Greetings Lokans,
We've been doing some internal soul searching about the Slicer rank. Initially our plan was to take a wholesale review of every player who was a Slicer and demote any we felt had not been living up to the spirit of the role. This was an effort in trying to restore Slicer as a meaningful rank on the server that other players could look up to.
As that list narrowed, we realized we were effectively singling out a very small handful of players for demotion, with the rest being largely inactive players, old players, or just ex-staff. At some point we realized that the concept of Slicer was somewhat broken. Initially it was really just a "good vibes" rank:
Slicers were thus getting promoted for a permanent rank on the grounds of having been good candidates at that time. The issue is players can become apathetic, change their mind about enjoying loka, go inactive/quit etc after any amount of time. These things are all fine but at some point you still have the permanent Slicer rank to wear regardless of whether your behavior has changed or not. As a result players can start to turn toxic and yet still be Slicers which defeats the point of the rank and leads us to the general sentiment about the rank today.
We realized we had a problem of scale and time. We keep promoting Slicers because they're great players now, but we'll never have to stop watching for Slicers in need of demotion and it doesn't scale well.
As a result we've made the decision to remove the Slicer rank in full. Instead we are looking to introduce a new concept called Featured Lokan. We'll be keeping an eye out for outstanding Lokans that have contributed something very meaningful to the server and, provided there is a candidate for that month, highlight them on Capital Day with recognition and a statue for that month. The bar for this is much higher since we expect to have less of them, but there are certainly many Lokans of late who have created some awesome things for the server. Ultimately, we still want to recognize positive players who have helped Lokans out, we just don't feel a permanent forever-rank is appropriate.
Chat Changes
Removing Slicer as a rank means that the vast majority of chat shows everybody as basically a [Settler] with the occasional sentry/guardian/elder speaking. On Loka we tend to favor minimalism and thoughtful chat colors/decoration over the rainbow vomit of color commonly see elsewhere and so we have an opportunity to clean things up a bit here.
We will stop showing ranks in chat, and will add the player head icon next to all chat messages and begin using iconography to differentiate staff/etc from average players. There will be additional polish as well across how chat looks on the server since this is a good time for it. Expect to see the chat changes come in over the next few days.
That's all! We're sad to see Slicer go but we felt it was a necessary, if not inevitable change given how it works once the community got larger and older. Who do you think the first Featured Lokan should be?
Go Forth!
-Crypt
We've been doing some internal soul searching about the Slicer rank. Initially our plan was to take a wholesale review of every player who was a Slicer and demote any we felt had not been living up to the spirit of the role. This was an effort in trying to restore Slicer as a meaningful rank on the server that other players could look up to.
As that list narrowed, we realized we were effectively singling out a very small handful of players for demotion, with the rest being largely inactive players, old players, or just ex-staff. At some point we realized that the concept of Slicer was somewhat broken. Initially it was really just a "good vibes" rank:
- Be cool
- Help others
- Have done those things more or less recently
Slicers were thus getting promoted for a permanent rank on the grounds of having been good candidates at that time. The issue is players can become apathetic, change their mind about enjoying loka, go inactive/quit etc after any amount of time. These things are all fine but at some point you still have the permanent Slicer rank to wear regardless of whether your behavior has changed or not. As a result players can start to turn toxic and yet still be Slicers which defeats the point of the rank and leads us to the general sentiment about the rank today.
We realized we had a problem of scale and time. We keep promoting Slicers because they're great players now, but we'll never have to stop watching for Slicers in need of demotion and it doesn't scale well.
As a result we've made the decision to remove the Slicer rank in full. Instead we are looking to introduce a new concept called Featured Lokan. We'll be keeping an eye out for outstanding Lokans that have contributed something very meaningful to the server and, provided there is a candidate for that month, highlight them on Capital Day with recognition and a statue for that month. The bar for this is much higher since we expect to have less of them, but there are certainly many Lokans of late who have created some awesome things for the server. Ultimately, we still want to recognize positive players who have helped Lokans out, we just don't feel a permanent forever-rank is appropriate.
Chat Changes
Removing Slicer as a rank means that the vast majority of chat shows everybody as basically a [Settler] with the occasional sentry/guardian/elder speaking. On Loka we tend to favor minimalism and thoughtful chat colors/decoration over the rainbow vomit of color commonly see elsewhere and so we have an opportunity to clean things up a bit here.
We will stop showing ranks in chat, and will add the player head icon next to all chat messages and begin using iconography to differentiate staff/etc from average players. There will be additional polish as well across how chat looks on the server since this is a good time for it. Expect to see the chat changes come in over the next few days.
That's all! We're sad to see Slicer go but we felt it was a necessary, if not inevitable change given how it works once the community got larger and older. Who do you think the first Featured Lokan should be?
Go Forth!
-Crypt
