Hey everyone! Hope you are all doing well.

For a good while now, the Althanas staff have been involved in behind-the-scenes discussions on the future direction of Althanas. This includes what we actually want to be as a site, ways to improve site activity, ways to improve member engagement and improve the quality of life on the site as a whole. A lot of good ideas have been shared and discussed, and everyone from the administrators to the moderators have had some sort of input to get to this point.

Today, the administrators got together to discuss these plans in more detail. We've come to a consensus on what we'd like to change and introduce, and now we put these ideas to you for a debate. Feel free to comment in this thread, and put forward your thoughts!

Realm of Greeting and Bazaar

The changes we want to make to the Realm of Greeting, which handle character approvals, is probably the single biggest change in the history of Althanas.

Our proposal is to scrap the current TPL system entirely, and move to a more freeform approval system.

What this means for you, as players:

1) Your profile abilities are checked for anything game-breaking or anything that would invite powergaming, and as long as common sense prevails, you'll be allowed that ability. No more PL's!

2) The levelling system will determine how many abilities you will be allowed, roughly. For example, a level 1 character may be allowed three strong abilities, or four weaker ones. This is very much going to be done on a discretionary basis now rather than cold, hard PL's or limits, allowing you all much more freedom with your characters. Levelling up will also allow you to strengthen your abilities, should you wish to do so.

3) Your level will determine what tier item you are able to buy in the Bazaar. A level 1, for example, might only be able to purchase up to Dehlar quality items. A level 8 might be able to purchase up to Prevailda, and so forth.

4) As well as those abilities you are approved with, you may also purchase new stock abilities from the Bazaar. These are abilities which have a set function and price, and may change week to week. You even may be able to purchase an ability that is very strong, for a sum of GP, that would normally exceed your level's ability cap! Purchased abilities do not count towards any caps.

5) We also intend on bringing back the Auction Houses, where you can bid GP against other members to try and win special items!

6) Finally, if you wish to add further to your abilities beyond what has already been approved, you may train with another player to obtain that ability as a spoil from the thread!

Judging

Judging is the second biggest change on this thread. With both turnaround time, staff commitments and feedback quality in mind, we want to make the following proposed changes:

For non-competitive writing, the following judgment options will now be available to you:

1) "Judgment" - Each thread will be read and the judge will comment on a number of strengths and weaknesses. The thread is then given a star rating between 1 and 10. The higher the star rating, the more rewards your thread will earn! In addition, if you wish a judge to have a specific focus in the thread, or wish for additional feedback, you may request it with this type.

2) "No Judgment" - a popular choice with players not looking for feedback. Your rewards here will be set by the judge after a read through, with no additional commentary.

3) "Workshop" - effectively a Judgment, with the added bonus of members being able to contribute feedback for incentivised rewards, such as GP and badges.

For competitive RP (including the Citadel, events and tournaments):

1) "Full Rubric" - The traditional Althanas rubric will be used to judge competitive threads, which hasn't changed, but the scale of the scoring is going to be different. We are moving to what we call a "schoolastic scale", which means that an average thread scores 70 instead of 50 (in other words, if this was a school assignment, a 70 would be a grade "C"). Each writer is still scored individually according to the rubric, and the judge decides the final winner based on the writing.

Activity

This is more of an administrative item, but we have also began working on our systems to optimise the ways people look for and find Althanas. There's quite a lot of technical and rather boring details, but the upshot is that we're making greater use of the site resources to be able to make sure new players and writers can find us on google, along many other search engines. We're updating our tags and metadata so that we're attracting less Russian bots and more actual people.

This alone, though, is just one (not particularly exciting) part of it.

We want to see more posting on the forum, whether its small stories, the OOC forums or the vignettes. We want people excited on site. To this end, we're intending on making lore easier to access and affect so that you guys can express yourself more. We're also planning on bringing back the awards system, which is an Althanas favourite, and introducing increased referral bonuses for anyone you refer to the site!

Last but not least, we have a fantastic discord community. It's filled with current and old players, and its a really great place to talk, but we'd all really like to see the wonderful activity levels on the server translate to the boards.

That is why we are going to introduce EXP incentives for those of you who post, regardless of where it is on the forum (IC or OOC).