Hey everyone! Here’s what happened at today’s GSM. The public portion recording can be viewed here.
Reviews of internal policies
We reviewed the City Rank Promotion updates and PVP arena approval processes and have elected to make some minor tweaks to both.
For City Rank Promotions: the request form is temporarily offline while we make some behind-the-scenes upgrades. Once that’s done, staff will be voting on cities using six scoring criteria (Internal Builds, External Builds, Planning & Infrastructure, Terraforming & Landscaping, Ambiance, and Scale). There is no minimum score threshold that a city needs to achieve to receive a “For” vote from an individual staff member, though you can expect that if you receive a 0, 1, 2, or 3 out of 10 in any category that the city will be voted down by that staff member.
For PVP Arenas: we’ll be tidying up the voting process a little, but otherwise this is working well. Remember that any member can create an arena and submit it for consideration! Just look at the August GSM notes for the guidelines.
Multi-person ventures are advised to formalize agreements
If you’re a part of a company which has multiple owners, or any other multi-person venture, we strongly encourage you to put your arrangement in writing, and make that arrangement publicly visible. This is not a requirement, but it will help you formalize your venture’s structure and will help you avoid sticky situations down the road.
In particular, multi-owner companies should put their governance structure and bylaws on their wiki pages. While companies are free to include any information in these documents, we would strongly encourage companies to include:
- Asset allocation tables: a detailed list of exactly who owns what within the company.
- Voluntary owner exit procedures: what happens if an owner decides, of their own free will, to leave the company.
- Involuntary owner exit procedures: what happens if an owner becomes inactive or banned (can their ownership be reallocated? how long do they need to be inactive before this happens?), and if owners can be forcibly removed by other owners, the procedures to do so.
- How changes to the governance document will be approved.
- Acknowledgement from all owners of their approval of the governance document (the best way to do this is for one person to put the contents of the governance document on the page, and then for each other owner to edit the page, make a small change, and put “I approve of the governance document” as the change message)
Companies will be responsible for enforcing their own procedures, but please don’t hesitate to contact staff for assistance.
If a dispute arises within a company and staff need to mediate, we will look first for a pre-existing governance document to assist us in resolving the dispute. If (and only if) no pre-existing governance agreement is found, we will assume that all owners involved have an equal stake in all company assets, that governance changes require unanimous consent, that active owners cannot have an involuntary exit, and that voluntary exits and inactive owners’ involuntary exits are handled by distributing their assets equally among all remaining owners.
Other community issues
- Access to the staff world is now restricted to staff only and staff should not be bringing non-staff there for any reason.
- Boats cannot be built around the edge of the world.
- A proposal to allow Premiers to have unlimited NPCs has been rejected for performance reasons and due to low demand. We may consider increasing NPC spawn limits for ranks (but keep them finite) if there’s demand, so if this is something that would help you, please contact your nearest staff member.
- Godzilltrain will be inspecting, and potentially removing, incomplete builds in Central City that have not been worked on in a long time. If you own incomplete builds in Central City, expect to be contacted in the near future.
- The project channels will be linked between Minecraft and Discord. As a reminder, political discussions should occur in a project channel (usually P1) rather than global chat.
- We had a conversation about the reflection letter system in use for re-promoting players who have received a double warning or two single warnings. While we won’t be making any changes for now, this will be discussed in greater detail at the next ASM.
Roads
- The B13, proposed by CodyHM, was pulled from consideration due to permissions being revoked.
- The B88, proposed by Needn_NL and CaptainObi to run between Carnoustie and Kaloro City, has been approved.
- The B846, proposed by Purrcat2010 to run between Cattington and Larkspur, has been approved. (As a reminder, please send road proposals to staff@ and don’t send dynmap screenshots from your phone!)
- We will also be reminding AlikSong and _InDev_, builders of the B751, that the road needs pillars in several sections. If pillars are not present at the next GSM, the road may be adjusted to ground level or removed entirely.
Projects and funding proposals
- A request by Frosty_Creeper10 to build a FrostyRail line near the inactive town at NE3 has been approved.
- A mini-golf tournament by SkyjumperTalon, which will occur around October 7, has been funded in full.
- An event known as the World Cup of Golf, also proposed by SkyjumperTalon, has been denied funding as we have concerns about fairness of qualification to the final rounds. Talon has since proposed an alternative format of this tournament, which staff will be considering via email.
- The Parkour House Competition, an event organized by Cortesi, has been denied funding as the request for funding was submitted after the event took place and we do not fund events retroactively. Additionally, the amount requested was not in line with the scale of the event (as a reminder, while the maximum grant is $10,000, that amount is intended for large server-wide events such as The Amazing Race).
- The MRT Fall Olympics, organized by airplane320, has been funded in full.
- XIII TacoBurritoAThon, organized by Skelezomperman, has been funded in full.
Miscellaneous
- London150’s request to take over ownership of NE4 Station has been approved.
- Earack’s city of Lanark was reviewed for Premier and was not promoted. (While all present staff voted No, the consensus was that it was very close!)
- We considered several moderator nominations but did not promote any.
- Frumple will be performing some server upgrades soon, notably upgrading the wiki to the latest MediaWiki release. (Be on the lookout for announcements as upgrades approach.) Other updates in the pipeline include a new Spigot build (we need your help testing this on the beta server!) and an update to our Java version. Minecraft 1.13 is still a ways away; we are guessing it won’t be installed on the MRT until 2019.
- Through supporter contributions and recurring payments, we have offset over half of this year’s operating costs. If you’re able to chip in and help pay for server expenses, you can read about your options here.
- The next New World dynmap render will occur in late October or early November. Details will be announced as the render approaches.
The date for the next GSM has not been set yet, but we are guessing it will be sometime in November.
Thanks everyone!
Chief