State of the union
All right everyone. I wanted to wait to have this discussion until, well, things settled down and I could come to terms with the way things are headed. I'm sure I don't need to repeat all that has gone on--the mass replurks/reposting of all the dirt people have dug up in past weeks have surely gotten to you, so all that will lay right where it is.
What I'm more concerned about is making you all happy. As you may have noticed, I have changed the layout of the main comm and this one to something that isn't affected by the change in comment style. We'll just have to be careful with miles-long threads since...if I remember correctly, they do end up breaking things after a certain point, but I can't remember how many it takes. If I could somehow crosspost everything--comments, entries, you name it--to both LiveJournal and Dreamwidth, I would so people who wish to migrate to Dreamwidth can and those who wish to remain with LiveJournal can all play together in the same game but use the commenting platform of their own choosing. And who knows, maybe that might be possible someday. But as things stand, it's not likely to happen any time soon.
So where does that leave us? Dreamwidth already has its community import thing set up--for paid accounts. If we do decide to move the game to Dreamwidth, I'm only going to do so once the community import option is free. I can't afford to buy paid accounts, and I certainly cannot condone spending money for a paid mod account just for a one-time import. It's a waste, especially when the game won't properly start until May 12th. Thankfully, we do have a few months before then, and at the rate everything has changed, who knows when that option will crop up.
What to do until then? Well, like I mentioned above, I did change the style to something that won't kill everyone's eyes. It's a bit easier than getting coding that'll make things all plain in a layout I'm not thrilled about anyway. (I had another one chosen that was more appropriate, but did not like the font it used.) The planned post for December never did happen, and I'm really, really sorry about that. I'm sure I'm not the only one whose tagging drive died during all the drama at the end of the month... But what I'm thinking is giving it another go next weekend (so like Jan 13/14) and keeping it just us--and not just those whose characters decided to stay behind, but all of the characters who were in the game last season. So it's sort of like a 4th wall, but not quite.
The proper 4th wall that I want to do in the future will be set in March sometime and that will be open to everyone and anyone. Plus, I'm planning on making it a canon 4th wall event like I did last summer so any new characters who come in will have established CR with those already in the game. This way, we get people interested a month before apps/reserves open--and the app form is going to change a bit, but not too drastically--and gives them more time to write and all that fun stuff.
Now that I've laid all of that out, I'm going to ask what you all want to do. I know Luministi isn't the only game that most of its members are in, myself included, so I can definitely understand if you want to move/stay because other games are moving/have moved/are staying. Hell, I'm willing to even run the game on both sites if that's what it'll take to keep everyone happy with their site of choice. The game is small enough that I could do that. It'll be a shared membership (like, only one Sophie, only one Ten. No duplicates), and I'll make weekly updates in the OOC comms about things going on in each respective platform. (And hopefully, the commenting style in the Expressive layout and such will remain good.) Also, if we do wish to move and the community import option still isn't free by the time the game should open? We can always leave the LiveJournal version as an archive and I'll add a thorough game summary page to archive everything we've done so we can go back and reference things.
Trust me. You'll want that for what lies ahead of us for the third and last season.
So what do you guys think? I really need everyone's opinion. Please spread this to every member listed in the contact page if you think they might have missed it.