30 Years of DB

Happy 30th, DB! As some of you might be aware, this is a big year for the club: based on our research into dusty old archives, the oldest date we can confirm the DB existed is March 24, 1995. We can infer from these sources that it probably existed for some unknown amount of time before that, but those ancient AOL bulletin boards are beyond our reach.

In short, by our best reckoning, the DB turns 30 this year. We have a number of things planned to celebrate this major milestone over the course of the year (including the DB's first Season, which you'll hear more about from Atra very soon) starting with a modern reimagining of the DB's logo.

Starting today, the new logo will replace our old post-Exodus logo (which was over 20 years ago!). We have a long list of places that need to be updated, so please bear with us over the next few weeks and do not contact us about places you find that still use the old logo. If the logo still hasn't been updated somewhere by March 1, then please let us know! Without further ado, here's the new club logo in some of its variations, along with our incredible Herald's descriptions:

A lot of work has gone into preparing this, mostly by Malfearak. Please thank him for all of the time and effort he's put into this! You should seen several of these new logo implementations immediately!

XP Adjustments

A week ago, I notified the Consuls of the some proposed XP changes. The focus of these changes is twofold: first, to promote our traditional activity pillars of fiction, gaming, and graphics; second, to reduce the incentives our system currently provides to spamming low-effort competitions. To those ends, we are implementing the following changes:

• Increase the XP value of CIs and CGs from 5 to 12
• Reduce the XP value of Cr-D from 200 to 120
• Reduce the XP value of Cr-R from 100 to 90

I came to these numbers by looking at the last two years (post-XP) of activity. Cr-Ds and -Rs have provided a disproportionate amount of XP compared to all other sources except high-level sacs, and fiction and gaming events have generally under-rewarded participants compared to gaming and the extremely popular puzzles. Based on the last two years' worth of activity, these increases to CIs and CGs will more or less offset the crescent value reductions and (hopefully) promote more more fiction and graphics competitions and fewer easily spammable miscellaneous comps. Malfearak will also be slightly reducing the number of CGs awarded to "easy" graphics comps from 4 to 3 to mitigate the impact of coloring book comps.

CFs are not being increased in XP value as they remain easier to accrue in large numbers and overall more valuable in XP terms than CIs and CGs even with these proposed changes. Moreover, it is extremely difficult to balance CFs by adjusting their XP value given that the smallest possible increment of increase is 100% (1->2). We will aim instead to balance them based on rate of accrual, as the Fist office has traditionally done.

We are also looking at increasing credit values as follows:

• CF: 1 -> 5
• CI and CG: 9 -> 40
• BN: 1200 -> 1700
• SN: 1800 -> 2300
• GN: 2700 -> 3000
  

All of these changes will be prospective only. Crescents, clusters, and novae awarded before the effective date of these changes will retain their old XP and credit values.

Finally, we will be making changes to Elder XP. Based on a sample size of one GM (me) trying to award DCers and CONs, and with advice from the Star Chamber on EL3 and 4 in particular, it's become apparent that we somewhat undershot with our initial XP values by not increasing our internal benchmarks for Elder XP nearly as much as we increased EQ XP last time around. The changes will only impact EL2+ and there will be no XP adjustments based on these changes:

• EL2: 167500 -> 190000
• EL3: 330000 -> 400000
• EL4: 655000 -> 800000

The leadership time requirement for EL4 is also increasing from 3 to 6 years.

These changes will go into effect as soon as James is able to implement them. I hope that these will be the last such adjustments of my term!