lore retcons have a public review period

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Factions have been having retcons or reboots in what seems like a higher frequency than in the past. There are also planned or considered reboots/retcons that may or may not come to fruition. However, if they do, they tend to come as a suprise.

The biggest issue is they harm established characters.  In a personal analogy, when crevus was rebooted it had big impact on my characters and came out of nowhere. However all i can do is criticize it when it already happened; no reboot or retcon ever really gets reverted.

The second issue is they come out of nowhere. The average player doesnt have any idea what our plans as loredevs are. Many of the ipc players are an anxious wreck because of the mass resignation of the synth team leaving the entire species' future up in the air.

Any reboot or retcon of an established faction should be publically disclosed so players can have input on it. Lore is really the only part of development where these plans can suprise players.

1 week to let people get involved is what i am asking for. Then even if the dev goes through with it, we all understand whats coming and the consequences. 

[Sytic]

A week to let people get involved seems more than fair, and what should already be common practice. Having it be dropped as a bombshell on players' whose characters and motifs might get irreparably damaged seems quite rude.

[Coalf]

What would this encapsulate though?

There are a lot of things that get changed in lore which could be considered "soft" rewrites or retcons which can still chuff people. Sometimes even slight wording changes can make a difference in how people view things.
If something like this were to be considered, then I believe it would also need a clear defined line of what is to be reported this way and what not, or at the very least a guideline by the heads.
Since having people announce every few weeks they're rewriting something in lore channel or lore diary is just  going to lead to people muting it.

[GreenBoi]

If you give people a week to prepare, they can think of a potential alternate version of the character that fits the NEW stuff better instead of leaving them in a limbo until they can think of something once it drops or stop referencing their past until they can see how they can fit with the retcon. So this would be nice. I honestly thought we already had this in place.

[Crozarius]

I think that this is a great idea. Another benefit as I see it is that this will increase the visibility of lore changes so that more people will be made aware of it. It'll help avoid situations where anarchronistic characters that are inconsistent with the lore continue on unaware of changes to their race and confuse the hell out of everybody (especially new players.)

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

1 hour ago, Coalf said:

There are a lot of things that get changed in lore which could be considered "soft" rewrites or retcons

It can be easy to determine if the dev communicates the change. Rewording something isnt a retcon or reboot. My point continues down.

1 hour ago, Coalf said:

If something like this were to be considered, then I believe it would also need a clear defined line of what is to be reported this way

A retcon is easy to determine. A reboot can be floated around to players of that faction and the loremaster to see if there is any consensus.

 

1 hour ago, Coalf said:

Since having people announce every few weeks they're rewriting something in lore channel or lore diary is just  going to lead to people muting it.

This should not be how we handle lore. If rewrites become this common then something has gone terribly wrong.

[Scheveningen]

A one week advance for everyone to adjust to a new style of play isn't unreasonable. I think it's a good idea.

[Carver]

Communication is never a bad thing. I'm all for opening discussion amongst those interested, it would be a very positive change over the past.

[MoondancerPony]

I agree with this, especially due to Jam's plans to retcon a bunch of stuff as Vaurca maintainer. 

[Skull132]

6 hours ago, Marlon Phoenix said:

8 hours ago, Coalf said:

There are a lot of things that get changed in lore which could be considered "soft" rewrites or retcons

It can be easy to determine if the dev communicates the change. Rewording something isnt a retcon or reboot. My point continues down.

8 hours ago, Coalf said:

If something like this were to be considered, then I believe it would also need a clear defined line of what is to be reported this way

A retcon is easy to determine. A reboot can be floated around to players of that faction and the loremaster to see if there is any consensus.

Just as a point about discourse. Asserting that something is easy to do (as you did) is not the same as proving or demonstrating that something is easy to do (which is what Coalf implicitly asked). Ultimately, Coalf's point is that retroactive continuity is a pretty common tool that we use, sometimes with no tangible or very small visible effect. Other times, larger things get modified. The question is, where does the line go and who determines where it goes.

9 hours ago, Marlon Phoenix said:

Many of the ipc players are an anxious wreck because of the mass resignation of the synth team leaving the entire species' future up in the air.

As further comment. This isn't necessarily tied to this point. This is a cultural issue lore has had for a long time. Every single developer wants to do Their Own Thing:tm:, and there is usually very little logical continuity between what one dev does, and what the next one does. Doesn't necessarily have to be retcons involved, sometimes it's just the new developer silently burying (discontinuing) the pursuits of their forebears and picking up their own initiatives with heightened rigor. Which is how, for example, we went from chill trees to macabre and edgy trees to whatever they are now -- no direct or major retcons involved.

Ultimately the latter point brings up a good meme I've held onto for a bit, and semi-regularly aired on #lore: wiki peer reviews. Devs would be required to review the work of their colleagues, and to evaluate it both on a technical level, as well as a conceptual level. This should provide better consistency, since the final form of any given idea is up for review when it's about to be implemented, though at the price of perhaps a slightly slowed down chain of processing.

[Coalf]

Yes, what skull said essentially. Rewrites are from my experience, rarely employed on a large scale. Usually they involve a bunch of smaller steps in changing the trajectory the projectile was taking initially, specifically because large scale rewrites get people angry.
In this way, It would be better to establish what constitutes as "large enough" to warrant an announcement.
Dionaea are a good example of this, but same can be said about the wasteland rework or my S'rrendar and Messa rework. Filling in the blanks can be just as much of a rewrite for some people as is just redoing text. So the question is, do we announce it for those kinds of people too or not?

Also what would happen to lore_canonizations, quite a hefty amount of those are rewrites but they are left out on the lore_can forum for weeks, months or even years and having to spend another week seems redundant.
On that note I'd like to specify how this would be done, another discord server? Announcements on the server itself? A sub-forum where these changes get announced beofrehand? Putting it into the lore_diary?

I am not opposed to this idea but I think the suggestion that is up right now is too hasty and not fleshed out.

[Mofo1995]

To bring this back around, since I do not think it's an inherently bad idea, I am interested in possibly implementing this or something like it. The biggest question I have is how big would a retcon have to be to warrant the one week trial period? The vast majority of retcons are unintentional in nature and even during my tenure as tajara dev certain bits of lore passed my notice in various places and were accidentally retconned. Should a single sentence change on the wiki count or would it have to be a substantial change, and if so, how substantial? Not rhetorical questions, genuinely interested on working this out.

[GreenBoi]

2 hours ago, Mofo1995 said:

The biggest question I have is how big would a retcon have to be to warrant the one week trial period? Should a single sentence change on the wiki count or would it have to be a substantial change, and if so, how substantial? Not rhetorical questions, genuinely interested on working this out.

I think it shouldd simply be based on the importance of the content at hand. A majority, or the important parts of a species' history would fall under this- as well as any change to any caste system or even drastically changing the populations of an essential group within a species.