The Future of Arizona
Posted on 10 Feb 2022 @ 2:23pm by Lieutenant Commander Elizabeth Watts
Greetings members of the USS Arizona!
I want to thank everyone in our community for putting forth the effort and giving this sim a try. Everyone has been doing a great job and I hope that the resources that I’ve found and provided are getting the job done. A special shout out to Penta for being a great asset in research especially in the service record department which I’m certain almost every member has taken advantage of.
Arizona is a very unique sim, the only one of its kind that I’m aware of. I want this to be the sort of sim where the effort put forth by the community is evident not only in our writing but also by just one look at our website. As well as putting the lessons learned in running the sim, in even just this short time, into good use to make our community excel even further. So how are we going to do that?
(Don’t worry there is a TL;DR at the bottom.)
A Slight Restructure
Effective immediately, I have increased the involvement of the Department Heads on the sim. Each one of the existing department heads have in some way shape or form contributed heavily to the success of the sim, providing ideas, and sounding out various sections of our sim. As discussed Penta has been instrumental in helping members build the foundation of their character’s professional existence, Pat has been with me on this idea supporting me since day 1 as Assistant Game Master, Beth has been great help with letting me bounce ideas off of her and instrumental in some of the upcoming projects, and Tristan has not only written about getting our boat ready to navigate the arctic circle he actually plotted a charted path for us.
While we will still operate with myself as Game Master, Pat will be the primary Assistant Game Master taking lead on my behalf when I’m unavailable, Penta will continue to work on research for us, Beth will be taking lead on our awards program that we will discuss, and Tristan will continue to be heavily involved in episode planning and the like.
As Department Heads are ultimately responsible for their departments both in and out of character in our sim rules already I think this makes logical sense to ensure that they all have a bigger say and direct involvement in how our sim operates.
So thank you to all of them!
Member Recognition
I have always been a large proponent for recognizing the members of a sim or community such as ours. In my time as a Game Master I have always tried to develop awards and to use them appropriately to recognize how hard the wonderful members we had were recognized by myself and the rest of the community. Just because I enjoy these sorts of things was reason enough to want to create such a system for Arizona but frankly the work that has to be done to be a member of this sim is quite involved and I think that it is even more of a reason to be sure to do this here.
An awards system will be developed with the following categories:
1) Milestone Awards – These awards will be given based on achieving certain milestones within the simulation as a member. Things like creating your biography, writing a post as both Officer of the Deck and Engineering Officer of the Watch at some point (mimicking the dolphin qualifications for officer), and other various aspects of our writing that make this sim unique and are worth recording.
2) Service Awards – These awards will be given based on the amount of time that a member spends with the USS Arizona. Awarded on the anniversary of the member joining Arizona at various points in time such as six months, a year, etc.
3) Content Awards – Awards based on the content of written posts such as humor, technical babble, a major milestone in a character’s development, etc. Potentially a post of the episode/month/quarter/etc.
4) Recognition Awards – This category probably needs a better name… however the point of these will be for a member to recognize something that a member of our community has done that benefits the simulation. This is something that ANY member can award by just contacting the staff; it can be done as often as needed. There will also be a GM level award for me to give out personally. Some examples would be a member taking time to create/edit some database/wiki content. A member recognizing a fellow member for helping them with a post idea, etc.
These various milestones and awards will be tracked by the staff to provide the proper recognition for how amazing all of our members are and to showcase our Esprit de Corps.
How to Submarine
Many games expect you to come ready to write the subject matter without a great deal of support. On the Arizona we’ll be doing the exact opposite. There is no expectation here that you know the ins and outs of your position, the workings of the Navy, submarines, or the socio-political elements we’ll be referencing.
With that said, we are here to help and want to support you in learning how to write your character well in this environment. That means that unlike many games feedback and dialog will be a component of writing together while we work on getting familiar with the environment of this game. That begins with joining and is the reason we asked each of you to speak with us about your character before even putting in an application. I, along with the department heads, will continue to make resources available to you, be open to discussion and drafting, and welcome questions.
Some ways to do this will include a discord thread to go along with each major JP, some post prompts to get some things accomplished with notes on how the general idea of the procedure works, and links to resources for different things we do. Of course we don’t expect you to memorize a manual but we want to be able to provide whatever we can for those who are interested to learn or at least get a visual idea of what is happening the best we can.
Part of this will be improving our website to make it evident to visitors that we understand this is overwhelming and that help is available from character creation to writing each post as needed.
New Website
Our biggest announcement is that we will be creating a new website that will be capable of functioning in the same way as Nova, with a better wiki, a better way to track awards, and to automate some of these things to make a much better experience for the crew. This will allow us to have an easier method for creating interactive content that can be easily update by anyone instead of having to hard code in HTML or use the poor wiki function in the nova system. This will also reduce the number of logins required if we were to use separate systems to accomplish this mission. We also plan for integration to allow login via Discord as all members are required to take part. I also feel this could be a better way to present items logically as we wish to display them without being driven based on how Nova functions.
There is a new room within the server #az-website that will discuss the development of this new website, questions can be asked, previews will be made, and news on its progress will be announced. There is currently no ETA as to when this new site will be used and we will continue to operate via nova routinely.
TL;DR
I know this was a lot to digest so I want to say thank you to every member of the sim for the effort that membership takes. I want you to know that I’m continually working to make this sim better and work well. The Department Heads are stepping up with more OOC duties and will have a more direct involvement with sim development. We will be introducing an awards system to recognize all of you for your wonderful efforts here. We will be better about broadcasting our efforts to help new and existing members be able to function within this sim. And we will be working on an exciting new website that will allow us to post like on nova, manage our bios like on nova, have a better wiki/database, and some other great user features! Please continue to use nova regularly.
Thanks for your time,
Stephen
Game Master
USS Arizona
Category: Sim Announcement
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