Hello
guys and girls... and in-betweens and outsiders... Everyone !
Administ-rat-rivia time !
As some of you know, I've been appointed "Fuel Rat Respresentative to the Player Group Initiative" and as such have gained
insight into another dimension... access to
knowledge beyond compair a special forum where we discuss Player Groups and how best to improve upon that idea ; and by that I mean what can Player Groups do to improve the ED experience for all and how can Frontier help Player Groups in that endeavour. Some of that information is publicly available on these forums, some of it is restricted to the place I was refering above.
As I am but a single Rat and as such cannot squeak for the more than 500 Rats (and one Cheer-Leader, wink wink) of different tastes and opinion that make up this Mischief ; and I know some of you are pretty opinionated on things, have a strong will and sometime opposing viewpoints (someone said Aisling's better than Arissa, pshe !) and such, I come to you today with some kind of Reader's Digest from the Forum.
I cannot go into details (as it could be boring, I don't wan't copy paste a whole forum section, and maybe I shouldn't be doing this because it is a restricted forum part) but here's what we've discussed so far :
- Group Definition : What's a Private Group, a Player Group, how do they interact, what are their goal and motivations...
- Group Management Tools : Group creation and naming, Ranks (Founder/Leader, Officers...), Group Icons on the GalMap...
Paint Jobs, Decals
- Group Activities : PvP, PvE, Community Goals, Events...
- Wishlist for the User Interface : Group Chat (like local chat), meet-up point setting (to arrange rendez-vous with Groupmates)...
It seems Player Groups are now called Player Faction, and this brings me to another point I'd like to raise with you Rats. If you look at some systems (PHIAGRE is the first that comes to mind) in the galaxy map, you'll see a description about the player group "residing" there. We have played around with the idea of making FUELUM our home because that's the only system
in the whole game that you can find by typing "fuel" in the search bar, it has an anarchic faction called the FUELUM CREW that we could maybe ask to be renamed "Fuelum Rats". It's also on the border of Imperial and federal spaces, is not far from Sol, has a Coriolis... So my question to you guys is : should we make FUELUM our official home ?
Also, I've seen on that forum that some groups have more than one representative. As we are a very diverse gathering of people, I thought it would be nice to have someone with a different viewpoint to maybe join me in my Propaganda Campaign so as to better represent this Glorious Mischief of ours. I know some people are interested but there was to be more takers I'd like to know.
Oh yeah, nearly forgot. Today we had the first Skype Conference between Frontier and the Player Groups. It was mostly to organize things (how often do we meet, exchange business cards, send Fuel Rats Mugs to The CODE...) but I managed to get two informations that are worth knowing :
- Instancing is here to stay. For now, it's the way the game was designed and it would require a lot of code rework to address this issue. The devs "are looking into it" but don't expect a solution in the near future (I'd not raise my hopes for Horizons either)
- Credit Transfer between Players is not coming soon. This is something they're considering but it's a system that could be abused really fast so they are thinking how best to address that as well.
Everything else we spoke about was organizing stuff for upcoming Events (you may have heard about "The Mayhem" happening on the Stress Test, there are some pretty nifty things planned Community-Wise and Lore-Wise, but we didn't get any specifics nor the impression Frontier had specifics to share to begin with.
God I hope I'm not breaking any implicit agreement not to say anything.
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Thanks for the lovely gifts
Michael
You're very welcome ! Get us a picture of how it looks when you use it, maybe ?