Greetings everyone and welcome to my #35th report as Grand Master of the Dark Brotherhood. This report is a few days later than I expected, but I hope to provide some data points and updates that were worth the wait. The most significant of those is the dreaded Possessions System.

Administrative Changes

1) The Fist has posted a news article that features a test trial for the Hip Chat program. This mobile application allows members to communicate without the use of a phone number and is another potential source for communication. This is something that we are going to test and then make an evaluation on (because we are going to have an open mind about new things). Let Val know what you think.

2) I plan on emailing the Dark Council on a regular basis to keep them informed of my expectations and our ongoing projects. These emails will be available to the club at large and can be found on our forums under Grand Master Communiques. The first one is up and ready for your comments.

Appointments

1) Wally has been appointed as our new Combat Master. This decision, like many we have made recently, was a no brainer. Wally was an integral part of the ACC's redesign, our character sheets, and future changes already being made to both systems. Take the time to congratulate Wally.

2) Halc has been selected as our new Wiki Tribune. Halc is a proven veteran of our club with experience at all levels. His dedication to our wiki and its continued development will only serve to enhance our club. Congrats Halc!

Featured Project: Possessions

Possessions. The dreaded bane of every Grand Master since 2003. In simplified terms, the possessions project will create an economy for Dark Jedi Brotherhood and allow our members to purchase, sell, and trade items through a graphical interface. In order to accomplish the deployment of this system we must first design a fair economy that provides junior members an incentive to participate in the system, code the interfaces and back-end logic for how the system will interact, design graphical interfaces, and create a presentable graphic depiction of every item.

Phew, that is a lot of work. But it is not 11 years worth of work and we owe the members much much more in terms of delivery on this long overdue project. With that said, allow me to pull back the curtain and reveal the wizard.

1) The Economy: All of you are able to view the beta-build of our credits system through your administration panel. This initial run provides credits for promotions, awards, special titles, and positional salaries. Most of you have reviewed your credit score and measured it against your friends. The problem with the existing system is that it does not provide our target audience (GRD-EQ3) with enough purchasing power to really enjoy the possessions system. Luckily I have math nerds on the new team. Lets take a look at some initial analysis.

Ugh. Right? Ugh. Dear Journeymen (indicated as JM on the graph), enjoy your ability to purchase a stick, loin cloth, and one earring. So yes, this was a bit disconcerting and we wanted another look at the credit break down.

Okay, that makes it pretty clear. The current credit system needs a tweak in order to provide our new members with more funds to purchase items. The baseline for purchasing power is that a Dark Jedi Knight or Jedi Knight should have the ability to purchase a single seat basic fighter and purchase one basic item in each possession category. In order to do that, we also have to fix the prices of our existing items. Next topic.

2) The Items: There are a lot of items on our spreadsheets with a lot of statistics, values, and additional data points. Muz has spent the last several years drawing many of these items and we have a solid count of how many of them are ready for release right now. The issue moving forward is balancing the cost of items, determining what data points are required for the launch of the possession system, and working through the development of additional items to provide all of us with options to build unique characters.

I have begun expanding our list and conducting an exhaustive research of books sitting beside me. Basically, it ends up looking like this.

(Capital Ships for Sale? What what! Maybe not for sale to you, but certainly to your Clan)

I owe this list to our economic gurus and system engineer types so they can start balancing Muz's previous items and my new items. The one thing I'm really good at is compiling data and then letting smarter people sort it for me. Ask Jac, Kir, Halc, Mav, Monty, and on and on. Once the smart people can get a hold of my data we can finally begin to see our work on the website. Next topic.

3) The Coding: James is a one man show on this project and will require Kalen and some others to take a little off of his plate in order go full blown possessions. I am also going to attempt to keep the good idea fairy and coding/plannig creep from slowing down the process. Eventually, and that time is about now, we have to go with what we have, rather than create new ideas. I misplaced my cool little image of some of the existing work and as soon I as find it, it will go below.

So, that is an update on where we stand right now. We have a lot of work to go on the economy and item pricing, but it is not an insurmountable task. Muz and James have laid a tremendous amount of ground work and we have a way ahead.

Conclusion

Alright, frequent reports are a good thing, especially when they have some content worth ingesting. Possessions, lets knock this thing out and begin the next project (DJB Video Game.....just kidding).

You can expect to hear from the DGM within the next few days with some additional policy updates. You will also hear from me again before the end of the week with a few GM-like decrees that help set expectations for the next 23 months.

Have a great week everyone!

Grand Master Pravus