We had another short GSM a little while ago – here’s what happened!
Staff updates
The admins announced that Echohue has passed his three-month trial period and is now a full moderator. Congratulations to Echo!
We received a couple nominations of players for the Trial Mod rank, however no player received two nominations by the GSM date. We are happy to accept Trial Mod nominations for future staff meetings – just note that all candidates must have at least two nominations in order to be considered.
Dynmap render postponed due to machine instability
At the GSM we approved the concept of our semi-annual dynmap render, and it was originally scheduled to occur shortly after the GSM. However, we experienced a machine crash, and therefore aren’t sure that a render can safely complete or terminate without the machine crashing in the middle of the process.
We have therefore decided to postpone the full render until we can improve stability on our machine. This may wait all the way until we can get the Zeta server up and running, which we don’t have an estimate for at this time.
When the new world is rendered, we will be dropping night renders. These certainly look cool, but community consensus determined that they’re not worth the extra disk space and render time.
In the meantime, you can always request a local render of your immediate area simply by asking your nearest staff member.
A26-C107 Armada demoted to Mayor
Well, this is a first. The city of Armada, located at A26-C107 and some nearby stations, has been demoted to Mayor.
Our reasoning for this is mostly reflected in the fact that all of the buildings have been floating for quite some time, and its new mayor DevvySky has planned to do some major reorganization. We are happy to assist, however we want to ensure that the project is done to completion and of good quality, and as such we have demoted the city to the Mayor rank. This means:
- DevvySky will need to complete the standard city rank promotion process in order to bring Armada back to the Senator rank.
- Until this happens, all Mayor rank restrictions apply – no airfields yet, but helicopters and seaplanes are fine.
- Staff will be assisting in bringing buildings back down to ground level.
Holiday rank submissions still open
As per tradition, we’ll be using seasonally themed ranks in the month of December. We had a few suggestions come in, but none seemed particularly appealing, so we’re leaving the suggestion box open on this one. Please send us your serious ideas, and remember there are 13 ranks (yes, we do need one for Trial Mod, even though there aren’t any at the moment). If we don’t have any serious submissions by the first couple days of December, we may pull out one of our old ones that we’ve done in the last few years.
Roads, Rails, and IATs, Oh My!
We approved all of the roads, rails, and IATs submitted at the GSM. These were:
- Construction of the B44 from New Beginnings to Columbia Beach, submitted by ondist
- Modifications to the B191, submitted by lil_shadow59
- IntraRail tracks passing under inactive towns at I38, I39, and SE1, submitted by KittyCat11231 (thank you as always for your extremely clear proposals!)
- Construction of the A245 from Mountain View (EN10) to the B246, submitted by AlphaDS. Some additional notes on this one:
- Both phases of this road have been approved.
- The bridge over to Rosemont should be high enough to accommodate boats.
- There’s a mystery road along the route, and we have no idea why it exists. AlphaDS can take the mystery road as his and do with it whatever he wishes, including connect to it or destroy it.
- H21 Walcott has been transferred to XtremeCoder.
- ZN6 Station has been transferred to EliteNeon. Elite is asked, for now, to stay on the east side of the Seneca Canal.
GSM Town
While not a GSM item directly, we do want to call your attention to the GSM Town community project. Since everyone likes to build various things in the vicinity of staff during public portions of GSMs, we decided to colonize a series of islands in the Northern Ocean and make a public town that anyone can build in, but only on GSM days. It’s been a really fun project to watch over its first construction period, and we hope we can continue bringing the community together to build something cool while the staff argue about all of your silly road proposals.
You can read more about the GSM Town project on the wiki here. Our next GSM is on Sunday, December 8, and GSM Town construction will be open from 5:00 am UTC on Sunday, December 8 until 5:00 am UTC Monday, December 9.
That’s all for now, see you around!
<3, Chief