Introducing Activity Tiers

In his last report, Bubba talked about "The Big Comp and Crescent Revamp," which is more accurately described as "The Big Comp and Crescent and Also Credit Revamp That Loops in RP and ACC and Other Things That Aren't Comps That We May Do in the Future." I think I'm going to call that "The Incentive Structures Reform" because ISR is a lot easier to type than BCCACRTLRPACCOTTACTWMDitF. Regardless of what we call it, it's a major adjustment to how activities, awards, and promotions will work going forward and I think it's worth going through it piece by piece to get people used to the idea before we dump everything on you at once.

Part 1: Activity Tiers and XP
Part 2: Crescents
Part 3: If Anybody Cares, This Was Our Due Diligence

This is Part 1.

How Things Work Now

Currently, we assume most recognized activity is going to be in the form of a competition. If you can figure out how to do the thing competitively, then run it as a competition. There are a few things we recognize outside of competitions, like RP and ACC, but if it's not a competition, we generally won't give you XP and credits for doing it. When we do, it's a weird snowflake system somebody had to work out from scratch with a lot of yelling.

The amount of XP you get for participating in a competition depends on what level Crescents the competition awards. That's determined by who's running the competition and what organizational unit it's for:

• If it's run by or on behalf of a core Council member, it gives First-Level Crescents, 70 XP to the organizer, and 35 XP to each participant.
• If it's run by anyone else club-wide, it gives Second-Level Crescents, 60 XP to the organizer, and 30 XP to each participant.
• If it's run by anyone else for a Clan, it gives Third-Level Crescents, 50 XP to the organizer, and 25 XP to each participant.
• If it's run by anyone else for a House, it gives Fourth-Level Crescents, 40 XP to the organizer, and 20 XP to each participant.
• If it's run by anyone else for a Battleteam, it gives Fifth-Level Crescents, 30 XP to the organizer, and 15 XP to each participant.

Now there are a few problems with this as an incentive structure. First, assuming they're run clubwide, it treats all forms of activity as equally valuable. That's not actually true, and we'll talk about that a bit more in a sec. The other problem is that it punishes people for running things for their clans and subunits. I can (and do) get judgy when I see positioned summit members crank out club-wide comps while running nothing for the units they're supposed to be generating content for. But I can only be so mad at them, because we in club leadership say right there in the XP Policy that running a clubwide comp is 20% more important to us than running a clan comp, and twice as important as running one for a BT. Not only do organizers get less XP for running those competitions, participants also get less XP for doing them.

We don't explicitly say that certain types of competitions are worth more or less, but by treating all content equally, we might as well. Some competitions are easy to run and in large numbers, because they take only a few minutes to enter and not much longer to grade. Other things take hours. Let's say for the sake of argument that I have an hour of DB time, all the club-wide (i.e. Second-Level Crescent) comps I could possibly enter, and that it takes me 3 minutes to submit a puzzle screenshot and 30 minutes to write 500 words. Here are three things I could do and the XP/Credits I would get for each other them:

Option 1: One 1000-word fiction: 54 XP and 243 credits (1 comp + 2 CIs) for participating, plus anywhere from 0-90 XP and 0-800 credits for placement. Hardly any non-vendetta fiction competitions get enough entries to upgrade to first-level crescents, so we can ignore that.

Option 2: Two 500-word fictions: 84 XP and 468 credits (2 comps + 2 CIs) for participating, plus anywhere from 0-180 XP and 0-1600 credits for placement. I'm less likely to place with a 500-word entry than a 1000-word entry, so this isn't necessarily better than Option 1, but it's the safe bet if I'm a weenie.

Option 3: 20 jigsaws: 60 XP and 4500 credits for participating, plus anywhere from 0-1800 XP and 0-16k credits from crescents, assuming none of the comps get 10 participants. Except they're puzzles, so they probably will, meaning I could potentially get 2400 XP and 24k credits if I got a Cr-D in every single one.

I pick on puzzles here because they're especially nefarious: the less time you spend on your entry, the more likely you are to place and the more XP you'll get. The handful of members who do a lot of puzzles and consistently place can get truly obscene amounts of XP for the time investment, such that one person I looked at got more XP for puzzles one quarter than the entire club combined got for RP.

But even if we banned puzzles (we won't), we'd just have a similar problem with other competitions. Namely, people who run or enter large numbers of easy comps (word search, meme, coloring, stick figure, name the clan item) are going to get huge payouts and members who put a lot of effort into our core activities, particularly art and gaming, are going to get absolutely screwed in comparison.

The upcoming changes are an attempt to address that. Whatever activities you like doing, you will still be able to do them and you will still get XP and credits for doing them. But this is a club for gaming, art, and fiction/roleplaying based around our community and our shared setting in the Star Wars galaxy. Our systems should steer people towards that, not just whatever they can do at scale.

As a reminder, this is what the XP and Credits for our competitions look like now:

Level	Participation XP	Organization XP	Participation Credits	Organization Credits
Novae	35	70	300	225
First-Level Crescents	35	70	225	225
Second-Level Crescents	30	60	225	225
Third-Level Crescents	25	50	225	225
Fourth-Level Crescents	20	40	225	225
Fifth-Level Crescents	15	30	225	225
Containers	0	0	0	0
RP Sessions and ACC	25	50	225	225

New System: Activity Tiers

When we first started knocking ideas around in GM staff chat back in January 2025, we quickly settled on two basic ideas:

Doing stuff with other members is better than doing stuff by yourself.

Doing stuff that involves the club is better than doing stuff that doesn't.

So going forward we will be sorting activities in five tiers based on those two principles. Note that I said "activities" not "competitions." At least in theory, any form of activity that we decide to add going forward should fit easily into this system; if it's not competitive, we just don't award Crescents for it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here are our tiers, from highest value to lowest.

• Tier 1: Priority activities.
  
• Tier 2: You have to engage directly with the club and do it with another member.
  
• Tier 3: You have to engage directly with the club.
  
• Tier 4: You have to engage directly with another member.
  
• Tier 5: Anything else we give participation credit for.
  

How do you know if something is a priority activity? Because it's Tier 1. This will be a manual setting that club leadership will use for anything they want a little more focus on, whether it's part of an event or just to make it rain a little. Competitions that award double clusters should be Tier 1. Novae-awarding competitions will count as Tier 1 unless something explicitly gives them more oomph. But I think in general you should expect to see a couple of these running at any given time, and then a bunch whenever there's a Council-run event.

What does "engage directly with the club" mean? Well, there's a policy for that. But here's a rule of thumb for you: Does it count towards clusters? Do you have to know things specifically about the DB to do it? If the answer to either of those questions is yes, then it probably counts.

Here are some quick and dirty examples to help illustrate how this will work:

• Tier 1: Double Clusters, Events, Vendettas
  
• Tier 2: Cluster races, RP, ACC, team multimedia comps, chat trivia (DB topics only)
  
• Tier 3: Solo fic, solo graphics, create a valid CS/prototype/location comps.
  
• Tier 4: Chat trivia (non-DB topics), fantasy sports, team shitposting
  
• Tier 5: Puzzles, Word Searches, Spot the Difference, coloring, memes, etc.

New XP and Credit Values for Activity Tiers

Let's start this off with a table:

Tier	Participation XP	Organization XP	Participation Credits	Organization Credits
Tier 1	55	110	825	1650
Tier 2	45	90	675	1350
Tier 3	35	70	525	1050
Tier 4	25	50	375	750
Tier 5	15	30	225	450

Looking at XP, you'll notice the new bottom level (Tier 5) awards the same amount as the current bottom level (Fifth-Level Crescents or Battleteam comps), and every step up will award slightly more than it does now. Whether you get more or less participation XP under this system depends a bit on what you do, but overall I think most people will break even or see about the same. The exceptions are people who do a lot of puzzles and not a lot of our core activities, who will get less, and people who do a lot of clan/house/BT comps, who might get more.

Fiction, art, and especially RP and multiplayer gaming get nice boosts.

Stuff that doesn't really have anything to do with the club beyond you using it to grind credits/XP will get nerfed.

Looking over to credits, the short answer is that Thran is making it rain. He wanted to give out more credits and he didn't want anything to be worth fewer credits than it is now. So worst case scenario, entering a comp will give you the exact same credits as now (#225gang); best case, it'll give you three and a half times as many. Organizing competitions gets you an even bigger boost, as the new values are double what you get for participating, as opposed to the same like they are now. You will be getting more credits unless literally the only thing you do is participate in Tier 5 comps, in which case you're getting the same amount.

What Else?

This post covered participation and organizing, but I didn't talk about placement at all. How Crescents work will also be changing, and that's involved enough that I want to get everyone used to the Activity Tiers before we dive into it.