Man, where do I even begin with Thran?
It’s hard to decide, to be honest. With Thran, there’s no question about what he did. It’s how much he did. The answer is usually? A lot. Thran has become a staple of the Regent Staff since I first hired him many moons ago, and continues to perform above par and expectation as my Praetor. Every single discussion, Thran is there. Every debate, every decision, Thran plays a part. He may not always like the part, or the decision, and we do disagree fairly often, but we always come out on the other side fine and one thing is for certain; Thran does the job and the job gets done.
Right after my last reward, Thran finished and practically solo-launched our Capital Ship Upgrades project, inputting, stocking, and doing quality control on all 102 different upgrade prototypes - that he has been previously rewarded for pretty much solo developing - putting in several hours of work to ensure that these were deployed with minimal issues and opened up swaths of new avenues for the Clans to tell their fictional stories. Whenever you’re deploying slotable upgrades, however, you need to add sub-item slots for those prototypes to the items in question, requiring Thran to navigate several pages over and over and over to add this new sub-item slot to every clan capital ship in the system, and then do a quality control sweep over all that work before announcement to ensure minimal errors during launch. Any deployment is a massive undertaking, one such of this especially so, and Thran muscled through it entirely on his own.
Thran was a big part of our discussions on what to do with the Celebration Store, which we felt was serving dual purpose and gatekeeping the most lore-intensive items that members might want to acquire more than once a year to tell their stories and really build their characters. As of last May, the Regent Staff massively changed how this store worked (previously stocking both heavy lore-related and special edition items, now stocking only special edition items).
For the last two years, we’ve run our Life Day Celebration Series on November 17th to commemorate the near real-life Star Wars holiday of Life Day. Each year, this guy plays a big part in the discussions and making sure it goes smoothly, helping organize competitions and ensure a smooth experience for the Regent Staff’s annual event. While he only ended up running a single competition this year (through no fault of his own, sorry man :P) Thran helped with the Life Day Celebration II item launch, stocking all of the prototypes and performing a quality control sweep with various corrections - even working up two prototypes of his own during development.
Our big project this year has been the Crafting System, the beast that keeps rearing its ugly head in Thran’s direction. We consider this project to be our whale, given it involves over a thousand different prototypes and many different nuances that normal item development doesn’t have - such as crafting materials, their cost, the overall item’s cost, its additional perks for being crafted vs purchased, etc. He’s been my main go-to man on this project, sharing insane ramblings amongst back and forth and debating - endlessly, I might add - all the little tidbits and inner workings of the project while slaughtering a massive amount of the work. He’s worked on countless aspects of this project from its initial inception of Masterwork Possessions to its transformation into a much more development-heavy Crafting System, devoting tens of hours to bringing a new system that (when polished and fully deployed, instead of our little lightsaber and corvette beta test) members will hopefully enjoy for years of come. He was integral in discussions for our what we should work on/launch first, and insisted on a “small scale” launch that we could use to get feedback on the system for additional tweaks and polish.
His tenacity has paid off, and after launching craftable lightsabers and member corvettes (which he did a quality control check on, which included checking all lightsaber crafting materials, lightsaber prototypes, and the crafting blueprints recipes) we were able to gather important member feedback that we can use to improve the system for everyone, offering his own ideas on how we can make crafting more enjoyable and give it a bit of more “oomph”/a larger dopamine hit for the member.
Even with the dozens of hours that Thran has put into his club just doing project work just as my Praetor, that still wasn’t enough. He’s been consistently keeping an eye on existing and new launches from the team, and has been making numerous quality of life improvements/fixes to prototypes in the system that stretch as far back as possessions’ inception under Evant and had been missed with numerous sweeps by the Regent Staff and non-staff members over the years. I could try for days, and I could still not put into words how much Thran does behind the scenes for every member that uses possessions (re: pretty much everyone but Howie) and for me personally as my Praetor.
I knew from the moment I hired Thran that it could take him a while to adjust to Regent Staff thinking from Clan leadership thinking (you need to have a certain level of disconnect, i.e. we don’t control what clans do in the sandbox, we just help fill it and give them the toys to make their sand castles). It did. But I also knew that I was going to be getting an impeccable work ethic, someone that I could rely on to always push me or play devil's advocate, and someone that (like me) was a bit of a redemption story and was going to be better for it. All of that turned out to be true. When the day finally comes that I retire, I know that the then Grand Master and Deputy Grand Master will open applications for Regent. They’d be stupid not to; you always want to see what kind of interest is out there, what kind of ideas…. But they’d also be stupid not to hire Thran. And that says pretty much all it needs to on its own.
This is by and far probably the longest recommendation I have ever written. I could keep going. There are so many little intricate things that are required for deploying a release of any type, or so many different things that can occur in one of our days-spanning conversations, that if I were to type out every little thing a staffer had to do over and over on every single deployment, and really break it down, my recommendations would be so much longer. There’s a misconception (how common, I’m not sure) that being on the Regent Staff is hard, or daunting. It’s not. It’s about organization, being thorough, and most of all pacing. When you’re dealing with (consistently) almost a dozen different fields on several different pages for a single prototype, and that’s just during deployment, you really need to control your pace to avoid burnout during development and deployment of a Regent Staff Project. Thran aces it.
Thank you for everything you do.
General Zxyl Bes'uliik, 2024-04-29 20:17:01 UTC