Sipp,

Thank you for your e-mail!  We're going to try to respond to this by point/paragraph.

We have been a bit absent lately, but it's because one of our mods is currently job hunting as well as attending school, while the other is recovering from major surgery.  In the latter's case, Cass' surgery didn't have the intended effect so she's had to spend a lot of time in bed rather than at the computer.  Suffice to say, we do what we can, when we can, as quickly as we can. If it becomes more of an issue, we’ll consider taking on another mod; however, we don’t think that we’re typically busy enough that another mod would have much to do.

We answer e-mails when the two of us are able to spend the time to do it.  In general, we will answer e-mails within 48 hours, although there are times where it will take longer due to the subject of the e-mail itself; a lot of the time it's a combination of us not having the time to sit down and answer e-mails as well as asking the opinions of our helpers or sometimes, the former mods. We fully admit that responses have slowed down recently due to the aforementioned real life events currently going on for both of us, but you’re always welcome to shoot us a follow up email if you think we might have missed something or you need a quick response  Immediate responses have never and will never be guaranteed, unless someone explicitly states that the e-mail is time sensitive, and in that event we try to get back to them as soon as possible.  We've made a few announcements in the past asking the playerbase to be patient with us when it comes to e-mails, but if another is necessary we'll be sure to add it to the next announcement post.

When it comes to our helper mods, a few of them already help us with various aspects of the game.  However with the numerous complaints that have come with AC and players squatting on characters, we've had to take over doing that ourselves.  We've also taken on a new housekeeping mod, again, because of numerous complaints that things weren't updated.  When it comes to win records, as we've mentioned and kept in the announcements, win records are updated by the NPCs after they run a game.

When it comes to announcements, again, we post those when we're available to on Fridays.  Sometimes, we may push them back a day for various reasons, which is usually where real life > roleplay comes into play. We did miss one announcements post on January 29th, and we’re aware of this fact - it was a one time mistake that won’t be happening again, and we apologize for it. As it is, we're discussing other options when it comes to announcements posts, as we feel that they are a bit repetitive and that no one reads most of what we post.

When it comes to the TDM specifically, we posted it quickly in order to please the playerbase and in all honesty, have only heard your complaint about us posting it a few days late.  Again, we'd like to point out that real life does take precedence, but if we say we're going to put a post up at the request of the playerbase, it will be done as soon as we can manage it. In the future, we will be rewriting it and prettying it up in order to welcome new players, however!  We are talking about such things as integrating the TDM in game canon and the like, in order to be a bigger draw for new and old players alike.

One thing you mentioned in your e-mail was that you want us to open ourselves up to the playerbase; we have mentioned numerous times, in official posts, plurks, as well as jumping into players' plurks that they're more than welcome to e-mail us.  We keep an open door policy when it comes to communication - no matter how small the problem or question, we never want anyone to feel as though they can't e-mail us.  In all honesty, we're a little disappointed that you feel this isn't the case, as we know you've been in some of those plurks in the past.  Especially when it comes to the bigger issues, we want people to come to us and open communications with us in order to solve whatever problem is at hand. The reason we don’t typically like people to direct questions or concerns to us on plurk is because of how unreliable it is as a medium, as you've said yourself in past e-mails; we can never be sure if it’s updated correctly or notifying us if we’ve received a ping. However, we want to help fix any issues we can, so if we happen to see a problem occurring on plurk, of course we’ll step in and try to resolve it - and honestly, we don’t think that’s a negative thing, even if there’s a possibility of sending mixed messages.  E-mail also gives us a record of the discussion that we make sure to save and archive so we can refer back to it in the event that someone asks a similar question or we need to reference it for a number of reasons.  So overall, e-mail is preferable for questions and short discussions.

However, that isn't to say that you can't open a private plurk to us and the other helpers involved in plot, which is something we've brought up as a possibility in the past.  For longer discussions involving more than just the mods and another person, plurk is preferable since there are very few people with access (and want access) to the mod email.  It also gives us a chance to bring in everyone involved and throw ideas at one another.  Most communications behind the scenes are like this, like the ones you've been involved in.  Again, we welcome you to open a private plurk to us and any other helpers you wish to involve in order to throw ideas out and receive feedback and assistance!  But for short queries, we prefer e-mail.

One thing we do want to point out though is that you say you feel as though you're carrying the plot yourself, but you've only approached us with questions.  You also say that we should be dropping bits of Nyssa plot into the game, but quite frankly, you haven't given us a solid idea of where you plan to go with the plot. You mentioned that you don’t know the overall plot, but we did discuss it in the last plurk.  If you need any further details to be able to play Nyssa successfully, you’re of course welcome to approach with any questions or suggestions you might have. If you'd like us to drop plot into the game, we'd be more than happy to!  But in order to do that, we need a solid idea of what you plan to do with Nyssa and where you plan to take her as well as the plot in order to do that.  (We definitely suggest setting up a doc open to the mods and any helpers you wish involved with a timeline and a solid idea of your ideas.  That way, we can refer to it to use in future posts.)

As for your suggestions:

- We've already spoken about communication in general, but a game-wide discussion post will be happening soon.  Before that, though, we'd like to take the time to go over the Nyssa plot discussion in order to take a closer look at what players have had to say - we’ll be doing so soon, and getting in touch with you regarding it once we’ve taken everything into consideration.

- We already discussed this!  We will be posting an ad to ATP as soon as possible; we don't know what sock comm you're talking about, though, and we didn't know that RPAnons did advertisements. Feel free to give us more details about the sock comm, and as for RPAnons, we'll check it out! Thank you for the suggestion.

- We spoke about the TDM further up!

- Again, you're more than welcome to start a private plurk whenever you want to pow-wow - or even let us know beforehand a time that would work for you so we can plan it in advance with other plot helpers. In the future, we’ll be more proactive about reaching out to you every so often to ask you if there are any plot ideas you need to discuss with us or go over with other players involved in plot. However, we encourage you to be proactive whenever you wish to discussion plots with us and the other helpers involved; we weren’t aware prior to this point that you were struggling with where to go with this plot, especially considering your excellent ideas about Nyssa’s shadow guards that have been coming into play recently. If we somehow missed you mentioning the fact in another email, we apologize for that!

- As mentioned above, plurk is unreliable at times and for shorter communications we prefer e-mail.  We do reach out to players on plurk if further discussion is needed, since sometimes it's easier to have a real-time discussion rather than going back and forth with e-mail.  We do try to get back to people within 48 hours, like we said above, but with more complication questions it may take a few days longer, since we do need time to discuss and sometimes ask our helpers and the former mods what their opinions on the topic are.

With NPCs changing hands, such as Princess and Queen, we've always put those announcements at the top of our announcement posts.  With the recent change to Patron AC, we wanted to get it out there as quickly as possible with AC going up that day.

- Considering the issues with players squatting on characters (that you yourself have brought to us more than once), we have no plans to change player activity requirements anytime soon, especially with how we allow players to stack threads in order to meet those requirements.

As we’ve mentioned before, one of the main reasons we adjusted patron AC is because we’ve received numerous emails from players about how their patrons are scarcely available; we have to address these concerns. As such, while we would be willing to hold another one, another patron discussion wouldn’t be a fair way to solve the issue of patron AC, since only patron players will have their voices heard. We agree that there should be more ways to incorporate patrons into metaplot, and we’re certainly brainstorming this very thing - however, before increasing patron AC, we did give patrons a variety of different events they could organize with their teams, and no one took advantage of it for two months until we increased Patron AC.  If we hold another patron discussion, we'd prefer it to take place along with the game-wide discussion itself, so that everyone can express their opinion on the matter.

We do like the ideas you've given us, though!  And we will discuss them at length along with the other things we've been brainstorming.

- As for teams, we're already discussed everything you mentioned re: partner teams, bringing teams down to six players plus the hobo spot, as well as temporarily dissolving teams such as Ometotchtli.  But as you said, we'd rather hear how the game as a whole feels about this before we put anything in motion.

 - We touched on Nyssa and plot above!

- We have been trying to do more mingles lately, so we appreciate your ideas! We want to add that anyone who wants similar mingles is free to put them up or ping us to do so; for certain kinds of mingles, neither of us have echoes who would ICly cause certain kinds of CR building events within the setting. However, we’re very receptive to this kind of thing and welcome anyone who wants to put up or run a post like that with their own Echoes! Additionally, if anyone ever has an idea for a mingle they think a certain Echo would run, they’re free to ask the Echo’s player if they can borrow them for the sake of a post they want to run.  We do have a spreadsheet with information for that very reason.

- We have something planned for Good Ended characters that we're still working the bugs out of, so to speak.  This has been something we've been discussing for a few months now, as we'd love to see these characters come back and have a chance to take place in Nyssaplot! We’ll certainly be approaching you with more details and ideas once we’re able to iron out more of the kinks in the concepts we think might be interesting.  We'll also be seeking feedback from players who have already reached a Good End with their characters in the near future, as we want them to be involved as well.

In conclusion, we're certainly taking everything you've said to us to heart, and we hope that you'll do the same with the things we've pointed out.  Again, we're doing our best to be as present and proactive as we can, and we always welcome players to come to us with any questions or concerns they want to run by us.

Thank you so much for all your suggestions, and we hope we’ve helped to ease some of your concerns as well! Please feel free to email us once more if there’s anything more we can assist you with.

- Kyr Mods