Player/Staff Chat -- Discussion thread

[WWYD]

I have a transcript and the entire meeting recorded. I'll get the former up some time next week, and can probably upload the latter somewhere if there's interest.

[Lizzie]

Can we at least get a summary of the meeting? Like, were there any particular topics that inspired more discussion than others? And if so, what was the outcome?

[Nyr]

Can we at least get a summary of the meeting? Like, were there any particular topics that inspired more discussion than others? And if so, what was the outcome?

Players had questions and it was nice to have questions and responses in almost real-time (there was one question in particular that just took some thinking for me since writing is second-nature to me, and public speaking is not).  There weren't any topics, we just had an open forum of people being given the staff of pontification, then they asked questions, and then we responded and sometimes just talked right back and forth with individual players over their questions.  About halfway through I thought we might want to impose a limit on how many questions a person asked in one sitting.  It's not that we don't want to hear you or talk about this stuff--we do--but there were a bunch of other folks there, too.

People asked about stuff like player-led plots, the new engine, stuff making it over to this game that was originally proposed for Arm 2, ways for players to help out with the inevitable transitions of staff rotations, better utilization of social media and the Web, animation questions, etc.  I got to show off Nyring a question in real-time ("Hold on, let me find that link for you where we discussed that in-depth at the time!").  We answered the questions as best we could.  It was an hour-long meeting; we have peoples working on transcription but that'll take a while.  Sorry we can't be more specific--it's not that we don't want to share it, but that it is a lot of material to remember and cover.

Overall, I think the meeting went pretty well.  All of the players there were cordial and nice, and even the more difficult questions were asked really professionally!  It made me proud to be volunteering to support such great folks.  A great big thank you needs to go out to Sephiroto for not only volunteering his server and his expertise, but for also helping folks troubleshoot their connections!

We're going to discuss using Mumble on Horta (the second server that we have) for future such meetings; we'll see how that pans out.  It's a better option for us since it is far more cost effective than TeamSpeak.  We also tossed up the idea of using this meeting itself as a podcast format.  Transcription is necessary for the hearing-impaired (and also for those that don't want to spend the time required to listen to a podcast), so we'll make that a priority in the future and see what we can do to improve the process.  Right now we're crowdsourcing the transcription between several people.  We're also going to figure out how often we can do things like this.

For those of you that had trouble connecting:  see what you can do to work out those kinks.  I don't know if it's the Mumble software or what, but even I had some issues with hearing people initially and had to tap the Push-to-talk button once at the beginning of the meeting in order to hear everyone.  No, that's not what "push-to-talk" means, but it seemed to work.  At the bare minimum, if you don't have a mic, you can join into the meeting and send your question in a private message to the staffer keeping track of those questions.

For those of you that would've been there but couldn't be there:  This was just a test event.  We will definitely provide more notice next time.  We'll have a transcription ready as well as (hopefully) the ability for you to download the audio.

For those of you that did show up and asked questions:  Thank you again for being courteous and professional.

For those of you that did show up but did not ask questions:  That's cool.  Next time feel free to jump in there, though.  We'll answer anything even if it's already been answered (with the usual caveat that there's some stuff we can't elaborate on too terribly much).  We won't bite. 

For those of you that couldn't be arsed to update your drivers and said as much here:  it's time to join this decade.  Even I had to eventually put a new OS on my POS Macbook in order to continue to run Chrome or Firefox without being vulnerable to security flaws!  Updating your drivers and software (in cases where this is applicable) isn't a bad thing.  Wait until there's a stable update for whatever you're using, research the driver itself, then update it.  It is exceptionally rare that a driver update will reduce your functionality; in the majority of cases, driver updates enhance functionality.  In the rare cases where a driver update doesn't make sense or causes issues, you will usually see evidence of it on the great big web before you put it on your machine, and you'll know what to expect!  Anyway, at this point, it does seem like we're going to use Mumble again, so if you plan to attend any of these events, you may well need to update things.

[Case]

If we shift to Horta, I recommend using TeamSpeak if only because it works out of the box for users with no futzing around. I think it's a real black mark against Mumble that its bugs/usability options interrupting the meeting from start to finish and made it a horrible experience for some people.

[Adhira]

We will definitely compare the two and figure out which will work best.  I am unsure why there were so many issues last night, it seems that it was likely to do with rushing/bypassing the set up wizard.  However, we do want to make sure we have the easiest/best solution available.

[Adhira]

We are looking at the nonprofit license for Teamspeak, also.  We will let you all know once we decide on a solution.  We haven't yet had a chance to look over transcripts or figure out if this is something we want to do regularly but at first glance it seems like it was a worthwhile event.

[Jenred]

Any updates on a transcript or recording?

[Nyr]

Any updates on a transcript or recording?

The transcript shared with us is only the stuff that WWYD didn't work on, which only includes about 15 minutes.  I do not know what WWYD worked on or how much has been done.  In the future, we'll have a better process for doing transcripts.

[Nyr]

We have our own TeamSpeak server now, hosted on our second VPS.  Whenever we have player events, we'll shell out the info needed to connect!  TeamSpeak should be a lot easier to use than Mumble.  I'd recommend making sure you can make TeamSpeak work at all.  For that, maybe connect to the existing player TS server and chat with the other players there.

Still waiting on a transcript, unfortunately.

[Lizzie]

Yay! This'll be great, thanks for switching it to teamspeak!

[Sephiroto]

I have a .wav file of the meeting on my file server.  If any staff members wants/needs that document to host on Arm's servers, I can make sure you get the URL to download the file.  I won't be hosting the file publicly due to my server being on a residential ISP.

[Jingo]

I just had an awesome question for staff. Wish I thought of it earlier.

[Nyr]

The transcript is provided here in staff announcements.  We're going to come up with a better place for it, but at least you guys can see it now!

Thanks again to WWYD, Sephiroto, and Wug.   Feel free to comment here.