Althanas Renegade Radio Episode 7 - Sausage Fest!

[Enigmatic Immortal]

In this week's fabulous, testosterone episode, we discuss what character we can contrive without stepping on previous incarnations or ideas we have already personally used. We dicuss awesome Featured battle ideas, and go big or go home with Dirks' question. Find out more and listen into the manliest podcast out there!

Althanas Renegade Radio Episode 7 - Sausage Fest! (https://soundcloud.com/masamunexxx-1/renegade-7)

[Hysteria]

I was thinking a dragon would be a good boss. Thanks for all the feedback on the format!

Also, you didn't do the voices I asked! I demand that you do so with Phi next pirate *shakes fist*

[Max Dirks]

:( I cannot listen until it's uploaded to Althanas.

[BlackAndBlueEyes]

I gave Paul all my login information exactly as I entered it; but if he's still unable to use the FTP, then I don't know what to tell you.

Dirks, can you use Spreaker at work? Spreaker's like a podcasting network/hosting site that has a free option that gives you a not insignificant amount of storage space.

[grim137]

As somebody who grew up on giant monster movies as a young kid I love the idea of a giant, Godzilla sized boss monster. That being said I do agree the idea needs to be fleshed out a lot more before it actually gets implemented. I've seen a lot of cool ideas here that were awesome in concept but horrible in execution.

Now increasing activity and getting more members here is a tougher problem. I agree that for now we should shelve tournaments. They're great when we have a lot of active members but we don't. We'd probably be lucky to get 8 - 16 different writers signed up. So those are something we should do after activity picks up. What Hysteria's doing with the featured quests/battles is great. Quick one shots that make players feel like they made a difference to the world of Althanas and gives them material to work with in the future. Even if you fail it's not bad because dealing with the fallout of failing to stop the big bad dude can be just as much fun as trying to stop them in the first place. Vignettes are also a great idea and I'm all in favor of bringing them back.

I also think we should focus more on getting new blood in that trying to bring the old guard back. Make no mistake about it we used to have some great RPers and I would love a chance to write with them again but back in Althanas's hey day most of us were young dumb teenagers with nothing better to do than write stories on the internet. That's just not the case any more since most of us are now (technically) adults with jobs and responsibilities and shit. So yeah we need new blood. Not only that but we need them to actually stick around.

Ironically to do that we need to increase activity or at least the illusion of it. I've had a couple RPer's come here, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has seen this, who come in, get a character registered and then when they're excited to start RPing they can't find any open threads so they start their own. Then it takes a week for anybody to join and by that point they've lost interest and have long since abandoned ship for some place where people will actually RP with them. What that means is that barring and influx of new members from one of our affiliates shutting down or something what needs to happen is if somebody new joins the people who are already here need to try to do something and help them feel involved so that they don't lose interest. Even if it's something quick and simple like "we meet in a tavern to go kill bandits and hunt for some magical do-hicky" or whatever we need to keep them active and interested in the site.

On the flip side we should be encouraging people to make open threads more often. Most of the ones I've seen are closed to the thread starter and their friends and it's some heavily planned piece that deeply effects all involved while they try to gun for a JC . That's all well and good but imagine if you're completely new to the site. You've just finished getting your character approve and you're ready for adventure. Only there's no adventure to be had because everybody is off in their own world with their friends and there's nothing for you to jump into. Seeing every thread being closed is discouraging. So yeah. More open threads is good. We used to see it all the time. Open battles in the Citadel, open quests in the various regions that anybody could pop into. Again these don't have to be complex. Something simple, open ended kill this, find that, whoa random encounter in my daily life types quests are great.

[Max Dirks]

Oh, Paul has no problems uploading. All previous Podcasts are uploaded. He's just behind.

And it looks like Spreaker is blocked too :(

[Karuka]

I think you definitely need more RoG mods and DEFINITELY need to improve the response times. It took me a couple of days to get Aly approved when I came back, and in that time I might have decided that it wasn't worth it to return. It took a week to get Karuka approved, and she went up before Aly. If that's the experience that most new members get, then what are the odds they'll stick around?

I'd also like to suggest that everything in the backlog that can be workshopped ought to be; there is a lack of judges at present and it's hindering the site's regular function. Since the people who submitted for a full judgment want a score, have reviewers give feedback as if they were judging, if they're up to that, and if the consensus is that the thread ought to get a JC, have a judge go through it properly. Until you can recruit and train new judges, it's a stop-gap measure.