Category Archives: Announcements

Elder voting process changed!

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Ok, so I changed the Elder voting process now. There won’t be a possibility to propose a Master for upgrade anymore if there is another Master already in the queue. As for the current ones in the queue, it seems that there are some vetoes coming in, so we might not need to do anything about them after all. Should there be more than one candidate to promote, I will take the first submitted one only and cancel the others. They will have to be re-submitted then.

Thanks everyone who contributed to the discussion!

Elder proposal issue

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Dear all, we have a small issue with the Elder proposals, and I wanted to get your input on this. This is slightly technical so please read through the explanation first:

As a quick recap, our Elder voting system is working as follows: For a Master to be promoted to Elder, all existing Elders have to vote “Yes”. If even one says no, the vote fails. You can read up on the details on the voting page.

This is working fine if one Master is being proposed for Elder, but if we have 2 (or more) at the same time, it gets tricky. If two people get all the votes for Elder at the same time, they are approved on the requirements of the current number of Elders. But since one of them was proposed earlier, the second Master theoretically should also need the vote of the first proposed to get upgraded.

This was not so much an issue in the past where Elder proposals were quite rare, but with the 2 Elders we just upgraded and the ones in the queue now, we have 7 Elders proposed in one month! This will ramp up the numbers of Elders from 10 to 17 in a quite short time. It’s not a problem as such if all the users are worthwhile candidates, but the fact that theoretically 6 people become Elders with a LOT less votes than the next one who will be promoted is an issue from my point of view. In detail that means that the 2 Elders who were just promoted, they both only needed 10 votes of those who were already Elders before them. In fact, one of them should have needed 11 votes. But as the system currently works, they got both promoted in a batch without needing each other’s votes. Now we have another 5 people who need 12 votes, but according to the theory of the system, the first one should need 12 votes, the second one 13 and so on. If all the proposals currently in the system are approved, the next proposal would need the vote of all 17 (then) Elders.

There are 3 solutions to this:

  1. We don’t care. Just let people get promoted without all Elders to approve. If several people get proposed at the same time, there should not be a cascade of the just-upgraded Elders to have to vote for the ones that are still in the queue.
    This is not recommended. It circumvents our base voting system.
  2. Let’s just upgrade the first proposed, let them then vote for the next one in the queue.
    This is technically possible, but a bit tricky. Once an Master is proposed for Elder promotion, all existing Elders get an email asking them to vote. When a Master is promoted to Elder, he does not know (yet) who else is right now being voted on. We would have to let the person know – fast. If this is late in the schedule of the next Elder proposal, the other proposed Master might time out and get denied.
  3. Let’s prevent two Masters to be proposed at the same time. Only once a Master is promoted or declined, the next one can be proposed.
    This is the most straightforward solution. It however slows down the Elder promotions, possibly substantially (up to 2 months). Specially if an Elder is voted down by someone: the system currently waits until the time given expires (which is 2 months) and only then takes the proposal out of the queue. This gives the person who voted someone down the chance to change their mind.

Generally I am for option 3 since it would make the Elder proposal something more special and not something done in “Bulk”. The consequence of this is that I would remove the other proposals and we would wait for one being promoted and then they have to be submitted again.

Opinions?

 

Server outage fixed

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We had a server outage today, thanks to all the users who sent me messages.
I have by now not only restarted the server, but also found and fixed the bug.
There was a mis-configuration in the chat plugin which causes an endless loop when someone used the /tell command instead of /msg.
After weeding through 30 plugins and configurations I found the issue and fixed it.

Happy Holidays and some small news

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I am off to another diving trip and not sitting in front of my computer the whole time. I am frequently checking my email however. If there is anything wrong, please send me a message and I will try to fix it ASAP.

I also want to wish everyone happy holidays and a much better 2018 than whatever this year was.

Also, I recently started a small experiment by re- generating the Empire with the same seed. It turns out it pretty much looks identical on the map. That means that (at least for version 12.2) we could update the empty lots in the empire to include all the current stone types that at right now missing, such as andesite, diorite etc.

So some time early next year I will likely replace all empty lots in the empire with new versions and test the same for the kingdom as well. As long as there are no big breaks in the borders between the lots, we should be able to get updated stone types.

I will continue to do those checks and updates for the coming versions as well.

All the best!

Uncovery