Posted by Kim on May 13, 2018, 10:00am
Missed May's Office hours? Here's a round up of questions and answers.Fun fact: Those messages in a bottle we used during this Epic Week were originally designed for EW 2015, the first ever Epic Week to be held when the site had such a thing as an inventory. But I couldn't figure out how I really wanted to make use of them, so they got shelved; then I found them again when planning this year, and realized they were a perfect thematic match.
I also thought I'd point out that being able to buff people, and the random heals that occasionally happened from wandering the site while injured were a result of user suggestions after EW 2017, so please do let me know what you'd like to see in EW 2019.
There's some chance it'll get integrated!Actually... I have a question about Epic Week... The combat stuff is very... Frustrating. When I was playing, I was only landing a hit maybe 33% of the time. Was I doing something wrong? Can I also suggest that maybe the negative status effects not last as long?
The hit odds/damage rates are very carefully tuned to ensure that you need a minimum number of people all working in concert to take down a given enemy. It's unlikely you're doing anything wrong personally, though if you were trying to solo, you're pretty much guaranteed to not be able to take down an enemy.
You can also instantly cure status effects with a number of different items. The armory never ran out of stimsprays, for example.
In 2016 status effects were actually permanent unless you used a specific item to get rid of them. In 2017, that changed to four hours.
I'm mostly curious on where the idea for the mythical Doubutt came from.
Every year we run an art contest that decides what "genre mascots" will be displayed on our homepage for the rest of the year.
Doubutt was submitted as a candidate for that contest in... I want to say 2014? By the member Wizard. It actually didn't win that year because the joke only worked if you could see both ends of the animal, and the picture was too crowded to get both ends totally visible. But I contacted Wizard and ended up purchasing the design from him because I knew it had to be part of RPR canon. Doubutt became our 404 error page mascot almost immediately after that, and later, was incorporated into Epic Week via the game my father and I built. Is there anything, maybe in the future, that would be more inclusive to those of us that... Kinda aren't exactly known for working well with others? Solo grinds or something? The frenetic pace of Epic Week actually leaves me kinda apprehensive towards participating.
The Epic Week games are overwhelmingly designed to encourage and reward working together, and I can pretty much tell you I'm unlikely to put much more emphasis on solo tasks.
However, that's not to say there are none. We do have the Doubutt game, the numerous contests, and in past years we had the hide-and-seek search element. That was removed this year to make discussion of the trivia much easier for more players to engage in, and replaced with fishing and crafting as new solo activities.
I'll also say, every year I get messages from people saying they are too shy or not good at coordinating with others for whatever reason, and every year I also get messages from some of those same people saying their minds were totally changed by participation.
I'd urge you to give it a shot if you haven't. But not every event is going to be everyone's cup of tea. If you don't like the pace, there's nothing wrong with ignoring Epic Week or just rolling your dice in the tombola
Kim, we had a WoW display widget at one point, didn't we? What became of it?
We did! It would automatically display all the equipment your character in WoW had on.
What happened was WoW totally changed its api requiring everyone who had built something like that to scramble to update their code. I had to decide whether to spend weeks re-architecting the widget or to let it die. The final death blow was when I ran a scan of the site and discovered that only 6 people were making use of the widget.
I just couldn't see my way to spending weeks fixing something that WoW could break again at any moment for the benefit of six characters, several of which were not very much in use anyway.
What was your favorite thing about this year's EW?
Oh my goodness I liked so many things about it! Something that immediately delighted me was seeing people who had previously said they were "not smart enough" to work on trivia or puzzles diving right in and actively helping to brainstorm on them when we switched to having individual forum topics for each riddle, with its clues automatically glued to the top of that topic so it was easy to see them. I had made that change specifically to try and make it easier for more people to participate, and shazam! It did. It was like magic. I was burbling about it in the mod chat for quite awhile.
I also really liked how the deeper integration of the Armory group worked this year; from my end, I noticed a lot of statistical changes that were significant because of that change.
Overall, I felt like this post summed up what my favorite things about EW are every year: https://www.rprepository.com/community/forumthread.php?t=55068
May users suggest themes for Epic Weeks or do you already have them planned out by the time the last Epic Week has passed?
You can suggest themes for sure! I have some loose plans for the next two(!!) epic weeks because we want to lead into something really major for RPR's 10th birthday in 2020.
But I can and do take suggestions. Ocean-themed was a suggestion in 2017, and it happened in 2018 This might seem really basic and common, but how are you doing?
Thanks for asking! The honest answer is that I am a little out of sorts this year. There's been a lot of Major Life Events going on for me pretty back to back, and although I am riding them out okay, I admit to being on the tired and slightly stunned side. I don't really want to dwell on any of it, but there it is.
What kind of features do you planned for the RPR, or are all of those secret?
At the moment, my top priority is to put some more lovin' into Groups and give them more convenience features, easier to use interfaces, a more streamlined creation wizard, and other such upgrades.
I've also got my eye on some upgrades to custom template creation for Epic Members, a more easily searchable template library in general for everyone, and some tighter integrations for the Find RP search tool to try and get more people more RP.
I've also been working behind the scenes on overhauling the push notification system entirely; I imagine in the next few weeks you'll start to see some announcements about testing the new version. Unfortunately, it will require temporarily disabling the old push notification system for an hour here and there while the new one gets introduced to its real home. I've been very hesitant to do the parts of development that will be disruptive to currently active features, but it's gotta be done. It should be a much more robust system that is available to more people on more devices when we finally get it done.
Kim when you think the rewards going to go out
I assume you're talking about the Epic week reward bags? Probably in the next couple of weeks.
I like to send them out in bunches for fewer trips to the post office, so I want a couple more contests to end HEY KIM HOW HARD IS IT TO RUN THE SITE
It varies considerably depending on what's going on in the community. The majority of users are an absolute dream, but every once in awhile there's a Deep Moral Quandry or a Difficult Issue that takes extra time and mental energy!
I was thinking about something, it doesnt have to happen, but maybe a browse users? Actually I am just curious about who has the most characters xD Because I love creating more, but I know I am not no 1, but I still am curious about where I am on the 'list'
Since so many people use anonymous characters, you probably wouldn't be able to use "Browse Users" to find that information
That said, f0x1nth3b0x and Loki have been in Most Characters spots #1 and #2 for many years now; they both have over 200!
So, I'm gonna pester you about those shirts again.
Have you ever mused on the idea of print on demand as a way to go about it?I have thought about it... the last few times I looked, the prices (to you guys) were very high, the profit margins (for the site) were low, and the quality was NOT where I wanted it to be. It was also very hard to tell where the printed materials were coming from, so I was never sure if they were going to be rife with child labor. I found it very discouraging from trying that method of creating products!
Would it be possible to see when you became friends with someone on here? Like if it was a certain date?
Hmmmmn. It's certainly possible I'll add it! Can't say it's likely to be high on the priority list, but I'll keep it in mind
Mandatory question - How's the piggos?
The piggies are doing wonderfully!
Ghiradhelli still insists on being a bit of a jerk to Mr. Truffle, so they have to stay in separate cages unless being closely supervised, but they are happy and healthy and very very cute.Also, my dog now knows the rule is if she barks at them even a single time I will kick her out of the room, so now she'll bark at them and then see herself out. *facepalm* You can basically hear her saying "LOL worth it tho" as she's running away
So I assume that the group header text can't be removed to make it accessible for screen readers and other things - but I prefer not to have it on display because I'll upload banners for groups with the group name in them, and have just been tweaking the colour to match the BG for now. However, do you think an option to make the font smaller instead would be reasonable?
That was one of the reasons behind it, yes. The pressure to make it removable has been high enough I'm starting to reconsider it, as I consider lots of redesign options for groups in general. Making the text smaller is entirely possible and reasonable.
Do you think it will be possible to figure out a way to make collapse tags work in the pop-out chat? Because some people hide sensitive stuff in those tags with a warning, or use them to hide walls of text/huge images so they don't bamboozle people, and it's been the case where by the time that mistake is made it's too late, as deleted messages don't update.
It's possible but I hate to say not high priority right now. Spoiler tags work for sensitive information in the chat, though!
A re-architecting of how the Forum Chat functions is probably in our future in the next several years, and I suspect it will be much more possible after that - along with updating edited/deleted posts.
The push notifications re-build has to come first, though. Luckily that's well under way
Related, then - am I totally missing an option to have the text editing bar (bold, italics, etc) in the chat?
That option does not exist right now, but is certainly planned!
Thanks to everyone who participated in this month's office hours!