New Year Q&A with the Admin Team

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Irongron
Server Owner/Creative Lead
Server Owner/Creative Lead
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Joined: Tue Sep 09, 2014 7:13 pm

New Year Q&A with the Admin Team

Post by Irongron » Tue Jan 10, 2017 8:46 pm

For those with an interest in server direction, and more generally what goes through the heads of those running Arelith, here's a little interview with the core team (myself and Dunshine for the 'main' servers and Mithreas for FL). I'm sure some of our community will find parts of it interesting.

What would you consider your primary role on the team?

Dunshine: As an admin I'm mostly handeling player issues with cdkey keys and their characters. And ofcourse I keep a close eye on the forum for bug reports and player ideas/opinions and see if I can come up with new ideas to improve the server. Mostly my devwork is in scripting systems that are RP oriented.

Mithreas: FL developer, and with over 10 years' server administration experience, the wise old hand who can offer advice :-)

Irongron: Aside from being the current 'server owner' (I pay the bills), I'd generally consider myself the 'creative director' of Arelith, especially in regard to area projects.

How would you define Arelith?

Dunshine: A mighty fine community with lots of fond memories for me as a player in the past, and today as a dev/admin. Wish I had more time to actually play myself again.

Mithreas: A true CRPG environment, where players can create deep and meaningful stories with each other.

Irongron: As a game, first and foremost. This may sound kind of obvious but I strongly feel this should be an AD&D emulator. Which for me, encompasses not only the role-play of one's character, but a fun and challenging 'game' environment.


What do you consider Arelith's greatest quality?

Dunshine: Repeating myself here, but that would be the community. The players with their roleplay ingame and their input, either as player, or as DM, or as dev, Arelith is really something we made great together!

Mithreas: It's a true RP community, and a chance to play with a lot of talented RPers in an environment that supports that.

Irongron: The team, in general. We have a lot of very skilled people doing really good work.

And its greatest problem?

Dunshine: That's the cheating that's going on too regularly. Aside from griefing fellow players with it, it's also a real shame our DMs, Devs and Admins have to spent their free time on that kind of stupidity. When doing things we constantly have to be aware of how people can abuse or exploit things, since it's been proven over and over, some will do just that.

Mithreas: Arelith is different things to different people, and as we're all passionate about what we love, even minor differences can blow up.

Irongron: Incomplete/flawed systems. Devs are always keen to move onto the next project, and don't always take the time to monitor and improve past projects. There's a lot of - nearly - great stuff on Arelith. Good ideas that haven't been sufficiently improved.

Are there any particular skills you have that other team members may not always share?

Dunshine: Since my knowledge of lore and mechanics is much worse then probably a big portion of the community, I tend to not have a too strong opinion in a lot of discussions, and usually can judge it with an open mind. Currently I'm the only Admin with database knowledge and enough Linux knowledge to do most regular tasks needed. I'm also very responsive and try not to keep people waiting too long for answers.

Mithreas: I have a huge amount of experience running servers, including ~9 years as an admin here. I'm also a manager in the real world, with a team spanning two continents. So I have a lot of insight into what works and what doesn't.

Irongron: I'm an area builder, of course, but I also possess empirical knowledge of Arelith in general. There are only a few of us who know 'where things are' in the module, and have a broad knowledge of the various functions unique to the server. This is something that I think simply comes with experience; I've had many years to learn my way around.

And what skills are you lacking?

Dunshine: I lack basic Forgotten Realms Lore, although I read my share of books, it's been a long time, and it's pretty basic. I also lack mechanical knowledge, I do know how to build a decent character when I put my mind to it, but I only played a couple of different characters in all my years on Arelith, so also here, pretty basic knowledge. Luckily we have other great team members who excel in both these skills. Also, I'm not a native english speaker.

Mithreas: I'm a jack of all trades but not a true master of any of them. Arelith today has people better than I am at each of technical work, area development, DMing and server balance - which is great.

Irongron: Technical, I can conceive systems, but am ill equipped to write the code myself, and am pretty much always reliant on the development team to make such ideas a reality.

What would you consider your greatest achievement for the server?

Dunshine: Pooh, that's a tough one. I think the joined project (with ActionReplay and Irongron) of Andunor would probably be it, where I worked mostly on the Cage Fight and Slavery related areas and systems. That was really an all or nothing attempt to bring the Underdark back to life, which after all this time is still proving to be going strong.
Although I think the Lasso and the Bar system were nice additions as well.

Mithreas: The things I'm most proud of are the FL server, Baator, and the weather system. The last of which was really simple but made such a huge quality of life change to the module.

Irongron: Andunor. It was a big deal- and was considered at the time as a 'final roll of the dice' for the Underdark. It seems odd now to think it was considered for removal, with less than 10 players at most hours. Now it is perhaps the most active area of the module.

And your greatest failure?

Dunshine: Probably just my lack of time to actually play. I really think it's a good thing for Admins to stay connected as a player to the community to experience what's happening first hand ingame. Since it's the start of a new year, I'm promising myself to take more time for this.

Mithreas:In a decade there have been a lot of failures :) At a personal level, I think with hindsight, the biggest one is not stepping back early enough at a time when I was too busy to keep running the server. The new team have done a fantastic job, and I should have been brave enough to give them the reins earlier.

Irongron: I think most devs look back on their earlier work and shudder, though if I had to say it would be my failure to get creatures balance right, or over compensating for visible 'grinding' of an area. The Cloakers stand out here. Great concept, great area design, but simply a terrible ordeal to play against.

If you could magically introduce an overnight change to the server, what would it be?

Dunshine: Goblins taking over the server and Oogooboogoo becoming the one and only deity in the deity book... Aside from that, well would be totally awesome if guys like George RR Martin and Patrick Rothfuss would start playing Arelith and bring their stories to our server. Imagine what a couple of big names like that could do for Arelith in terms of promotion!

Mithreas: My pie in the sky wish would be for everyone to focus more on enjoying what is there and less on how they would like it to be different.

Irongron: Improving monster AI.

Do you perceive any big threats for the future of Arelith?

Dunshine: Well, since it's been running so long and still has a great and active community, I find it hard to think of threats as that other games or other servers will take away our playerbase and the community will dissolve. Probably the biggest threat could be something similar that happened with the "forumhack" which led Artos to leave the dev/admin team and Watchtower the DM team. So basically anything that would be so disheartening to our team members, which would cause them to leave the server.

Mithreas: Eventually the playerbase will run out... but we've been worrying about that for five years now, and it's now as high as it's ever been.

Irongron: Not really, though we only have two people qualified to manage the nuts and bolts of the server itself (Mithreas and Scholar Midnight). Simply put, if something 'big' breaks, we need one of those two people to fix things.

As a player is there anything you particularly enjoy?

Dunshine: I enjoy interacting with lots of people when I'm on. Either with a brutal character, bossing them around, or with a whimpering character, peeing itself everytime it spots a Drow. Lots of interactions usually leads to nice rp situations/groups or big adventures rather quickly.

Mithreas: Plotting and meaningful "political" RP.

Irongron: I'm kind of a traditionalist with AD&D. I enjoy dangerous/deadly dungeon crawls, and a general atmosphere of danger overall. I'm also partial to a spot of fixture decoration...

Is there any advice you'd give to someone taking on your role?

Dunshine: Be prepared to spent a lot of time on reading PMs, forum messages, e-mails and Skype messages and answering them. It really is time consuming and not always regarding topics that are highly exciting or interesting to yourself. It's much much much more relaxing and creative to just work as a developer on projects. Being an Admin brings a lot more overhead to the table.

Mithreas: You can only give what you have to spare. If you get sucked into overcommitting, you will burn out.

Irongron: Don't get hung up on being 'popular'. Active forum members are naturally the most outspoken members of the community, but make up a tiny fraction of the people playing here.Forum feedback is essential, but It's easy to think they speak for everyone, but this is very rarely the case. One can't please everyone, and working to demand is rarely fun. The best you can do is build the server you yourself would like to see.


2016 was a big year for the server, does any one achievment stand out to you?


Dunshine:Scholar Midnight's performance magic against lag, hands down. Aside from that I think the introduction of Adventure XP was a big thing.

Mithreas: The successful transition to the new team and the resulting plethora of improvements, bringing about an increase in players to our highest levels yet.

Irongron: Well, servers live or die by the numbers of players, but I'm not sure that's a valid answer. Player numbers are increased by a number of factors. Much as I'm proud of my own work last year, Performance really does trump everything, and the impact of Scholar Midnight's work in this area cannot easily be overstated.

Anything bad about last year?

Dunshine: Sometimes discussions led people to become irritated, myself included. Too much of that, and people will see it more as a burden to help out as apposed to an enjoyable and creative hobby.

Mithreas: FL being broken for about 4 months by changes made to the main server ;-)

Irongron: My own failure to get the website project complete, and promotion of the server more generally.

Any predictions for 2017?

Dunshine: Predictions? Well, I know a couple of projects in the works ofcourse, I'm sincerely hoping a new website soon, which would hopefully help drawing more players to our server. There are a lot of interesting ideas/projects out there, but it all depends on available time as always. Hard to say what will be finished in 2017 and what not. I do hope we can keep counting on our great DM and devteam and on the playerbase to constantly keep Arelith fresh and interesting, year and year again.

Mithreas: We're entering 2017 in a really good place - the new team is on board and ramped up, and I've got some time and energy back again to contribute. The player count is as high as it's been, and even FL has been picking up players recently. That's a great launchpad for a very successful year.

Irongron: I know it probably sounds a bit ambitious, but I genuinely feel 2017 will leave 2016 in the dust. If 2016 was the renaissance of Arelith, then 2017 will be the age of Englightenment. Everything I see from the team leaves me hugely optimistic for the future.

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