MOD ANNOUNCEMENT: GAME UPDATES

[goldmods]

MOD ANNOUNCEMENT

Howdy, hens and harlots!

With the close of our first official month of play, we wanted to unofficially celebrate and express our gratitude for all of you who have made our humble little game into a real hootin' nest. We've broken our beaks and stumbled our way out of the coop, and it's been a real learning process! We thank you, our players, for your kindness and patience during the craze of 160+ apps, a real chicklet mod team, and your continued understanding as we test these new winds.

We're rapidly discovering what does and doesn't work while trying to innovate on our ideas. One core value we want to embrace is clarity, starting by bringing you this Mod Update illuminating all our changes.

CODES & UPDATED INFO

We’ve made various updates to our codes, generally making things more streamlined and legible. If you still have issues with any particular page, please let us know so we can do our best to make it more accessible!

Additionally, we’ve made quite a few informational updates:

▷ The taken list has more centralized information, including everyone’s rank/suit and quick access to player-relevant pages. If you see any missing or incorrect links, drop us a line and we’ll be happy to fix it up.

▷ A sample app is now available, which includes all the new changes to our application and related processes. If you plan to apply with us this month, please scour these pages thoroughly! Please remember that your applications are your birdie bibles and TDMs are canon. If something is not included on your app, we’ll have to ask you to leave it at the door — you cannot bring it in to Golden Peacock.

▷ Our applications, reserves, and calendar pages have all received updated timelines. We are cutting down the length of the application round to help with our workload. (Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten about our promised announcement from last round! Stay tuned for more on that.)

▷ The FAQ has been blessed with some sprucing, codestry, and pizzazz. We're also implementing a change log to keep our answers easily accessible, before the comment pages get too unwieldy.

▷ There's a special new reward: birthday gifts!

If your character had a January or February birthday that has already passed, please feel free to immediately claim your IC Resort Birthday Package. You can either backdate your request, or assume a system update alerted the hotel staff that your character's birthday got missed in the craze of the newcomers and they've re-assigned your character a random replacement date ASAP. Enjoy your special day!

LET YOUR CREATIVITY FLOURISH

Another one of our values here at Golden Peacock is player expression and creativity. In other words, so long as you aren’t trying to “break” the setting or the game itself, you can do... just about anything! The library can have whatever kind of books you want or don’t (though they pivot towards erotica more often than not); there are no weapons, but if your character wants to spend hours whittling a meter stick into a spear, we'll start calling them Ishmael; if your character is craving a specific kind of cuisine, a period set of clothing, or you want to create your own funny bird-punned restaurants — it's all within your power!

We ask that you inquire and/or inform the mods primarily when you feel like your character has incurred or would benefit from some kind of punishment (we'll try to make these sexy or CR-building!), or it seriously affects so many people it needs to be run by the mods as a player plot. Think of it like the difference between someone deciding to throw a house party, and someone deciding they're going to livestream the kidnap and murder of multiple characters. If it isn't excessively criminal or pertinent to many others, feel free to use the setting to the fullest!

ACTIVITY CHECK RESULTS & REMINDERS

We want to congratulate everybirdie on passing AC this past round! In the future, we will not post or plurk any reminders for AC, so please remember to get your submissions in on time. If you feel you won’t be able to make activity for any reason and it’s too late to hiatus, reach out to us as soon as you get a chance — we’re always happy to accomodate players in case of emergencies, since at the end of the day IRL will always supercede RP.

FEBRUARY APP ROUND & GAME CAP

And at long last, the part you’ve all been waiting for — that formal announcement on applications we said was coming.

▶ THERE WILL BE A CAP ON HOW MANY APPS WE PROCESS.
After much debate, we have decided to process a maximum of 50 applications total from new players, due to the workload that app rounds put on our team.

You are not included in this 50 total if you 1. are already in the game, i.e. apping second or even third characters, or 2. were given revisions in the previous round. We feel this is the most fair way to do it since many of our first round revisions were for small things like incomplete applications, and without the cap, would have been processed at that time. You will still need to get your reserves in, though! This does not grant you any sort of priority or acceptance guarantee, only that we will look at your app, even if it’s submitted at the last second.

▶ PREVIOUS DECLINES MAY REAPPLY.
We have also decided to go into this app round with a blank slate for all previous declines. This is in part due to our clumsy handling and the lack of sample app to give the general populace an idea of what we're looking for. The only exception would be for those players we explicitly had ban discussions with in private, outside of the application system. We hope this helps ease the hurt and confusion players felt as we worked the kinks out of our system.

Going forward, declined characters are permitted to reapply up to two more times, for a total of three application attempts. After a third decline, you will no longer be able to apply for that character. Being deferred due to a player or canon cap does not count as a decline.

▶ PLAYER AND CAST CAPS ARE NOW IN SESSION.
Furthermore, we will be capping the game at 100 players after this round. For this round, we will be accepting up to 25 new players out of the 50 applications we process. We want to give everybirdie that last chance to squeeze into the coop, since we didn’t originally plan on being a capped game, meaning we’ll be temporarily over our cap after this round. The only exception is for revised apps from last round — we will be processing these apps as if there were no caps at all, as there were none at the time the revisions were requested.

This means that future application rounds will only be open for current players to app seconds and thirds until we fall back below 100 players. This is as large of a game as we feel comfortable modding while still being able to exercise the personalized flourishes and individual player plots we love doing, and allows us to stay somewhat public and welcoming of new blood in the future.

For casts, all individual canons will be capped at 10 characters. The only exception is for original characters, which will be capped at 12 characters instead. We may re-evaluate these cap values as the game progresses, but our aim is to keep any one canon from dominating the game as we grow.

▶ TDMS WILL ALWAYS BE OPEN.
Just because we might be capped doesn’t mean we won’t always want to meet you! Everyone is welcome to play on our TDMs as much or as little as they’d like, whether they plan on apping that round, a future round, or never. We ask for samples from the past 2 years, so if you’re concerned about them expiring, you have plenty of time.

IN CONCLUSION

Thank you for letting us host you here at the Golden Peacock! May this thick, juicy update help fill any holes in your experience thus far.

More seriously, the interest we’ve received has so, so far exceeded the expectations we had for our humble little game, and we hope we’ve made a good compromise between maintaining our vision for the game and keeping it as open as possible. We also added a more experienced hen to our modly flock earlier this month to help us hatchlings with communications; this update was partly hatched out of their eggs. Please let us know if you have any questions or feedback for us, and enjoy your stay!

Comments

[gunpowderblue]

Hi mods! The updates above speak to revisions, but I got 'at cap' without being given revisions. Will 'at cap' players be included in the 50 count, and are we also given no priority or acceptance guarantee? Because I would certainly find it frustrating if, after having to wait two months, someone else got a reserve in a few seconds before mine for the same character. (I can only imagine that players who got minor revisions would be similarly frustrated, so I might ask for all of us who have had to wait that the mods reconsider us having no priority.)

[goldmods]

Hi there! After some talk, we agreed that previous round applicants that were not accepted for any reason will be able to submit reserves starting at 8:55PM EST for the February app round, and only for the character that was previously deferred. We will update the pages to reflect this before reserves open.

[skirtofbooks]

Could you clarify how "For this round, we will be accepting up to 25 new players out of the 50 applications we process." and "You are not included in this 50 total if you [...] 2. were given revisions in the previous round." work together? Does this mean the game might go over 125 players if revision-apps are accepted, or will acceptances from previous-revisions count towards that 25 total?

Also, will this round also be all eligible apps judged against each other, or will it be first-come-first-served (up to 50)?

[goldmods]

Hi! To your first point, the answer is the former — from the post, ”we will be processing these apps as if there were no caps at all, as there were none at the time the revisions were requested”. This does mean it’s likely we will have over 125 players when the app round concludes.

For the applications themselves, we will only be processing the first 50 applications posted by new players. Out of those 50, up to 25 will be accepted. We will be judging primarily off suitability and samples, for reference.

The aim is to keep our app intake manageable without speed being the only determinant factor for an app. In our last round, we had 25 apps in by 9:20PM EST, which is pretty fast! Hopefully that explains the methods to our madness, but let us know if anything is still confusing, though.

[twicest]

Does this mean that if someone apps 2 characters and gets both accepted, only 23 other apps will be accepted, or does it mean that 24 other players can still be accepted?

[goldmods]

Our aim is to accept up to 25 new players, not counting any that received revisions. A player who apps two characters takes up exactly as many slots as a player who apps one.

[twicest]

Okay, thanks!

[silverviolence]

So I was declined the first round because the game had reached the cap. I’m not sure where me and others like me stand? Are we part of the 50/25 total applications group? Or are we part of the revisions/apping a second or third character group? I’m definitely interested in reapplying.

[goldmods]

Hello, anyone who was deferred solely due to cap would be in the 50/25 group. The exempt groups are those we asked to make changes that we could not review due to enough complete applications being accepted, and existing players apping seconds or thirds.

Editing to say we also want to note that being deferred due to cap is not the same as being declined, per our modly terminology — otherwise people would be getting permanently barred from reapping solely due to space constraints over time, which is definitely unfair.

[silverviolence]

Thank you for the response! I’m curious as to why the people who didn’t get into the game because of the cap aren’t consider the same as the people who received revisions.

If there wasn’t a cap both type of players would have gotten in correct?

[goldmods]

We have considered many different approaches to this coming app round, keeping in mind the limits to our bandwidth we have found. While allowing everyone from the previous round to have priority was one of those options, we have no way of knowing how much of that group might return, and thus considered this from the angle of everybody in that round returning; this would put us substantially ahead of what we have determined is manageable from a modwork perspective. We also wanted people who were deterred by the initial round or not aware of the game at the time to have the opportunity to apply as well, since we also cannot assume that every single person on Dreamwidth saw our game when we initially opened and applied at that time.

Additionally, the amount of revisions we actually handed out was very small, and were for technical issues that prevented us from processing the application at all. Instead of handing out traditional revisions, we focused on clarifying what we were looking for with the sample app — we already knew from the initial round that we would need to make changes, and thought it would be unfair to players to ask for in-depth revisions when a sample and a few section tweaks would help clarify what we were looking for on a broader scale. We love the passion we’ve seen for the game and know that this is disappointing for some, but we hope that the compromise we’ve come to is an understandable one.

[zangetsu]

modlies! does 'no weapons' apply to things like knives for bloodplay purposes asking for a friend the friend is me and i might have to retcon some thread details if so haha whoops

who's got two thumbs and completely missed that part of the setting, i did ヾ(＠⌒ー⌒＠)ノ

[goldmods]

Hi there! No worries, there are still standard dinner knives around at restaurants and the like that can be filched in a pinch.

The resort does not sell weapons (no sword store, for example) but there are ways to acquire small ones on the down-low in seedier locations at player discretion. You can read about that under locations. A brief summary: they are not totally absent but there are currently no significant weapons like grandiose spears, rifles, dynamite, etc. This will likely change as players gather reward points and contraband comes more into play.

[hallowing]

oh perfect, okay! that's awesome, thank you c:

feedback

[notgivingyourmoneyback]

hi there, hello - i have an accessibility feedback that is minor-ish. on the layout page for this comm, setting at 100% (as opposed to zoomed in) - the text is very smol. on the site scheme pages, it's better. (and all of the pages with sans-serif fonts are the bees knees. A++. 10/10)

i don't know if the smol text on the layout pages is because of coding in the layout itself or because of hardcoded font sizes in the post.

it does scale up fine with ctrl+mousewheel, so not insurmountable on my laptop.

(and i am doing this while i remember, but am also very tired, so if you need any clarification, just ask and i will brain better tomorrow XD)

[goldmods]

Thanks for letting us know! We've passed this on to our code mod to look at adjusting.