#charstaff_digest

At the code wizard's behest I publically announced the phasing-out of randomly added decimal places on character stats last night. It's something I've been doing for a while actually, I just don't change existing characters with current players unless they ask, so not everyone had noticed. The other two staff heads felt this was an oversight, so I took a few hours to write up some bbposts explaining the process of ceasing to randomize stats and gradually undoing the ones that had already been randomized.

It seemed to go over well, although the "why" seemed to go over a lot of heads and the "what" still seemed a little unclear to a few. I got a few questions like "but what does this mean for me right now as Blaster?" and "is my character going to change," the answers to which are "nothing, it only applies to the next Blaster, whoever that might be" and "not unless you want it to." I guess the players didn't expect me to make a big announcement unless I was changing stuff that was immediately relevant to them.

Admittedly a four-page announcement that boils down to "for lots of statistical and game-design reasons I'm changing something you won't even see on your current characters and which is not mentioned anywhere in the existing policies because it's not actually a rule" might seem sort of unnecessary, which I guess added to the confusion about why I would make these massive announcements about it, but you would not believe how much staff argue about stuff like that behind the scenes!

Anyhow, so that's what I was doing between about 12:30am and 5am last night(that and also regretfully setting a deadline on the character staff to get a couple apps done before Thursday)! Of course you can't formally announce a new thing without putting it on the wiki, so this morning I also wrote up the retrofit policy and published it to our wiki, and then came over here and posted about it here too. Ha ha, transparency!