A report, wherein certain projects are teased, others are discussed, and a couple questions get answered while Muz watches Notre Dame Football play a paradoxically titled 'Home Game' 3 hours away from their home stadium.

Since my last report, there has been a fair bit of movement. Some faces changed, as some people retired and others shifted position. This movement is good, as it encourages growth. Fresh eyes always does. Fresh perspective brings energy to things, and that re-energizing factor helps get things pushed forward.

Internal Reports were done by the whole DC. We've reviewed things with each and every one of them, and started to put together plans for success for each specific sector of the club. Some need more attention than others, to be sure. None of us are perfect, and progress can be made in every corner of the club. As such, sitting down and finding the path for each section was important. As these plans develop and actions start taking form, I suspect there will be a little bit of a change to how some things are done. For example, we've been actively working to crosstrain specific roles with people who have proven that they are very good at that role's capacity. Big kudos to specifically Howlader and Andrelious for helping out in that regard.

Which brings me to the next point, albeit in a roundabout sort of way. I am very proud of how far we've come. When I first joined, the clans were at each others throats. There was vitriol, bitterness, and anger when there was anything other than competition to be had. It was rare to see clans and houses working together and not snarking off at each other. Heck, it was rare to have another clan's member in your clan's IRC channel. Sometimes it was just in spirit of fun, but there was a lot of the time that it wasn't. Fast forward a dozen years, and we have much more of a brotherhood, above and beyond clan and house affiliations. Sure, we have loyalty, pride to our homes...but it doesn't preclude us from helping each other out. It's this kind of attitude that helps the club, helps make sure that we will continue on, that we will pull through anything. The recent work with crosstraining has helped punctuate that in my mind lately, and I wanted to share it with you.

We spend a lot of time working to bring new traffic to our site. Search Engine Optimization, streamlined join process, social media presence..all of these programs that have been rolled out to help get people into the club and keep them here. But there's more than that. We are up to almost 14000 pins issued so far. That means that there are a lot of people who used to be fans, but left for one reason or another.

This is not news to most of us. In years past, there have been recruitment drives aimed at the rogues specifially. Some have had good luck, others have not been so well received. What we are setting up is a sort of 'newsletter' that would go out to the rogues periodically, and tell them what we've been up to, big changes, upcoming events, and kinda tease some of the stuff that we've been doing in an effort to get them to come back. The whole DC has been working on this mailer, refining it, streamlining it, and working the wording just right. When it rolls out live, we'll probably host it up somewhere, so everyone can see it. We intend on doing this once or twice a year. This will keep us off the spammer lists, as well as not drown the rogues in emails from us. We've all had people freak out on our maillists about wanting to be removed, so we don't want to make them sacrifice their email address/get us marked as spam anyway. At any rate, James has built a specialized 'transfer back' form for people who are coming back from the rogues that will make it super easy to get back into things, and also to track how effective the mailer is. We're hoping to get that rolling out in the next week or so, and hopefully, we'll have a little bit of an influx from the members returning.

I don't have an XBox. Never really did. But there was something that XBox (and later Sony) did that spoke to the OCD collector in me, and likely to many of you, as well. Acheivements. cleverly named things that you would earn for specific actions done in a game that would tag onto your profile and show off some of the things that you've done.

We started using that sort of verbage in the promotion robo-emails some time ago. Go back and look, where it says 'Addtional Robes have been unlocked' and that sort of thing. We figured it would be a nice way to advertise that you can do more, have access to more with each promotion.

We've been working on what is being called the 'Badges' dossier tab for a little while now. We're up to fifty such achievements when i looked yesterday, and that list is growing rather exponentially now. Some of them will be things that every member accomplishes ('Create a Dossier'), while some will require some work ('Attain an ELO ranking of X in the ACC')...yes ELO, more on that later. Much like Prestige, this won't be used to justify promotions and/or medals. The point is that there will be a running tally of specific touchpoints that you can rack up, collect, and brag on. It should be fun.

It's been an exciting couple of days in more than one way. In discussion with Jam3z, we determined that it'd be a lot easier to roll out specific functions of the Possessions Program one at a time and then link them, rather than save up all the work and then dump it out on you guys sight unseen. Basically, it's a huge project ("No really? It's only taken FOREVER, youse guys.") and being able to roll out BETA versions of little portions of it, tweak, and move on will be a big chunk off of our coder's minds. It makes the almost-impossible project actually feasable. There were reasons that I wanted to get it all released at once, chief among them is to not have to hit the reset button every time new goodies come out to buy as well because everyone already spent all their creds on something already.

So what does that actually mean? It means that there's been progress. Lots of progress. We're currently running numbers to make sure that the average member at specific ranks will be able to buy a decent selection of stuff. We don't want to spend all this time and energy making it so that either a.) you have to be an elder for it to matter because everyone else is broke and everything is expensive or b.) everyone gets too much money and buys everything they could possibly want before the end of the first month. It's a tricky scenario, and there are several key touchstones being discussed. I'm not going to divulge everything, but one of the keys is that by the time a member gets DJK, they should be able to buy a starter ship and a decent combat kit worth of gear.

"Starter Ship?"

Yeah, along with massive lightsaber customization, we have a heck of a lot of upgrades for starships in the system, so you can make your personal hunk-o'-junk pretty bloody awesome. There's a lot of stuff that we're doing in Possession's initial launch (after the beta roll out, of course), and we're already talking about insane features to bolt on for a 2.0 release. Some of those? NPCs (Droids! Pets! Apprentices!) that you can gear up, Properties (Store more stuff!) and a sweet dovetail system with the upcoming Alchemy Guide.

You'll forgive me for running all frothy-mouthed with this stuff, as it has been a long time coming, and I'm super excited to see things coming to a head and nearing release.

"Wait, you said something about ELO?"

Yuuup. I don't want to steal Mav's thunder as Voice, but the idea of an ELO system int he ACC had been discussed for a few years now, and when the new Antei Combat Centre was built, an ELO system was considered as something that we were certain to eventually include.

What is an ELO system? Basically, it's a ranking system that shows relative skill, as opposed to just spamming matches and winning against newcomers before they know what they are doing. Something that ticked off the huge fans of the ACC in the past is that someone could beat twenty APP Darfh N00BC4kes and have the same ACC rank as someone who fought hard against the very best people who could be playing. So, what that means is that people will get points based on the difficulty of their opponent. It's a bit more of an indicator of how good an opponent is, as opposed to just a blank indicator of activity.

Ask the GM Time!

Jaredi asks "Will the prestige system allow something similar to the legacy system in TOR?"

I had to clarify here, to make sure I was understanding the question properly. The Legacy system in TOR allows you to unlock for purchase certain perks and items ingame. To be completely honest, Prestige was the core mechanic for deciding what a person had access to buy in the original documents. The argument was that Bill Gates (as an example) might have the money to buy a aircraft carrier, but he might not have the access to be able to get someone to sell it to him.

A few years down the road, and Prestige launched well before any other part of the system, so it's basically been a bragging rights system for some time now, and not everyone can be expected to know or even recall the original intent, but there it is. Higher prestige = More things that you could possibly buy in Possessions.

Marick asks "<@Wally> Muz: Would you and Sarin ever consider doing a Live Q&A similar to what I've done? Could be a good way to get people to hear about out club on the social medias."

It's a cool idea, but i think scheduling it might be a little tricky. It's something we've talked about, though.

A little later, also from Marick: "With how strong our Grand Masters are, why do they need a guard? :P"

It's a valid point. At the pinnacle of rank in the club, it can seem that these people are basically gods. It's not exactly the case. By and Large, the GMRG serves almost as an honorific, a tradition, ceremonial. But their presence acts somewhat as a bolster against attrition. A stray blaster bolt is far less likely to even get to the point where a GM has to quickly divert/absorb/deflect it if he has been surrounded with people who are charged with keeping him alive. That said, i doubt that any Grand Master is comfortable enough that he'd let his guard down enough that if it did make it past his guard to not handle it themselves. Arguably, Sarin might not have died fighting Crask had he been accompanied by a few of the Guard. They may not have made it out alive, but Sarin would have been able to see his foe's true strength somewhat ahead of time and paced himself accordingly.

Malik asks "Dear AskTheMuz, How long would it be before your bar dried up if you drank one drink per day?"

Well, with some back of the envelope math here... i have 46 types of whisky on my bar. there's also probably about a dozen and a half bottles of various liquors below, and a wine rack full of stuff for the wife. If I drank only one normal sized drink per day, and never had anyone else over to share, I'd guess it'd last me well into 2016.

Related question: "<@Atty> Muz, which is your favorite type and why?"

My regular drink is Glenmorangie 10. On special occasions, I get into the Oban 14, which is probably my favorite for the expenditure involved. Both are Highland Single Malt Scotch Whisky, which is my favorite region for Scotches. The Glenmorangie is a well-rounded dram, and I convinced the local liquor store to let me get 1.75L bottles for 60 bucks, so it's reasonably priced. The Oban is a fair bit tastier, but a fair bit more expensive.

TL;DR

• Everybody's helping out, regardless of clan. This is awesome.

• Rogue Newsletter campaign to bring back the retired folks

• Badges (DB Achievements) getting worked on.

• Possessions getting a piecemeal rollout (BETA, BIGTIME) soon (tm)

And that is about all for this time. Have fun out there!