Master at Arms Report 10
Promotion / Experience System
For those of you that have been paying attention for the past few months, you may have periodically seen Mav or myself talk about an experience system for promotions (I will call it a points system until the day I die dammit)– and it is true. Now, before I get into the details? Nothing is official. Nothing is approved. Nothing is certain. This post is merely meant to inform about thought processes, and not meant to tie us to things. Now, onto the ideas!
The basic premise is that rank promotions up to Equite 4 will be calculated on a points system, you earn enough points, you earn a promotion to the next rank (subject to some other requirements, leadership/administrative service time most likely). Points are earned by earning medals? And mostly? Through completion of activities that the site tracks: Competition hosting/placement/participation, gaming paritipation, Shadow Academy course completion, degree completion, and many many others.
The biggest change? Medals are likely to be awarded far, far less frequently – because the site tracks many of the activities (I would say majority?) that people engage in. What it does not track, however, is non-site activities. Leadership activities, project activities, assisting the summit with a specific task, assisting the Dark Council with a specific task, Shadow Academy course creation – and so many others.
Teylas and I are currently working on the long slog of, well, trying to make things work – and when we’ve done that, we’ll probably start trying to figure out how in the hell we pick out numbers and decide on appropriate levels. We’ll be asking for assistance from people in the (relatively) near future, but I thought I’d give people a heads up on what’s actually going on with that. But please don’t come asking to join us yet…well….ish…
Magistrate Applications
In accordance with the aforementioned XP promotion system project, as well as future stability in the MAAs office, we are also now looking for a magistrate to join us. Aside from the day to day operations of the MAAs office (and it really is a daily job), we're looking for someone who can be an objective devil's advocate during the XP promotion system development. Someone who can sit back and tell us when and if they think we are wrong about something. Someone to yell at us for once! We are also looking for a magistrate who would be planning to stick around for a while - longevity is a trait in the MAAs office going back for years.
Here are some of the other things we are looking for:
24 hour turnaround time for medal/promotion requests
Friendly & engaging
Workable knowledge of MAA Policy
Familiar with the promotion guidelines & Promotheous system
Someone willing to sit in the MAA chat and talk about The Expanse, books, scifi, beer, and honestly a whole list of completely unrelated topics
If you feel you lack in one of these areas, don't fret! Still apply. We are willing (and prefer) to train any candidate.
For applications we're looking for some general information:
Just a little about you that you'd like to share, to help us get a sense of you as a person
Leadership experience (anything, including any real life leadership you think may be applicable, but none is necessarily required for this position)
Your interpretation of what the Master at Arms office does, and how it interacts with the club at large
Please send all applications to the [Log in to view e-mail addresses]. I'd like to make a decision by around July 13th!
Master at Arms Competitions
MAA Puzzle #18 – Ends on July 4
MAA Puzzle #19 – Begins July 5 and ends July 11
Competition Creation
Last report (yikes, that was forever ago), I mentioned that you should double check links, details, dates, grading criteria – and that’s still true, but people are still closing their competitions when there’s just one error – or at least wanting to – and we’ve had to head things off at the pass. Please don’t do that.
Additionally, we’ve run across issues where competitions have had to be fixed more than once, because graders are not careful – and they need to be. Look, as I’ve said many times before, we don’t mind fixing competitions, that’s part of the job of being in the Master at Arms office – but it also creates work for other people, and that does bother me.
So to reiterate, if you’ve made an error in your competition, a date, a typo, a critical error? Email the Master at Arms staff and we’ll look into fixing it. Please don’t just close it and make it again.
Finally, James deployed the code to change credit allocation for competition organizers and co-organizers of container competitions. They won’t award credits from now on – so feel free to add as many people as you’d like. That said, co-organizers for other types of competitions? You’ll still continue to need to be judicious.
Tie Breakers in Competitions
So this has come up a few times, and I don’t want to make tie breakers mandatory for every single competition ever (subjectively graded competitions, for instance, by definition don’t need them, there’s a grading rubric with all those categories for a reason). But for flash games, and especially container competitions, you should come up with some sort of tie breaker in most cases – and we will be asking why there isn’t one when we find them.
Tie breakers can be anything from shortest time to submit to the site (yay Timed competitions!) to most events participated in (for container competitions)
Graphics Competitions – Manually adding participants
The Graphics Archetpye, like the fiction archetype, does not allow competition organizers to manually add participants – at least not normally. So if you end up running a competition and you need to add participants (let’s say it’s a co-operative graphics competition!), you’ll need to email the Master at Arms staff to get us to switch the competition from a graphics archetype to regular, then the organizer can add additional competitors, when finished, we can switch it back to graphics – then it can be closed as normal. Please keep that in mind, because if you close it as normal – it won’t properly award Clusters of Graphite!
Promotions of Note
Medals of Note
Important Links
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wonder when the points/promotion kicks in, how many folks will jump from equite 1 to equite 4 lol
I look forward to this. I think a way to keep people from jumping up a billion ranks though will be the same thing we have for our JM, Time in Rank requirements. Which will most likely be sort of related to Leadership positions or "Administrative service" time. Though I hope for many it will be a cumulative thing and not all the time consumed for a single promotion, leaving none (if any time) left for a next promotion. I suppose with this way it will really put Elder level at a very high bar, since the emphasis will be even more based on what they bring to the Club at large.
I think it is a good and bad think making E1-E4 like the N1-N4 and J1-J4. For some it will make it an easier for them. But it kinda looses the fact that if you want to advance from that point you need to put in effert. If I can make E2, E3, and then E4 from just doing SA exams, playing HotS and D3, and doing comps it is not the same as doing some of that and interacting with members of the club. Doing leadership and what not. I think if you use a point system that a "Time in Grade" needs to be there and to keep people from jumping form say E1 to E4 the time in E1 only counts for E2 and the timer starts over. At least that way you do not have 1/2 the DJB go from J$4/E1 to E4 overnight.