Hi folks,

With one third of the year done already, I thought it’d be a great time to follow up on my new year post!

2016 So Far

The first four months of the year was quite a ride of us - we rolled out a number of new features like hunting, better scavenging, and released Fever, our new sim.

We're not done yet, though!

I've been working with admins on a schedule over the next 2 months to release a number of items that will help grow our community and focus on story-building and communication.

Community Officers (COs)

We have mentors, weavers, moderators, leads, and admins today. While mentors, weavers, and moderators are pretty clear roles, the rest of the management burden falls on admins. Serving as a liaison and coordinator between group leads and admins,  I’m introducing community officers (CO) who will focus on certain areas of focus in role-play and will be recruited from existing or former group leaders. We have seem some amazing ideas for improvement and we want to empower those in our community that seek to use their RP and ideas as catalysts. 

• Journals
• Community Events
• Fringe
• Council

General responsibilities include helping players and leaders navigate the different avenues offered in Outbreak, creating long term themes or story arcs, strategy to boost interest, and serving as a point of contact for collaboration.

Mentors Update

The responsibilities of being a mentor will now apply to all staff and we’re going to be dropping that as role; current mentors will either become Moderators or Weavers. It’s also more important than ever that we have a team of exemplary players and will be more stringent in our recruiting process.

I think it’s super important that our staff continue to take that proactive role in reaching out to new players - building a friendly community is one of the key reasons why people stick around. Personally, I think Outbreak does an excellent job at this already.

Hospital Updates

The hospital is an integral part of the Island and could use special focus:

• I’m rolling out a new chart system next month that allows staff to quickly pull up patients present in the recovery ward, better search, and number of other updates. This will replace the notecards that are used today to track characters.
• Introducing an NPC nurse that enables self-admission to recovery to get partial credit until staff is present for a medical scene.
• Paging system designed to summon staff, even off sim, instead of forcing them to wait around in the hospital. I’m particularly excited about this new feature as you’ll see it applied in a number of other areas…
• Automate promotions for new employees based on new systems and tracking.
• Automate follow up notifications for appointments.
• Reward cash to staff who submit charts and automatically healing patients who RP with the hospital instead of forcing recovery "camping" and handing out medkits.

Commodity Updates

I think it's important that we don't let commodities linger...

• Introduce daily water source to meet basic water needs
• Build a "quest"-like experience for new players to discover areas of the sim while picking up key commodities that will allow them to survive long enough to focus on social interaction that worry about survival.
• Rare commodities that new players earn to encourage RP from existing players with them.
• Release 2-3 new commodities a month (admins to work with community to recommend ideas)

In Conclusion...

Between moving, travel, and other RL commitments, the next few months are going to be incredibly busy. I want to thank our staff for holding down the fort - they’ve done such an amazing job considering the number of new folks we get.

I’ve already published my monthly deliverables on all the things I’ve talked about, plus a few more that I haven’t shared (want to surprise you guys).

The one thing I’m going to ask for in the community is to help us with stories and ideas to introduce some of these new features. I’m also super excited to recruit new COs and build a bigger team overall.