Broken Blog #1: July 2022

BWRP Team News

Fresh Fish

This month is our most recent addition to our Moderation team, Siah! They’ll be joining the roster of CM’s who keep the discord and in-game chats friendly and positive after a long time spent as a player. When asked about their thoughts on their promotion, Siah had this to say:

Gone, but Not Forgotten

While we’ve gained Siah, we’ve also had to say goodbye to Andrew and Pobs who will be dearly missed while they take their own time away.

God Help Them!

Introducing our first Team Leaders:

• Build Team: Index
• Writing, Wiki, & Web: Nyvrem
• Blockbench & Art: Retrospect
• Recruitment: Jojo (Hey! That’s me!)
• Techie: Jojo (Oh no, that’s also me...)
• Community Moderators: King CM Trudy as always!

Brick By Boring Brick

Moving forward our Community Moderators are seeing a return to prior permissions, as of the last week CM’s now have access to /socialspy that allows them to see messages in game sent with /msg. Not to be confused with /spy that is only available to Storytellers, which grants visibility to all in-game chats. Community Moderators will only see the dedicated in-game private messages meant for OOC (Out-Of-Character) information, in order to help them combat metagaming as per their main prerogative of, you guessed it, maintaining a positive roleplay environment.

Additionally, because of our return to a multi-settlement world, the necessity for Crafting Roleplay facilitated by CMs requires that they be able to reach people in easy to find areas of the map, CMs will once more be able to use Nuwa to warp themselves to each of the three settlements in the world where they may conduct strictly OOC Crafting Roleplay with players who have scheduled such a thing with them.

In addition to Nuwa-Warp, CMs also have access to Nuwa-Vanish. Like Nuwa-Warp this is a tracked Nuwa command that will enable them to vanish for the duration of a crafting RP so as not to disrupt any ongoing RP by their OOC presence. (Imagine Tink rocking up in Azu last month to help little Jimmy make a neat sword! Scandalous!)

What Do You Even Do?
The Article - Trudy

Entering this new part of BWRP’s lifespan, here’s a rundown of what we do globally across the server and how you can help! Take it away Trudy!

From top to bottom, every background team keeps this server one step ahead of those pesky wood recycling projects. At the head of us all is the Grand Swan himself, Tavolk. As the server’s admin, Tav is responsible to keep the rest of the teams in line, though he can also step into any role he needs to. Helping Tav maintain the various teams is the Community Manager, currently helmed by myself, Trudy. This job effectively acts as a middle man between the Admin and just about everyone else. Much like the Admin, the Community Manager is present to help every staff team, from our newest contractors to the most seasoned Storytellers.

As far as the Storyteller team goes, these are the server’s Dungeon Masters, so to speak. Once the average player, they have stepped up beyond that role in order to help run the overarching storylines of the server. Unlike every other staff position, the Storytellers have full access to meta-information, the “deep lore”, and a wide array of powers to help them run events, play interesting NPCs, and fill our broken worlds with things to poke at. Storytellers do not generally moderate the server, though they might step in to mediate or even moderate at times if things escalate or if the Moderators need a little help.

Speaking of, the Community Moderators are a volunteer group who help make sure the server’s rules are being followed. While still players at their core, the CM’s do have some distinctions in terms of commands and jobs in order to help keep our community a safe and fun place for us all. Primarily, the job of a CM is to moderate our channels in both Discord and Minecraft. Checking for obscenity, spam, meta-gaming, and other forms of rule breaking is the bread and butter of this team. The commands they do have access to, such as the ones we introduced above, are simply meant to help them keep our chats clean and welcoming. Of course, they are also responsible for helping out folks with basic crafting roleplay or answering any questions about the server. Overall, though, the Community Moderators are players who volunteer to keep the server healthy, oftentimes by stepping in to act as responsible members with experience in how the server functions on both in and out-of-character basis.

Beyond the Moderators, we have our Techie team. Responsible for the server's many technical needs, from updating the resource pack, ensuring stability and of course working on new features, the list of Techie jobs never seems to end. Because of their high workload and access to the server itself, Techies are some of our most trusted community members.

And finally we have our Contractors. This cluster of volunteers might be part of the Building, Writing, Recruitment, Web, Wiki, Blockbench, Art, or Staff Actor teams. Each Contractor is responsible for some aspect of content production for the server.

• Builders make our many nodes, mob camps, and even some plot-related builds.
• The Writers help codify the world’s lore, creating beautiful cultures and religions and locations for current and future characters to revel in. They don't just work on their own ideas however, writers frequently pool their heads with players to help polish any new lore submissions.
• The Recruiters post regularly in places like Reddit in order to advertise the server or show off some of its best moments, such as r/worldbuilding - which I hear gets us our best players.
• The Web team makes sure the official website is up-to-date with information, fixes any issue, and adds new pages for any new mechanic, lore, or otherwise.
• The Wiki team handles our fandom wiki pages, making sure that pages are formatted properly or showing finished pages to the ST team so it can get an official Stamp of Approval, which locks it's editing down and adds it fully into the canon.
• The Blockbench team might be making models for our custom mobs, interesting items to add in-game, or perhaps even a horrific model for an ST to use in some future story.
• The Art team has a wide range of skills and jobs, and might be asked to make a series of sprites, an art piece for an advertisement post, or perhaps textures for one of the new models.
• Finally, the Staff Actors are lovely players who the ST’s can call on to help act as NPC’s for certain events - usually to help give a scene more than one or two individuals for the other players to interact with.

Virtually everyone can volunteer to join any and all of the above teams. And while some Moderators and Storytellers might work in these teams, most of the folks doing all of this hard work are otherwise everyday players who want to help make the server a better and more interesting community. As a server built by our players, anyone and everyone can apply to join these contractor teams, even if they’ve done so before and had to step down to deal with real-life responsibilities for a bit. We even have an official form you can fill out on the website in order to do so; here. Once your application is in, I’ll give it a brief overview before sending it off to the appropriate tem leader for them to run a more formal interview and test run!

Cooking or Creatures!
The Vote

That’s right, it’s time for the vote. This July, you get to decide what we as teams will work together on for the server!

A Teamwide Roundup!

In this segment, we hear from our respective team leaders on what they’ve been working on to catch a glimpse at what’s in store for the server with them in charge!

Builders: ‘Hallooo, I am Index. I am newer compared to most of the staff team, having only gotten here in late September, and never did I really think I would be able to contribute to a project like this one. I am honoured to be granted the privilege. I am now heading the build team, and hope to start cracking out our dusty old build ideas and to-do list for us to make cool new things for you all to actively explore, die in and have hopefully have fun in! This coming month my team is going to be full steam ahead on adding a town selection into Spawn and, if the vote goes the wrong way, we'll be working on some mob camps too!

Maybe I can finally sneak uranium into the world somewhere so that Jojo will let me have my nuke building arc..’

Writing, Wiki, & Web: 'Hiya, I'm Nyvrem. One of the longer-going BWRP players, I've been around since BWRP 1, but the server is always changing, so there's always new faces who I haven't met yet, and honestly that is part of the fun of it. I'll be the head of the Wiki, Writing and Web teams going forward. While I am not at all surprised to end up here, I am glad, as I do care greatly for the wiki and have a passion for the lore and writings that underpin this world, and I would gladly help guide those that share these feelings. For those who are unfamiliar, the Wiki Team keeps the wiki to a certain standard, ensuring consistent formatting, crosslinking, and the sort. On the other hand, the Writing Team writes new lore for the wiki and the website. Sometimes to update outdated stuff and sometimes to flesh things out more, like with recent and up and coming projects relating to the Wildchoir, its regions and its beliefs. The Web Team is where we sacrifice all the goats.'

Art & Blockbench: ‘Howdy all, Retro here. I think by now most of you are familiar with me as the local forest cryptid. For those of you who may not know me, I'm one of the server's Community Moderators, and now it's my job to be the head of the Art and Blockbench teams. I'm super happy to be here, and excited for what the Art and Blockbench teams have in store going forward. I hope to help these teams provide BWRP with beautiful artwork and models to populate our world with. Between sprites and modelled mobs, I'm confident this team will make Nebelloren feel a little more alive, piece by piece; and can't wait to show all of you what we have in store.’

Recruitment: ‘Hello! Editor extraordinaire jumping in to talk about myself at last, my favourite pastime. As head of our recruitment efforts over the past 12 months, I make sure there’s at least one person who is available to write and post our weekly thread on reddit in order for us to continue growing our playerbase. We work closely with the Art and Writers teams to do our best at making high quality posts on wider audience subreddits as well, such as r/worldbuilding (where we get our best players)!’

Techie: ‘Oh I get another paragraph? Being a techie is simultaneously the most time consuming yet rewarding role we have to offer, ensuring that our server is functionally sound and entertaining mechanically is a large responsibility that keeps us on our toes collecting feedback and fixing issues almost constantly. Having worked on a few projects now, starting a couple myself now I’m excited to see people’s reactions and reap the attention once ready.’

Community Moderator: ‘Howdy folks, it's the King CM Trudy here! I just want to say that I'm really happy to be managing such an incredible team of people. From the oldest, most decrepit of Blarus to the freshest of Siahs, I know I can trust everyone to give a helping hand wherever needed. Moving forward, I'm excited about the CM team practising with their newfound powers while also having a clearer role as players first. Because while these guys are amazing moderators, they also make up some of my favourite roleplayers, and that's the whole point of the server! I also just want to reiterate that if anyone has any questions or concerns about the CM team, or any other team, my DM's are always open. I may just need frequent poking while I suffer at real life work.’

Cheeky Peek!

This month’s curious spoiler involves…

Looking Forwards (And why Eon hates me)
The Guest Piece - Tavolk

With our upcoming return to the throne of small minecraft servers we'd like to put ourselves in a position where it's also easier to play. It's no secret that the confines of Virgin Media's network has disrupted many an evening on BWRP and, while entirely acceptable, the hardware behind Nuwa herself is starting to show her age in small ways.

With other internet providers, hardware upgrades, and ongoing energy costs in the UK; any improvement for us will need to come from something outside of the current box. As such we're looking into external hosting. Ideally this will bring us a slew of benefits including better network stability, performance and a clearer breakdown of our direct running costs.

At current, to match our spec or beat it to comfortably allow us the space for our many plugins, website, bots, figura backend (It's coming) we're looking at an estimated $80 per month. With the server already now eating into my power bill by about that much, if not more, this seems like the logical next step for us.

So, now more than ever, thank you to those people who've donated to keep my lights on these last years. Thank you even more to those dedicated souls who've signed onto our Patreon, and stuck with it, to give us a guaranteed budget to work around each month.

As such, in true Tav fashion, I've prepared some "arty" gifts for our current patrons.

Much love for everything brochachos and remember:

𝓛𝓲𝓿𝓮

            𝓛𝓪𝓾𝓰𝓱

                               𝓛𝓪𝔂 𝓓𝓸𝔀𝓷 𝓢𝓾𝓹𝓹𝓻𝓮𝓼𝓼𝓲𝓿𝓮 𝓕𝓲𝓻𝓮

Signing Off

And there we have it, BrokenBlog #1 for your viewing pleasure. For a first issue we can only hope to continue to grow and improve, much like our server. Thank you to everyone who took the time to read, and to those still with us after all this time or who just joined this week. Make sure to cast your vote, every single one matters and will dictate what new toys you will have to enjoy on server next month. Stay happy and healthy and I’ll see you in August for the next blog!

- Jojo