CIR - Postponing next term

[DukeofRealms]

Greetings,

After much consideration at Schine, we will be postponing the next term until we've sorted a few things out. We want to take some time to solidify what we (Schine) want the Council to be and how it should be operating. We also want to get feedback from the community, former Councillors and take some time to plan for ideas we've already discussed. During this period we'll be evaluating what we've done right, wrong and what can be improved.

We see no reason to rush into a next term until we're certain on where we wish to head. We believe that the best option is to take some time to focus on making the next Term the best it can be, ensuring that we start from a solid, transparent foundation.

In the last few weeks, we’ve taken feedback from current and former councillors. We’ve implemented a couple of changes and seen an increase in activity from the Council; this has been in an effort to be more transparent and improve communications between Schine and the Councillors. Given a bit of time for us to evaluate and plan for the next term, we think we can capitalise on the experiences from the previous three terms.

We have no plans to discontinue the program; we do believe that it needs a bit of work from our end to make the most out of community members' willingness to volunteer time.

A couple of examples of ideas we'll be investigating are assigning the Council to gather information for new default values for our server config and a Community Events program.

We know some great community competitions/tournaments are run throughout the year. We think it would be beneficial for both the community and those who run these events if there was some system where these events could be broadcasted to the rest of the community. These would comprise of the typical building and fighting events as well as other aspects of the game such as racing, drones/AI, logic/rails and so on. Along with community events, we'd still be hosting official Schine ones from time to time as well.

We think it would be beneficial for the community as a whole to give some exposure to these community run events. Ultimately, these events generate increased community activity as well as advertising material in the form of YouTube videos and Twitch streams. Making sure as many people are aware of these events, directs more views to our streamers and broadcasters (encouraging them to continue), more users joining these events which are beneficial for both event runners and participants. Places like this forum and our new launcher are great venues for advertising these programs.

We're excited to investigate some of these ideas and hear any suggestions from the community.

The current term will end as scheduled, on Thursday, 29th of September.


Thanks for playing StarMade,

- The Schine Team


EDIT:

Summary of the Council meeting on the 25th of September.

The Council held it's last meeting with Schine on the 25th of September. Here is a brief list of what they came up with.

Current tasks agreed upon:

• Badge processing (needs improvement, perhaps handling it through Phabricator)
• Event Management (minimum requirement of one Council hosted event per term)
• Suggestion tagging

Things that worked in the past:

• Phabricator task handling for suggestions

Ideas to brainstorm:

• Weekly Community Spotlight: Spotlighting three different StarMade creations of any medium e.g. ships, stations, mods, videos, stories.
• Event Spotlight: Servers/communities inform the Council about events, which would be published monthly on the forums main page.
• Integrate Phabricator status changes to tags on SMD: A lot of repetitive work could be made easier if at the very least tags get automatically updated.
• Forum to Phabricator automation: Import new suggestion threads to a particular Phabricator task.

We'll be creating a news post once we've fleshed out all these different proposals and most likely add new ones to the mix. If you have any suggestions or comments, feel free to post them.

 

[Mariux]

Alright. I would like to run as a candidate for the next (next) term just because why not. But this time, with a proper campaign and a proper slogan.

 

[alterintel]

Wow, I look forward to it.

(sounds like of like the platform I was running on last time?)

 

[Malacodor]

So no one will read our suggestions in the near future?

 

[DukeofRealms]

So no one will read our suggestions in the near future?

We frequently read suggestions, just as it was before the Council.

 

[Keptick]

just as it was before the Council.

Uh... no you didn't. The fact that schine wasn't reading suggestions is a big part of why the council was created in the first place.

 

[DukeofRealms]

Uh... no you didn't

We've always read suggestions since the new sites, we have channels to discuss interesting (new) suggestions. Community suggestions are commonly brought up in our weekly meetings, even if only briefly.

The council has tagged suggestions, prodded us for feedback and given a bit of visibility to them. We've never stopped reading the suggestion section, we might not read all of them or reply often, due to the pure number of suggestions, 4.8K threads with 54K posts is a bit much to handle. We don't simply ignore the section.

 

[DrTarDIS]

council needs to be made in less democratic and more republic fashon.
EG: All moderators are council members in situ, 4-6 additional council seats are voted on. council itself votes/nominates leader/reporter positions with more contact to schine every month.

council also needs some(not absolute) authority over bugtracker and testing priorities.

 

[Lecic]

There are a few things I would like to see the council doing.

1) Surveys.
Comr4de did a lot of these during his term on the first council. I would like to see more of this from the councilors, PREFERABLY in their own field of expertise. I don't want to see an artsy-fart making a survey about PvP or Jimmy McDoombrick surveying what new color of hull is so desperately needed.

2) Council chats.
Yet another thing Comr4de did that I really enjoyed were his "fireside chats" where he listened to people's ideas and talked about how the council and development was heading. Could we please have more of these? They were great.

3) Badge giving.
I've been told this is supposedly their job, but I've seen very little of it. A little bit of activity on this front would really help people with believing the council is active and doing things.

4) Organizing official contests and events (badges optional).
I think it would be great if councilors would organize things like building competitions, fights, races, astronaut combat, rails and logic competitions, etc. It'd be a great way to invigorate the community and the fights would also help with finding what's balanced or broken.

5) More tagging of suggestions.
What HolyCookie did last week was absolutely incredible. Hats off to him for going and tagging all that stuff. Could we maybe have the other 4 to 6 (depending on if we go back to 7) councilors do that sort of thing?

 

[jstenholt]

I can get behind all of these suggestions pretty well.

 

[DukeofRealms]

There are a few things I would like to see the council doing.

These are all great suggestions.

 

[alterintel]

Lecic for council :D

 

[Xacktar]

4) Organizing official contests and events (badges optional).
I think it would be great if councilors would organize things like building competitions, fights, races, astronaut combat, rails and logic competitions, etc. It'd be a great way to invigorate the community and the fights would also help with finding what's balanced or broken.

I would love to see this. Badges help get people in to compete, which means we see more creativity from the community.

 

[Comr4de]

1) Surveys.
Comr4de did a lot of these during his term on the first council. I would like to see more of this from the councilors, PREFERABLY in their own field of expertise. I don't want to see an artsy-fart making a survey about PvP or Jimmy McDoombrick surveying what new color of hull is so desperately needed.

2) Council chats.
Yet another thing Comr4de did that I really enjoyed were his "fireside chats" where he listened to people's ideas and talked about how the council and development was heading. Could we please have more of these? They were great.

gomro for gouncil :DDD

 

[ToasterBorst]

...what they aren't telling you is that cookie's tag rampage was only after a former councilor raised absolute hell that the council wasn't conveying its activity to the community. Note, this councilor was also told to fuck off and not speak further by a dev and that his opinions were all based on 3 months ago. It should also be noted this same councilor was doing 90% of all badge stuffs before his resignation and at his resignation spent days working his ass off to politic with current, former, and incoming councilors as well as team members about every suggestion listed in this f'ing thread.

So, the council has been temporarily disbanded.. more or less? Its a fucking joke. Best news I've read here in awhile!

 

[Jojomo]

Can we have a solid commitment on how long it will take to "sort a few things out" and get the council running again?

 

[Jasper1991]

...what they aren't telling you is that cookie's tag rampage was only after a former councilor raised absolute hell that the council wasn't conveying its activity to the community. Note, this councilor was also told to fuck off and not speak further by a dev and that his opinions were all based on 3 months ago. It should also be noted this same councilor was doing 90% of all badge stuffs before his resignation and at his resignation spent days working his ass off to politic with current, former, and incoming councilors as well as team members about every suggestion listed in this f'ing thread.

So, the council has been temporarily disbanded.. more or less? Its a fucking joke. Best news I've read here in awhile!

Holy shit, so just to get this straight, a dev literaly told you to fuck off after all the contributions you made to StarMade?

THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE.

And with some exceptions I though the Schine staff was pretty chill, but outright telling long time large scale community contributor and member to fuck off?

This puts my faith in Schine's claims that they are listening to the community in question, if they hate people like you enough to outright tell you to fuck off, then I for one want some fucking answers.

Why is Schine telling the people paying for their game to fuck off?

Is Schine really listening?

Do the Dev's even care about their community?

Are they just here for money?

Is this the new Electronic Arts?

 

[Criss]

Holy shit, so just to get this straight, a dev literaly told you to fuck off after all the contributions you made to StarMade?

Well, as I expected, this news has led to inaccurate information. We did not tell anyone off.

Toast here resigned, and since then the council pulled together and we set up meetings to discuss their most important issues. We set up a new workflow for tracking their suggestions. When the meeting was over we started discussing how to display it so as to be transparent with how the council was operating and to show they could get things done. I believe we have already done work to include a few issues they brought up in the latest dev build, I could be mistaken. The recently added auxiliary power system was a joint endeavor by the councilors and the Schine team, but it took a while to implement.

Without knowing any of this, Toast entered one of the chat rooms (because he resigned and access is therefore limited) and so began some arguments about how ineffective the council was. This was more about our transparency than anything. We told Toast that we accomplished quite a bit but in the end he left the discussion altogether claiming we were not listening. I will avoid providing further details, as really this is turning into drama. Others have more insight to this than I, and I am sure Duke would like to comment before I go any further.

If we have a council, we want it to work. It's better to get a gameplan before rushing into the next term, and so here we are.

 

[Jasper1991]

Well, as I expected, this news has led to inaccurate information. We did not tell anyone off.

Toast here resigned, and since then the council pulled together and we set up meetings to discuss their most important issues. We set up a new workflow for tracking their suggestions. When the meeting was over we started discussing how to display it so as to be transparent with how the council was operating and to show they could get things done. I believe we have already done work to include a few issues they brought up in the latest dev build, I could be mistaken. The recently added auxiliary power system was a joint endeavor by the councilors and the Schine team, but it took a while to implement.

Without knowing any of this, Toast entered one of the chat rooms (because he resigned and access is therefore limited) and so began some arguments about how ineffective the council was. This was more about our transparency than anything. We told Toast that we accomplished quite a bit but in the end he left the discussion altogether claiming we were not listening. I will avoid providing further details, as really this is turning into drama. Others have more insight to this than I, and I am sure Duke would like to comment before I go any further.

If we have a council, we want it to work. It's better to get a gameplan before rushing into the next term, and so here we are.

So you telling me ToasterBorst is lying?

I think that I trust his word more than yours, you even avoided addressing 90% of my post, that does not help your credibility

 

[Criss]

So you telling me ToasterBorst is lying?

I think that I trust his word more than yours, you even avoided addressing 90% of my post, that does not help your credibility

I am not saying anyone is lying, he may very well feel that way about us and interpreted our conversation that way. We explained to him what had happened in his absence, and simply put, it was not good enough for them. We lacked the procedure and workflow that allows council transparency and interaction that it needs without it being a hassle for the councilors, the staff, or the community. We want to make sure players can know what the council is up to very quickly, but also make it easy to manage.

As for the other questions that I did not address:

We are listening, ask the councilors about the recent meeting.

Yes we care, what is the point of making a game if we can't enjoy it with the players. We want to make a cool game and share it with others. I imagine that is why many indy developers make their games.

In the end, the game needs to be successful for us to keep our jobs. From a business standpoint, of course we need money. Now are we in it just for money? No. I genuinely think StarMade is unique, and will continue to grow popular as we add in the features we have planned. I play StarMade outside of work, and as a player there are things I want to add to improve the game. If it was about the money, Schema wouldn't have a free demo at all. He does not believe in forcing you to buy an unfinished product, and so we don't.