40 replies to this topic

[acidic]

As part of playing this game I have been fortunate enough to assemble a top notch team which has risen from being ranked 100+ to becoming number 1. In this time I have met a lot of people and realized how fortunate I was to have met the people I met and how well they meshed together. What made this all a reality was chemistry of players first and investment in the faction second.

With this in mind I went to my faction recently asked if they felt like given something back to a lower ranked faction in hopes to give a jump start to a faction that has the potential to go all the way. They emphatically all agreed. I then approached leadership of The Nognof Brotherhood and Sigma Stars about what they thought. The emphatically agreed it was a good idea and agreed to help judge such a contest.

It is therefore my intention to announce the first "Jumpstart Your Faction Giveaway"

This is how it works. Starting today and running for the next week we will be accepting applications for consideration in this contest. At the end of that week or after we have received enough applications the contest will begin. Members of all three contributing faction will be allowed to interview members of all participating factions. At the end of a two week review period we will collectively vote for the factions with the most potential. We will be awarding presents to the top three factions.

For the part of ROTTK, we will be contributing the following:
100FC
500,000 credits
2 sunstorm arcs
several bundles of gear, not entirely yet determined
additional prizes may be added without warning.

For consideration in this you must submit either in response or in FORUM pm (not in game) a letter for inclusion. Your letter should be a mission statement of what you intend to do with your faction and how you intend to do it.

To be considered the minimum following qualifications MUST be met.
Your faction should have at least 20 members
All your members should be active
The founder must be over level 40
You MUST be ranked less than 20th in the top factions
****EDIT****
AFTER NO RESPONSE THE CONTEST HAS BEEN CHANGED
Anyone may enter not in the top 10 rankings. Criteria that will be used to determine the winners are:

[*:259te918]Age of the founder (in game terms)
[*:259te918]number of active members
[*:259te918]member presence both in game and forums (quality of posts will be weighed vs number of posts)
[*:259te918]Investment level in the faction
[*:259te918]quality of mission statement by founder
[*:259te918]existence and relevance of faction website
[*:259te918]quality of responses to random interviews of faction members
if there are any special considerations to take into account please include them in submission letter


****END OF EDIT****


These conditions have been determined to make sure that we are investing in a faction which has invested in itself and to prevent us from overlooking truly young but deserving factions.

To be clear, there is no cost to enter the contest. We are not looking to gain anything by this other than some fresh competition

[acidic]

If it turns out to be too exclusionary we will revise it. However, there are a lot of factions that qualify. I also set the qualifications to make sure that we had people applying who had already invested in their faction. I was truly scared of what might happen if it was awarded to people who were just starting a faction. They might not realize what it takes to run a faction a give up after a few more weeks and the prize would have been wasted.

[acidic]

I guess no one is interested in free stuff

[acidic]

Okay in consideration that no one has officially applied and the few responses I received were very uninspired, I am opening it up to any faction in the game not in the top 10. Instead of setting the criteria for applying I will just say that the things that will be taken into consideration are:

[*:37qhis88]Age of the founder (in game terms)
[*:37qhis88]number of active members
[*:37qhis88]member presence both in game and forums (quality of posts will be weighed vs number of posts)
[*:37qhis88]Investment level in the faction
[*:37qhis88]quality of mission statement by founder
[*:37qhis88]existence and relevance of faction website
[*:37qhis88]quality of responses to random interviews of faction members
if there are any special considerations to take into account please include them in submission letter

With this in mind, I am going to say application are due to me in a pm VIA THE FORUMS by 8/2/09 at midnight. Do not ask me to pm you if you qualify or what I think your chances are. Write your faction mission statement, tell me what you have accomplished so far and leave it at that. If English is not your first language, please mention that early in your message so I will know to contact you for any clarification if something is not clear.

[acidic]

Amazing. Can I contribute to the prize pool? It's great to see the dominant players of a game decide to help smaller groups like this.

thanks for the feedback, and yes anyone who would like to contribute to the pool will be allowed to and will receive recognition in the final results. However, the voting needs to stay limited to ROTTK, Nognof and Sigmastars. I will also ask that no one send me anything. To maintain a clean record and avoid confusion I would ask that if you are interested in donating to the winning factions let me know what it is you would like to donate and I will let you know who to send it to. Depending on the total number of applicants and people who want to donate we may establish a few runner up positions as well.

[evilbry]

What bugs me about this, (it's not a dig at acidic or those offering resources. I commend the idea and their actions.) is that it's the players now having to stimulate the growth of the game.

Now that the game is out of it's infancy and taken it's baby steps, got past teething issues, there should be more and more things for the game to be a drawcard to those who have signed up, invested and become bored with the same templates being used.

I am sure we all know many who have signed up and no longer play for whatever reason. There's a small community of players wanting to make a difference as this is showing, but really we need some new and exciting things for the game, and to fix some long time niggles such as the fact HCS is more or less forcing you to play using firefox with scripts because they haven't allowed other browsers any way of killing mobs other than clicking them. Now you do have the choice to use a browser and clicky clicky to kill, but that grows old real fast especially when you are trying to level up around someone using firefox and the script, taking all the mobs away from underneath you.

The depth of the game is great, the amount of work the staff and staffettes put in always turns out high quality content, but sadly without any decent distractions, a number in the top 200 or more, often end up sub leveling or sitting at max energy, waiting with XP gain for new content because it loses it's feasibility to hunt. An example I used recently is that even if HCS released another 20 level spread like 90-100, then 14 days later released new content (10 levels) and continued to do so weekly, at least the top 50 players would keep up with this content, without needing to purchase energy.

The behemoth, nice idea, but you really have to think about it's future. I mean, you can purchase the behemoth weapon now for around 100FC. This just goes to show how little demand there is for it, and it's only going to be a matter of time before people stop bothering with the behemoth at level 50. If one was released at lvl 150, this would work wonders for a while till people became bored with it why not a behemoth set?

I would really like to see more from HCS to get people back into the game, and not get to the point of the community trying to spark life into the game.

[acidic]

What bugs me about this, (it's not a dig at acidic or those offering resources. I commend the idea and their actions.) is that it's the players now having to stimulate the growth of the game.

Now that the game is out of it's infancy and taken it's baby steps, got past teething issues, there should be more and more things for the game to be a drawcard to those who have signed up, invested and become bored with the same templates being used.

I am sure we all know many who have signed up and no longer play for whatever reason. There's a small community of players wanting to make a difference as this is showing, but really we need some new and exciting things for the game, and to fix some long time niggles such as the fact HCS is more or less forcing you to play using firefox with scripts because they haven't allowed other browsers any way of killing mobs other than clicking them. Now you do have the choice to use a browser and clicky clicky to kill, but that grows old real fast especially when you are trying to level up around someone using firefox and the script, taking all the mobs away from underneath you.

The depth of the game is great, the amount of work the staff and staffettes put in always turns out high quality content, but sadly without any decent distractions, a number in the top 200 or more, often end up sub leveling or sitting at max energy, waiting with XP gain for new content because it loses it's feasibility to hunt. An example I used recently is that even if HCS released another 20 level spread like 90-100, then 14 days later released new content (10 levels) and continued to do so weekly, at least the top 50 players would keep up with this content, without needing to purchase energy.

The behemoth, nice idea, but you really have to think about it's future. I mean, you can purchase the behemoth weapon now for around 100FC. This just goes to show how little demand there is for it, and it's only going to be a matter of time before people stop bothering with the behemoth at level 50. If one was released at lvl 150, this would work wonders for a while till people became bored with it why not a behemoth set?

I would really like to see more from HCS to get people back into the game, and not get to the point of the community trying to spark life into the game.

While I agree whole heartedly with most of what you said. I would appreciate it, for the sake of what this thread is intended to do, that no one expand further on this here, there are several threads running at present that address this:


http://forum.sigmast....php?f=7&t=4978
http://forum.sigmast....php?f=9&t=4993
http://forum.sigmast....php?f=7&t=4995
http://forum.sigmast....php?f=7&t=5001

[acidic]

bump.... 32 hours left to apply!

[021962]

...

Since it's in game message only, I can't tell how many factions have signed up. I have this nagging feeling in the back of my mind that this is going to happen:

acidic: Well, it's time to give the prize, and it turns out...not a single faction has managed to follow all the rules while applying, EXCEPT...ROTTK! Everybody clap for them!
/rottk members clap
acidic: This honorable faction, which by temporarily kicking out half its members is now not in the top 10, has shown extreme generosity and spirit by organizing this entire contest! More claps for them!
/rottk members clap
acidic: And I'll go get the prize now!
/acidic withdraws FC from guild back
/acidic deposits FC back into guild bank
/rottk members clap

Humorous reading

But not going to happen of course, we would have to tar and feather Acidic. Of course we may do that anyway.

The prizes will be given out.