6 January 2017
Dear BG:TSCC,
We'll be spending the month of January transitioning things over to a new year, both in and out of character. For instance, I'll be retiring this thread and starting a new one.
But before that, a short address about the "state of the server" ...
(It's actually a really long address, I'm sorry.
I am who I am, you guys!)
***
In academic circles, there is some debate over who or what the month of January is "really" named for, but the conventional myth is that it is named for the Roman god of transitions, Janus: A god with two faces, one looking forward and the other looking backward. With the new year starting, it's a good opportunity for us to look in both directions just the same.
In looking backward, we can take an account of all that has happened in 2016. And what a lot has happened!
We had an enormous amount of content released (some smoothly, some not-so-smoothly), to include new spells, skills, and abilities; persistent storage; disguise and appearance changer systems; costumes and jewelry and character faces; shops and treasure systems; classes and prestige classes; new area maps (to include whole new area groups, like the Upperdark) and revamped area maps; and so much more. It's almost certain that 2016 was the year we saw more content change than we'd ever seen before on BG:TSCC.
We also had quite a lot of staff changes. Our admin of many years, Luna, disappeared on us at the end of March, and I was brought back out of semi-retirement to take over. With the help of Endelyon and many others, we were able to transition the server. We saved the forums literally in the nick of time (we moved everything on a weekend, and the very next Monday the old forums just stopped working for people -- as a result, it turns out, of the outdated platform that it was using, which the old host was suddenly no longer supporting!).
We had the entire Head DM team transition over into new hands in 2016, and many new DMs have come and gone -- with a few returning DMs as well. Indeed,
none of the current ADMs were DMs at all this time last year! (Although a few of them had previously served.) We also had several new staff groups created, to include the forum moderators and art team. The dev team more than tripled in size, with the addition of 8 new developers (one of whom's since left) and the return of 3 others (one of whom's also retiring).
2016 was a year of increased server transparency, as well, with the introduction of "state of the server" updates, a developer pipeline thread (that really had no chance to keep up with all the changes happening in 2016), the rebirth of the server update thread/new content log under Duster47 and Endelyon, a DM campaign thread (to help players better engage and track the official DM campaigns), a sorely needed update to staff and credits threads, the release of our accountancy books with the creation of the server treasury thread, and the publication of the staff's codes of conduct, so that players could better know the standards that we hold our volunteer staff members to.
2016 saw a lot of forum changes, from the entire transition of the server's forums from bgtscc1.com to bgtscc.net, and the splitting of the suggestions and bug reporting threads, the creation of new roleplay organization/ooc threads, redescribed and reordered subforums, new forum features and updates, the restoration of the forum server player counter, and so on. Much left to do here, to be sure.
At a more "community-wide" angle, 2016 saw the creation of a NWN2 server admin roundtable, where BG and other servers (once maybe "competitors" of one another) finally came together in a real way to share ideas, content, tips, and news.
2016 was not all rainbows and sunshine, of course. Losing our previous admin threw the server into chaos. As part of that chaos, a huge update got released in March without proper bug testing or oversight -- and we probably won't have all of the bugs from that release fully ironed out until
this March (fingers crossed). The server transition itself caused hiccups, once with the entire forum database corrupting, erasing tens of thousands of posts and PMs (and costing us an arm and a leg to get it fixed -- it did teach us to start paying for backup insurance, though, which we've been doing ever since!). We had two prolonged DDOS attacks, the first right as Luna was disappearing, and the second last fall. We finally seemed to come up with a way to mitigate them.
Many people, mostly staff and former staff, have chafed some under the new admins and their ways of doing things (which could probably be described as a little more hands-on than was Luna's standard). The moderator group's very establishment has not been without controversy. DM and player dramas have also generated the usual controversies, scandals, and rumors they are wont to generate every year.
But perhaps it's the eternal optimist in me that thinks "what's a challenge if not an opportunity to overcome?"
And this community
has, for yet another year, overcome all of the challenges that have been thrown its way. The bad and the good have strengthened the core, and a game that's almost as old as some of our players (and probably older than some of our players's children) has continued to live on against all odds.
Indeed, our server population has
grown in 2016. Even as I type this update, we sit with over 70 players online. And we see the server capping out multiple times each weekend.
The future looks bright. At least, the future seems liable to be more stable and less chaotic than the year now past us. But any and all of the successes we enjoy in the year to come, as in every year before, rests squarely on the cohesiveness of this community, the strength and skill of its volunteers, the storytelling and flexibility of its players and DMs, and the friendships that keep us all together here.
Thank you for yet another wonderful year BG.
So big thanks to Aspect of Sorrow.