP. This will essentially be current-Tuna, just without the use of Java.

• MTS is also looking to expand the semi-recent changes he made to how link-dead characters interact with Discord and the Mud as a whole(see also: Pose). Expect the options to expand as we move forward!

Player Housing News

• Finally, although the following is still in a pre-alpha-idea stage, I was asked to mention an incoming change to how Player Housing will operate.

• You may or may not be aware of a thing called OLC(OnLine Creation). This is the tool that Staff use to build and edit the MUD without having to actually bring the entire game down to implement area changes.

• What we are looking into doing is modifying the system such that once a Player pays the fee and is cleared by a Staff member; Players will be able to use a stripped-down version of OLC to build their Player House themselves!

• • This will take a good deal of time to do in a stable and secure manner, but we currently foresee little hindrance mechanically to this idea!

Staff Meeting 2-16-2019

Generalized Topics

• First order of business, it has been mentioned in notes before but not in the meeting minutes: Ageatii has stepped away from the Head Builder position, and in turn Cooper has been offered and accepted said position. In addition, Puffleton has also had to step back from the Cleft in general due to life(something about college, yadda yadda), but is still considered 'hired'.

• Other staff positions and responsibilities have not changed.
  • Of note: We ARE still hiring Builders, should anyone be interested! Inquire within!

Coder Checkins

• Bea is officially out of the Navy (Grats all around!) and settled in! Our massive coding request log has already been beaten about the ears rather thoroughly, and Bea has no intentions of slowing down. We went over our current situation, and hammered out a generalized coding direction to take things, summarized in "Bugfixes first, then all the class tweaks".

• Demeter has been having IRL pressures, and is backing off from coding as much again. Still here and working, just letting Bea take most of the weight since they can.

• MTS worked some magic and increased the Cleft's server RAM allotment! We now rock a very modern 50MB, up from the old 35MB. This SHOULD help limit a lot of the problems we encountered during the Festival in January.

• Speaking of MTS, he has decided to try putting about two hours a week into a long awaited Wizard revamp. This particular adjustment has been talked about for quite some time, and we're all excited to see it move forward. More info will be provided as we get closer to the end, in case something happens and we end up having to change course.

Areas for 2019

• Following discussion, we've decided to make two changes to the current Area of the Month scheme:
  • Default reward for a usable review is now two(2) restrings.
  • Particularly good and useful reviews will earn a new Immortal Token, from Funslash. This is the ONLY expected way to earn said token, as an extra incentive. (Examples will be on the Wiki shortly).

• By and large we are all quite pleased with the way the AotM has been doing, but we are well aware that some of the more older and less updated Areas can be rough to work through. Those Areas are high on our list, however; so we decided to up the ante a little bit in exchange.

• Remember, any decent review will result at least two restrings; and it doesn't matter how you get the review to Funslash!

• Cooper talked at length about plans for Shadmire and its new areas, including going over with the Staff the rough plans for level ranges and all kinds of juicy details.

• She also laid out a few new guidelines aimed at helping everyone keep track of the new oset/mset toys the Staff has learned to use in the last year and change.

Class Balance Discussion

• We ran over our intended time discussing things, so we didn't actually get to go into deep detail about most of the things we all wanted to cover. For the sake of time, we opted to chew on the hottest topic of the year: Summoners.
  • Charmies, Pets, Followers, and etc are all in line to be tweaked in SOME manner or another. This of course means that certain core mechanics relating to Summoners and their abilities will be seeing changes.
  • We do not have details to report at this point because there ARE none. The discussion is still going on, and is projected to continue for some time. This is going to be a tricky thing to get right, and we want to make sure it is going to meet all our checkboxes before we move forward.

• As mentioned in the first section, Wizards are due for a slow rework by MTS, assuming life doesn't get in the way. Besides that, the Priest rework is almost complete(we have a few other things coming for it), and then we'll start testing ideas for Charmies/Summoners.

Staff Meeting 1-3-2018

To start the new year off right, the staff of the Cleft had a general-purpose meeting on the 3rd. What follows is a rough outline of the points that were discussed.

This list is not exhaustive. Several things were discussed in varying amounts of detail; but were either decided against for the time being, or simply shelved for further discussion at a later time.

Finalizing Immortal Positions

• MTS (MIA), Benamas, Ageatii, and Lilly are top of the chain.

• Funslash is Liaison/General Support; Shamaster is head of RP.

• Cooper, Puffleton, and Odwofi are Builders of various ranks.

General Game Health

• None of the recently discussed new classes are slated to be added in the near future.

• In regards to current classes, we are intending to make a pass on their playability, starting by continuing the tweaks to Thief.

• We are also planning to make some changes to a few Stat benefits, namely to Con and Wis. Hitroll is also slated to be tweaked.

• Several Quality-of-Life tweaks in regards to Score and item readouts are also being worked on.

• Reminder: Please keep in mind that we do not have a 'test server' in regards to game play/balance changes. As a result, all 'testing'

needs to be done on live. Therefore player feedback is quite critical in order to assist us in making the proper adjustments. Please bear

with us as we gather as much feedback as possible with these changes.

Areas-to-be

• Ageatii laid out the plans for Shadmire in rough detail and asked the Builders to start leaning towards new areas that would fit the theme.

• No current 'lock' on new Areas in Guardia or Fa'Diel, however they will have to properly fit the established themes of the continents.

• Look forward to a few areas being re-linked in different ways as Shadmire fills out(Expellian and Sunsnug, for example).

This meeting pretty much ran the gauntlet on what was discussed, and despite several of us taking our own notes during the meeting I'm quite sure that this

list is missing a few things.

If anyone, player or staff, have a concern that they think needs to be addressed in another meeting; or just a question about anything, drop me a tell or note!

~Funslash