lore writer Haydizzle's Deputy Loremaster Application

[Haydizzle]

Ckey/BYOND Username: Haydizzle

Position Being Applied For: Deputy Loremaster

Have you read the Lore Team Rules and Regulations wiki page?: Most certainly!

Past Experiences/Knowledge: My last year and a half as a deputy-then-developer for unathi; a strong collegiate background in communication and writing; relevant for this position, being a shift leader and running a floor of anywhere up to a dozen people at a time, coordinating meetings with my supervisors, and helping vet new hires, roughly two years doing all that.

Examples of Past Work: My work is documented on the Aurora lore Discord! Most notably besides that, I have authored the Aut'akh rework and additions, added and contributed to the Izweski Nation page with DeadLantern, added Dominian unathi content, revamped the Th'akh religion fully, added verbiage and slang for the species, and various other additions and edits. A full history can be found in the lore Discord announcements channel.

 

A brief note (such as a roadmap with additional descriptions) identifying the course and creative direction that you'd hopefully like to pursue:

I would ideally like to do three things:

- Expand on interspecies/national relationships;

- Make species more prominent in setting, ideally through marriage with megacorps; and

- Increase the number of canon events held  in round.

Regarding the first: species relations are important! Every species exists in the same space, yet how the C'thur hive views dionae is not something readily expanded on. Similarly, where the lore could very much intersect and collaborate, areas remain and feel too separate. I'd like to explore where this could be developed.

Regarding the second: a strengthening of countries by tying themselves more to a megacorporation would help give them a leg up in the Spur and increase their relevance to the setting as a whole. Going to Adhomai would be interesting, but the premise is bolstered if there is something NT needs our characters to do for them at one of their outposts there. Similarly, there is more OOC interest as anything that benefits the country would benefit the megacorp, as well as the opposite being true, so some people may watch to see if a megacorp becomes screwed over in some way. There is more promise in benefiting both parties by developing these bonds.

Regarding the third: I touched off on this in my last application. Read about it there!

 

Criticism of the current state of lore:

Currently, the lore feels stagnated. Not in the sense that there is no development, but instead that there are no events for characters to get passionate about. I have realized the biggest mistake in my career as a unathi maintainer is not doing more to give the species current topics to talk about over the last year. Exciting developments can inspire, and it is hard to call a development exciting if it is not a present change, but rather a retcon. I also think this ties back to hosting more events; we should push out more articles and events for people to discuss and utilize themselves.

 

What you believe you can bring to the team as Deputy Loremaster:

I think my best asset is the ability to think critically and make tough calls. Ideally, I like to be gentle with making a choice, but I am not afraid to be firm with a decision either.

I have a very technical background in writing and journalism that I have brought to the table in the past: most notably, editing Schwann's work (mister post-collegiate level writing, which I say in friendly banter as he has called me 'undergraduate' in the past); helping with the speech in the post-Mars destruction article and proofing KotW articles; helping edit other projects wherever asked. I would like to offer this to the team as a whole should they want another pair of eyes for any missed misspellings and syntax errors.

 

Additional comments: I applied for this position before! I was brief here to avoid rehashing everything there. You can find the previous application and more of my elaborated thoughts here: 

If anyone from the last application has new commentary or feel their opinion on me has changed, please do comment below!

[Marlon P.]

Youre such a great lore writet, and consistent, and full of passion. I'd hate to see unathi lose that bcuz youre required to resign your post but i support any development you have in mind. I agree with your direction and everything you've said.

 

+1

 

Edit:

"Expand on interspecies[sic] relationships;" 

Edited December 10, 2021 by Marlon P.

[Captain Gecko]

Wait you're not Lore Writer already? All of these roles sound the same but are different, I'm... Confused.

But (even though I'm not entirely sure of what you're asking for) you've always been the go to guy for lizard lore to me, so please, b e c o m e.

 

+1

 

Edit: Ok NOW I get it, nevermind. Still +1.

Edited December 10, 2021 by Captain Gecko
I got it now.

[Alberyk]

First of all, I don't think you have enough availability to handle this position. You joined as a spriter in the dev months ago, still the only thing you did was some unathi items. You did not contribute to the nbt spriting project besides giving some opinions on colors and how to do things. People who joined way later have done way more than you as a spriter. And I can assure you, we have a lot of work to do in that field.

As a lore writer, you are also very infrequent. The last unathi article, or some kind of in character development for the unathi, was posted one year ago. So we had one entire year without the unathi doing anything. This does not inspire any kind of confidence in your proposal of making stuff happens in the lore. In regards to wiki addition, I also feel it has been slow and some big issues are still left unaddressed.

In question to organization, something that caught my attention was you announcing and trying to get an admin to run an event right on the day the event was happening. We all know we should put the events on the calendar, and you did it in the day you were running it. Sorry but leaving stuff to the last day is not a good thing at all.

I am not saying you should speed up or do more stuff, but I don't think you have the time in your hands to tackle this position.

[Triogenix]

21 hours ago, Haydizzle said:

Currently, the lore feels stagnated. Not in the sense that there is no development, but instead that there are no events for characters to get passionate about. I have realized the biggest mistake in my career as a unathi maintainer is not doing more to give the species current topics to talk about over the last year. Exciting developments can inspire, and it is hard to call a development exciting if it is not a present change, but rather a retcon. I also think this ties back to hosting more events; we should push out more articles and events for people to discuss and utilize themselves.

I am of much the same opinion as you, however, as you said over your career as Unathi Maintainer you did not give the species current topics to talk about, with the last article posted close to a year ago as Alb said in his reply, which I agree does not inspire much confidence things will change at face value. So, to pose a question, in your eyes, what is the reason Unathi have had no articles in the past year, and very few(I think it's been like 3, 2 of which were part of KOTW, but I'm not sure) under your leadership as maintainer? And assuming you view it as an issue, how do you plan on fixing whatever has caused this lack of articles from yourself if you end up becoming deputy loremaster?

Edited December 11, 2021 by Triogenix

[Desven]

I agree with Alberyk in that someone readily-available as deputy would be more beneficial. Maybe I'm used to how Cael will always try to quickly answer, but I would rather see someone quicker to respond in the position.

[Haydizzle]

21 hours ago, Triogenix said:

So, to pose a question, in your eyes, what is the reason Unathi have had no articles in the past year, and very few(I think it's been like 3, 2 of which were part of KOTW, but I'm not sure) under your leadership as maintainer? And assuming you view it as an issue, how do you plan on fixing whatever has caused this lack of articles from yourself if you end up becoming deputy loremaster?

It was a mistaken judgement that I needed to fix the foundation here before building on it. Rather than putting out fires as I go, instead focusing on putting out the whole fire first. I realized in hindsight that wasn't exactly a great idea. There are a couple of articles I've been sitting on because I felt like I had more I should fix before releasing them.

It's also my belief that other teams feel similarly about this. It could be the same reason why there aren't many updates from the human and dionae teams too for example, but I don't want to put words in their mouth. Most of lore just feels very focused on a season of internal consistency right now.

3 hours ago, Desven said:

I agree with Alberyk in that someone readily-available as deputy would be more beneficial. Maybe I'm used to how Cael will always try to quickly answer, but I would rather see someone quicker to respond in the position.

To clarify, Alb looked like he was talking about my frequency of creating lore. I'm still around on the lore and staff servers often and read the chats, reply to pings in a timely manner, the whole nine yards. So I am still around if people need me to ask questions and such.

[Triogenix]

12 hours ago, Haydizzle said:

It was a mistaken judgement that I needed to fix the foundation here before building on it. Rather than putting out fires as I go, instead focusing on putting out the whole fire first. I realized in hindsight that wasn't exactly a great idea. There are a couple of articles I've been sitting on because I felt like I had more I should fix before releasing them.

It's also my belief that other teams feel similarly about this. It could be the same reason why there aren't many updates from the human and dionae teams too for example, but I don't want to put words in their mouth. Most of lore just feels very focused on a season of internal consistency right now

Posting this before I forget, apologies since I'm tired so it will probably be incoherent.

I like these answers, they identify the flaws and mistakes you made, and where they're also being made in other places, which you will be able to help with as deputy(I think). Due to that, I think this application deserves my support with a big old +1, but given that I am not a lore writer and don't really see what you do/don't do behind the scenes like Alb and Des can as lore writers, and what you work on, so I can't really comment on it. Because of this, I'm stating now I may change my opinion at a later date if more staff who see you in the lore team environment voice their feedback on this thread.

 

Wish you the best of luck on this application!

[niennab]

Personally, I think the argument of Unathi lore not pushing articles is an incredibly weak one. There is a lot of work to constantly be on top of as the maintainer. So much so that depending on the state of lore, desired projects, or if the staff member is an admin or not, running events or article events is a huge ask. It's a volunteer position and no where is it enforced that maintainers need to be pushing articles. If the server wants to see more of something, then we need more deputies to each team.

Regardless, having worked with Haydizzle, I am confident that he has a level head, a creative mind, and would make a great Deputy Lore Maintainer. The issue of the previous team dynamic is that because the Lore Maintainer was generally unavailable, it meant that the Deputy had to take on the Lore Maintainer's duties and then some. With Caelphon at the head, I believe the work will be better distributed and be better off as a whole.

Nevertheless, +1

Edited December 12, 2021 by niennab

[Marlon P.]

Since I've returned I've seen a lot of complaining that unathi have too many articles and not enough structural work. Haydizzle has focused a lot on structure. Now he is being criticized for focusing on structural work instead of articles. It sounds like he is in a no-win situation if these are the basis of judgement. 

It doesn't speak to his ability to manage a tea, especially when loremaster deputy isn't based on writing articles but coordinating and talking to players - things haydizzle does a lot of.

Edited December 12, 2021 by Marlon P.

[Roostercat]

Around the beginning of Haydizzle becoming lizard master supreme, I remember seeing the conversations and long long messages of complaining. Complaining that there was so much shit to fix. And Haydizzle WAS doing the fixing back then, so the beginning of his tenure went very well, in my eyes. Thus the argument that he has done nothing at least somewhat falls apart. At first. 

LATELY it seems Unathi lore has stagnated completely, which I am not going to put all blame on Haydizzle for, as I have not been terribly active either.  But to that point, he is still a present entity that gives opinion on matters, which is a large part of loremastering. 

BUT

I feel like the idleness is getting a bit worse, in that I see you around less and less as time goes on, so I do have some worries that you might not be as active as some would want you to be. Being there for the Unathi community is good, but as a deputy loremaster you have to be present for all of the communities, often. It's a massive time commitment, and I'm not too sure you can keep up with it right now, from experience. So in my eyes, you are fit to be the Unathi developer as of now, but I'm not too sure on deputy loremaster for activity reasons.

[Chada1]

I like Haydizzle and it wouldn't bother me to see them elevated to Deputy Loremaster, however I would expect their activity to raise exponentially for the promotion, Haydizzle, maybe it'd be good to go into detail on how you intend to do the things you propose,

• What kind of events would you like to run in round? How often?
• On interspecies relations and the like, a place I could see really needing expansion is the moon in orbit of Moghes, would you go into detail on how the Skrell and Unathi live together there?
• How would you tie marriage/megacorps etc to other species? I would personally love to see a Jargon sponsored megacorp or two, that works in tandem or as a subsidiary of a human megacorp, that'd be cool. But what do you already have planned?

Either way, it's a +1

Edited December 22, 2021 by Chada1

[Haydizzle]

Heya!

- Planning events can take a lot of work, but even something small can spice up a round for the day. I think running things like TCFL drives, Ceres' Lance visits, embassies boarding the station from various countries, or perhaps a canon hostile presence comes aboard: minor events can be more easily devised. Ideally, I would like to encourage more staff and even players to submit event ideas to be approved and ran with them, so that way there is more to shakeup the current monotony of how rounds play out.

- Are you referring to Ouerea here? Currently, my plan for Ouerea is to actually incorporate lore from nearly every species. There is justification for all but tajara on the planet, so I look forward to making it a team project for the lore. I already have some ideas as for the themes, and that will make gathering contributions easier as well. I also let everyone know on the lore team know that I am interested in collecting these contributions in the future, so it does not blindside them when I do begin on it.

- The foundations for this already exist, I would say. Einstein and Sol. Zeng-Hu and Jargon. Hephaestus and Izweski. NanoTrasen and the PRA. Vaurca are already tied to various corporations as well, and IPCs play important yet different roles in many if not all of the corps. It is more about building on existing relationships and strengthening them.

[Marlon P.]

Depending on how you count it, human maintainers have either 23 distinct factions to maintain, or over 40 distinct factions including planets. What on earth is going to be done by you in a deputy loremaster role to reduce this number or otherwise handle it so human maintainers arent perpetually overwhelmed by maintenence? All other teams have less than 15 even in the loose definition

[Haydizzle]

This is a misnomer. We have the Sol Alliance, Republic of Biesel, Elyra, CoC, and Dominia. Five major players in the spur. To note, this is not nearly as many as your post is describing. Most of this can be accredited to being wrongly defined (Solarian warlord factions are, for example, not meant to be represented on station or be long-term).

Regardless, human lore is still the largest sect of lore. I would like to offer my help in "picking up the slack" so to speak; human lore has been working very hard and it is inspiring to see, and I would like to help round out their efforts as a deputy loremaster. There is already a moratorium on making new planets and factions, so there is not really a need to say "stop making new stuff." The ruling is already in place.

Lastly, I will say that human lore has the feel of being bogged down because they are trying to play catchup; this won't be a consistent issue for years to come if lore writers keep building on the foundation that is there. There won't be a need to rewrite things in the future again if we continue to do quality work, so with that, I'd say that this maintenance is a phase rather than a perpetual cycle.

The best thing anyone can do is work with the team to help them perform this maintenance so there isn't a need to go back and fix major inconsistencies, only worry about small ones and additional writing for our factions and planets. 

[Marlon P.]

Even with conservative writing, look at how many human factions have international relations that mean they have to consistently respond to events in the wider galaxy. You are correct that we have the Big Six of Sol, Biesel, Eridani, the Coalition, Elyra, and Dominia. That's still more factions than we have writers, but that's not the end of the story.

The wikipedia navboxes show the massive workload difference. Here is, to my knowledge and only using navbox pages, the counting of ONLY pages dedicated to a planet or system as available in the navbox for that species.

• Tajara have three planets and one system.
• Skrell have five distinct planets/locations with dedicated pages and a sixth that has minor details on ancillary locations.
• Unathi have three dedicated entries for systems and planets and one page with minor information on ancillaries.
• Dionae have four dedicated, and one ancillary.
• Vaurca have one page which all their colonized planets share, so it's all ancillary.
• IPC's have none, and neither do synthetics.
• The Sol Alliance has eleven planets with dedicated pages. 
• Biesel has three. 
• Dominia has two.
• Eridani has four.
• Elyra has two.
• The Coalition of Colonies has ten.

 

That's thirty-two dedicated pages for locations under humanity. And each location that has a dedicated page has to include information on the history, culture, and society of that location.

You say that you won't need to do rewrites if the work is quality, but I do not agree with this. Just recently we saw something written expanding New Gibson that saw criticism and planned rewrites to address them. That isn't bad - it's good, and expected, that submissions undergo maintenence and revision.

It sounds though like you focus more on the big six. Would you rather see the other twenty-six places made minor locations and not focused on? Or should all of them be kept as updated as possible? How will you identify when one of these pages starts to get atrophied? Elyra used to be cutting edge, and then the problem of maintenence falling off had it become super old because so much was focused elsewhere.

How will you coordinate all this?

I still. +1 your app; this is just an area i find concerning and am wanting to see how applicants will handle it.

Edited January 7, 2022 by Marlon P.

[MattAtlas]

On 10/12/2021 at 20:23, Haydizzle said:

Regarding the first: species relations are important! Every species exists in the same space, yet how the C'thur hive views dionae is not something readily expanded on. Similarly, where the lore could very much intersect and collaborate, areas remain and feel too separate. I'd like to explore where this could be developed.

How are you going to accomplish this in a sane way? There are way too many factions in the universe to try and write a page for each faction's feelings on another nation. Even worse if you get down to the species level.

[Lucaken]

1 hour ago, Marlon P. said:

You are correct that we have the Big Six of Sol, Biesel, Eridani, the Coalition, Elyra, and Dominia. That's still more factions than we have writers, but that's not the end of the story.

This is a misnomer in two ways - one, Biesel is not under the jurisdiction of the human team, but under the entirety of the lore team (and mostly the Loremasters, as I've come to understand). Furthermore, as I've argued at lenghts with others on Discord, you really can't consider Eridani it's own standalone faction. Not only does it not have the scope of a full standalone faction, it is pretty intrinsically tied to the rest of Sol once you begin to read through the other planets. Affording it the same amount of time and attention would, indeed, make it a lot - but as it stands, the true workload is around four large factions with various orbiting groups around them.

1 hour ago, Marlon P. said:

The wikipedia navboxes show the massive workload difference. Here is, to my knowledge and only using navbox pages, the counting of ONLY pages dedicated to a planet or system as available in the navbox for that species.

Using the planetary navbox as a measure of how much maintance (which is also the wrong word to use for reasons explained below) a species requires is a bit cheap, because it really doesn't represent the true depth of the lore elsewhere. Purely as an example, using your list, you'd be led to think that Tajara are the most abandoned corners of our lore. When in truth, should you go down into their various other pages (culture, government, history) you would find their lore is very dense with information. I haven't done a complete wordcount, but I'd bet you that Tajara would sit very high up, and any Tajara whitelist applicant will understand what I mean. More planets does not mean more 'maintanance' because --

1 hour ago, Marlon P. said:

You say that you won't need to do rewrites if the work is quality, but I do not agree with this. Just recently we saw something written expanding New Gibson that saw criticism and planned rewrites to address them. That isn't bad - it's good, and expected, that submissions undergo maintenence and revision.

-- not every rework is the same. Using this recent New Gibson update is particularly bad because based on the numerous discord posts and forum thread, one could say it did not hold up to the standard people expect of planets. Most additions simply do not spawn nearly as much criticism. To compare it to an actual human lore project, the recent Dominia changes were fairly massive, and yet inspired very little response. In fact, the number of Dominian players skyrocketed - a sign of stable and popular lore. Should something similar happen with the upcoming Elyra rework, we will have plenty of evidence that what Haydizzle and others are suggesting is true. Getting the reworks right is all that needs to be done. Afterwards, there will be plenty of space for the team to run arcs, news stories and everything else that is more 'active' development.

[Marlon P.]

23 minutes ago, Lucaken said:

Using the planetary navbox as a measure of how much maintance (which is also the wrong word to use for reasons explained below) a species requires is a bit cheap, because it really doesn't represent the true depth of the lore elsewhere

Thank you for the reply!

Do you feel that each location can be given the same detail as tajara, and maintained to be so? What critetia SHOULD be used?

 

My intention is to ask how the deputy loremaster considers these and how to resolve the issue, if they do find it an issue.

My concern is human development has immense responsibilities more than any other team. They seem to be spread thin. what should the deputy do to help?

Its my stance that humandevs have a hard time matching the depth of aliens for all locations because of their quantity. How I'd handle that isnt the full purpose of my replies to the app so i havent rambled off about solutions too much except as examples of what could be done.

23 minutes ago, Lucaken said:

Should something similar happen with the upcoming Elyra rework, we will have plenty of evidence that what Haydizzle and others are suggesting is true. Getting the reworks right is all that needs to be done. Afterwards, there will be plenty of space for the team to run arcs, news stories and everything else that is more 'active' development

If the level of activity can be sustained, and I'm wildly wrong about the level of maintenence placed on human developers, that is great. I love when my fears are unfounded. Precedence just worries me because the size and scope of humanity has always been a challenge to the team in a way unique to them.

Edited January 7, 2022 by Marlon P.

[Lucaken]

While it would be great to have each and every single human faction with the same depth as that of Tajara lore, it is simply not realistic. They have more planets and factions due to the sheer fact that we play a human-dominated setting, where humanity was very successful with their colonization attempts. Human lore does not need to match that depth to succeed (see again: Dominia), and viewing it as such is setting yourself up for disappointment. If anything is going to happen on that level, it'll be a steady, upward process after a majority of old lore has been covered - hopefully through news and whatnot.

The writers have already proven themselves as capable of writing quality lore, they simply need a deputy loremaster that will not interfere in the process itself too much, and ensures their activity. To get back to the point of this thread, that is mainly why I would prefer Alberyk over you or Haydizzle - I simply think he would be more capable of achieving that goal. With that said, I do want to apologize for hijacking the question - though I'm sure Hay will be able to provide his own thoughts on it.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Lucaken

[Haydizzle]

All things considered, there wasn't a twenty-message back and forth, so I wouldn't see it as hijacking.

On 07/01/2022 at 09:46, Marlon P. said:

The wikipedia navboxes show the massive workload difference. Here is, to my knowledge and only using navbox pages, the counting of ONLY pages dedicated to a planet or system as available in the navbox for that species.

The breakdown of pages to maintain by system/planet is extremely misleading. By this measure, anyone would wonder why we have three people on a team dedicated to three planets when there are three times as many planets named in Sol alone; it is with a closer look under the hood that someone would notice that tajara, skrell, and unathi each have around 20 pages to maintain and put lore into, a lot of which are some of the longest pages on the wiki.

With the Elyra work on the horizon (and I've gotten to help proofread some of it, it is quite thorough and well done), human lore is about to hit a point where they are starting to go after smaller fish to fry. They've worked on Dominia and Elyra to great degree; the megacorps and the Republic of Biesel are being worked by the greater team's contributions and coordination; Earth and the timeline of humanity was also brought in line with the current state of lore too. I reiterate my point from before that we don't have to go back and keep reworking things if the lore is all made consistent. The human team has done a fantastic job and I hope that I can continue to help them with their efforts should they need it.

On 07/01/2022 at 09:46, Marlon P. said:

Would you rather see the other twenty-six places made minor locations and not focused on? Or should all of them be kept as updated as possible? How will you identify when one of these pages starts to get atrophied? Elyra used to be cutting edge, and then the problem of maintenence falling off had it become super old because so much was focused elsewhere.

I honestly don't really know where these numbers are coming from, but for the most part (or perhaps even entirely), all of the locations in human lore fall under an existing factions. I think it's safe to say that things be considered "old lore" when it hasn't been touched up in a while in comparison to the rest of the lore. This can come from either content size or inconsistency with the rest of the written lore. Pages don't really decay, they're a test of time to what was written before, after all. I think Elyra is a good example; it's clear that it's current state hasn't been added to in a while because the content size is much smaller than the rest of the lore. If there were no reworks or major tweaks to the lore, then writing lore would just be about making sure to update the different factions equally rather than writing a bunch of lore for Sol, for example. And to this degree, I think that this is very doable.

I'm going to cherry pick some other ideas to respond to before going on to Matt's question.

On 07/01/2022 at 11:32, Lucaken said:

-- not every rework is the same. Using this recent New Gibson update is particularly bad because based on the numerous discord posts and forum thread, one could say it did not hold up to the standard people expect of planets. Most additions simply do not spawn nearly as much criticism. To compare it to an actual human lore project, the recent Dominia changes were fairly massive, and yet inspired very little response. In fact, the number of Dominian players skyrocketed - a sign of stable and popular lore. Should something similar happen with the upcoming Elyra rework, we will have plenty of evidence that what Haydizzle and others are suggesting is true. Getting the reworks right is all that needs to be done. Afterwards, there will be plenty of space for the team to run arcs, news stories and everything else that is more 'active' development.

Lucaken is correct here: not all reworks are of the same quality. When I overhauled Th'akh and Aut'akh, there was very little criticism I received from it (besides "remove Aut'akh entirely lol" and "I miss old Aut'akh"). Our community also has the benefit of being pretty thoughtful, and the current atmosphere around lore encourages constructive talking about the lore and how it can be better. There will always be small fish to fry that we may miss or otherwise have the power of hindsight to want to fix later, but I don't think what the human team has done in the past two years will be quickly thrown out the window.

On 07/01/2022 at 11:46, Marlon P. said:

Do you feel that each location can be given the same detail as tajara, and maintained to be so? What critetia SHOULD be used?

The biggest thing that species besides humans have going for them is a more detailed narrative that is smaller in scope. The actions of their countries won't be felt across the Spur most of the time, but it gives writers the chance to stick to overarching themes and ideas due to less content to write for. Skrell and unathi have adapted to hardship; vaurca and synths struggle with their own rights; tajara are fighting for what they believe in. Human lore is a realm unto itself that needs its own policies and strategy. The moratorium on new planets is a good measure, and otherwise, I think leaving small details for the playerbase to headcanon regarding what happens on specific planets in a faction is more appropriate to leave the team to write for the important, overarching ideas for each faction.

On 07/01/2022 at 12:55, Lucaken said:

The writers have already proven themselves as capable of writing quality lore, they simply need a deputy loremaster that will not interfere in the process itself too much, and ensures their activity.

To touch on this somewhat, perhaps Lucaken and I differ here; I want to be there to offer my help, whether to proofread, offer or build on ideas, or help round out efforts when it comes to writing lore. I want to be involved with the teams and engage with them so I remain up to date on as much of the new happenings as possible and be knowledgeable about them. Otherwise, I do think it's important that I'm not striking down every little idea that comes to the table with the lore. The teams should largely be autonomous, and while I would enjoy being able to help edit drafts, they should be able to stand on their own for most of their work.

 

On 07/01/2022 at 11:21, MattAtlas said:

How are you going to accomplish this in a sane way? There are way too many factions in the universe to try and write a page for each faction's feelings on another nation. Even worse if you get down to the species level.

Probably could have worded what I said better. I don't want to write relations for every single country and species— that's tedious and not useful most of the time. I used the C'thur and dionae example because they both inhabit the Jargon Federation primarily, but from what I recall, there isn't much on the wiki about how they both interact. There are a couple other sections of the lore that do this where there is surprisingly little on relations between groups. These could be added to the wiki in the form of putting relations on faction pages for its own header. It's not a huge task, but it's a small one that can make the setting feel more entwined together.

Edited January 9, 2022 by Haydizzle
Clarity

[MattAtlas]

What are your thoughts on languages in the setting?

Do you think that Tau Ceti Basic is fine the way it is? How do you feel about getting rid of it and instead relying on various languages with cross understanding?

Do you think the current human languages are fine, or should there be more? Would you break up Sol Common? If so, why?

What are your thoughts on current language availability?

[Haydizzle]

11 hours ago, MattAtlas said:

What are your thoughts on languages in the setting?

Do you think that Tau Ceti Basic is fine the way it is? How do you feel about getting rid of it and instead relying on various languages with cross understanding?

Do you think the current human languages are fine, or should there be more? Would you break up Sol Common? If so, why?

What are your thoughts on current language availability?

I think there could be more diversity in languages, but as it stands, besides a tongue for Elyra, I don't really see any more human languages getting added. I'm not opposed to adding more in the future, so I guess it comes down to a case by case basis. There are so many humans on station that I could reasonably see there be more diversity to them. I think tajara have like, what five or six? So I could see adding a couple more for humans given they have four currently (Tradeband, Freespeak, SolCom, Freespeak I think?) and have one on the way, and they are the most played race. I also currently think most of the species don't intend on adding more languages for the time being either.

I wouldn't mind easing up on TCB being a requirement and instead using translators, but I don't think that might be feasible from a developer standpoint, so currently I feel it may be best to keep it as is. Maybe some stipulation that, should something like Canon's proposal get accepted, full understanding and no speaking is fine should they be able to nod and write back if needed (for jobs without disability restrictions).

Again, language availability I would like to see made more available like in Canon's proposal, but unless the system changes, I think things are pretty alright how they are.

[WickedCybs]

I have not really worked with Haydizzle, so I can't speak to things like availability or anything. I can say though that he's a very approachable person and at least from my perspective, a team player that's very willing to work with others. I generally agree with his stances on things in lore, I really enjoyed the restructuring and additional lore Unathi had and believe anything further will be just as good. He's also pretty nice and while I wouldn't call any of the lore team unfriendly, it circles back to the approachability thing. Lore could do worse than have him as a deputy,  in the position itself there will be a chance to see how stuff unfolds and to learn new things beyond the set plans here already.

[Marlon P.]

Haydizz has a different approach to the solutions and problems in lore than I do as our posts show in this thread, but his philosophy is consistent, convincing, and he has a good game plan with it.  +1