Now that everyone has a chance to catch their breath with the Dark Crusade finally being over, there are some fairly significant changes that I need to announce for the MAA Office.

Promoting the Promotions

I am not even going to try highlighting any of the recent Awards or Promotions. There are just too many of them. The Dark Crusade just ended, the results are out, and lots of people have been (or soon will be) rewarded for their efforts over the duration of this mega-event. Take a look at the Recent Promotions and Recent Awards boxes on the right side of the main news page if you're curious to see what awards and promotions have been sent out.

Cluster of Ice

The criteria for awarding the Cluster of Ice have been updated. The most pertinent section of the update, for the moment, is the Run On section, but you'll also note that the details are already in place to begin awarding these for ACC matches as well. Anyone interested in participating in the ACC or Voice-sanctioned Run Ons should review this wiki page just to make sure there are no surprises in how these will be awarded.

Promotion Guidelines

The Promotion Requirements wiki page has been renamed to Promotion Guidelines, and has also undergone a fairly significant restructuring. I encourage you to read the page for yourself, but will point out the biggest changes.

First, Journeyman ranks no longer have a required time in rank in order to qualify for a promotion, and the use of tasks assigned by the Master at Arms office in order to bypass that requirement is also gone. Instead we have a list of expanded examples of activity that can count towards a promotion. Being an active member for a specified amount of time is on that list, and can count towards a promotion. But if you have, or are, an especially active Journeyman, you can now work through the Journeyman ranks as quickly as you desire.

Also of note is the general lack of any game-specific activity examples that there were in previous versions of this policy (i.e. Complete X number of Flashpoints/Operations in ToR). This was a deliberate decision based on two lines of thought. First, so that the policy would not require constant updates whenever a new game becomes a supported DB platform or an existing game becomes unsupported. Second, when any such activity is recorded on the site, it results in the awarding of Clusters of Fire and/or Pendants of Blood, which are on the list.

Halc has been awarded a Dark Cross for his assistance to Howlader with portions of these new guidelines. And thanks to JaM3z, the promotheus tool will soon (if it doesn't already) reflect these new guidelines, for which I have also awarded him a Dark Cross.

Staff Changes

Finally, I've decided to make some changes to the MAA staff. First, I am releasing Howlader from his position as Praetor, and would like to thank him for the time and effort he has made here. Along with processing requests with incredible speed and being the driving force behind the Promotion Guidelines revamp, Howlader took the initiative to begin correcting the dossier history for members where the site's data was incomplete or inaccurate. This ongoing project was absolutely necessary to get started, with some big projects coming up that will diretly rely on this data.

So for his service to the MAA Office with particular note to this work in handling corrections to dossier histories, and with the blessing of the Grand Master, I am pleased to award him with an Emerald Dagger.

I have decided to bring onto the staff three Magistrates: Aabsdu Dupar, Malik Sadow, and Evant Taelyan. They will be helping me to process the requests that come through this office as well as helping me to plan out where we go from here. There are several other policies that need to be revisited and revised, as well as a variety of other projects that I am going to need their help on.

Congratulations, gentlemen!