3.1. Opening thoughts

Hi all,

Welcome back, everyone. 3.1 is the start of our 10th round as Fury, 11th as an alliance. You all deserve to know that it's very possible that 3.1 will be our last round. 3.0 was a ugly round in many ways: inactivity ran rampant in both the alliance and the game, ops were shorthanded and painful, enthusiasm was low, and competition around the community was minimal. If, despite our best efforts, 3.1 ends up similar to 3.0, and the prospects for the future (both for the alliance and the game) do not look good, Fury will disband.

In that sense, 3.1 is either a beginning or an end for us. Either this is the start of a new era of prosperity for the alliance, or this is a end of a long and good run. We are going to treat it like a beginning, and do everything we can to make sure that it is one. For Fury's sake, I hope you all do too. What has made Fury great is ultimately not numbers, or planning, or design, or leadership, but the good attitudes and active contributions of every person on the roster. Our future is in your hands.

A couple things to be aware of for 3.1 in general:

1. We are going to begin enforcing activity expectations again. At points last round, we had dozens of members who did not bother to log in and who sat around in escape pods for weeks. This will simply not cut it this round. People who are unwilling or unable to be consistently active are going to be pruned, even if we love you.

Obviously we do not expect you to make TDZK your first priority over more important real life things. However, the expectation is that every person on the roster will:

a) Play actively (whether trading or hunting) and show up on IRC every day, for at least an hour per day and ideally more. The more you can make yourself available on IRC, the better.
b) Read and respond to relevant threads in the alliance forums.
c) Sign up and show up for raid ops regularly, both for cover and raiders. We will do our best to plan a variety of raid times so at least everyone will have some ops that are convenient for them.

If you cannot consistently meet these expectations, you will be removed from the roster until you can. Leadership will hold ourselves to the same standards.

2. As we've lost a number of players over Nomad beta and 3.0, we are going to be aggressively recruiting throughout 3.1, with an emphasis on new players. Please do your best make new members feel welcome and help them out if they have any questions. We are implementing something of a mentoring system for new players this round, and are going to need experienced players who'd be willing to give special attention to new members. VT is handling recruitment and will be posting a more detailed thread about that soon, so if you're interested, keep an eye out for that.

3. One of our goals for this round is to significantly increase our hunting presence and impact in the game, to the point where our hunters and jumpers are able to make as much of a difference as the raid team. Hunters, be prepared to die a lot and hopefully kill even more.

Regardless of if this round is an end or a beginning... let's make it a good one.

Solace