thatrainbowcity | (no subject)

Hello one more time, Polychromatic!

Voting on our gamewide poll is closed.

The majority of votes were in favor of moving Polychromatic to Dreamwidth.

Therefore, Polychromatic will be moving from Livejournal to Dreamwidth.

And the mods agree that, given Livejournal's recent difficulties and potential future changes, this will be the best course of action for the game.

The move will be taking place on Sunday, January 15. On that day, posting will officially move from LJ to DW.

Furthermore, we are waiving activity requirements for January because of this move.

However, because this is such a change, we have decided to revisit a topic of discussion--namely, should Polychromatic operate in a community-based or a journal-based posting format?

There are pros and cons to each format--journal-based posting allows one to keep one's own content even after leaving a game, but community-based posting eliminates the need for an add/remove list, &c. Please give both sides due consideration and vote in the following poll. We would like you to decide as regards this change. The majority will rule in this poll as in the other.

This poll is open until Friday, January 13th.

[Poll #1809839]

As before, while we would prefer you to use this poll, you may also contact us by email (polychromatic.mods@gmail.com) with your response if LJ is giving you difficulties of any sort.

A few more things:

→ Please join [poly_chromatic], [tampered], [poly_tldr], and [thatrainbowcity] with your character journal(s). These will be our main communities on DW. (Alas, the name "polychromatic" was already taken by a personal journal! How can this be? Also! if the mods of

poly_crack would like to set up a crack comm for Poly on DW, please do. That's all up to you, but spread the word if you create one!)

→ This poll is still on-going, but you may go ahead and post in your DW journal if you would like, but please be aware that some players may only be checking LJ. We certainly encourage crossposting from DW to LJ for the time being. We know the game is kind of on hold while the move is going on. We are working on importing our communities and getting everything set up as we'd like. Moving is something of a gradual process, but we would like to have at least the basics completed by the 15th.

→ We recommend that everyone use poly_chromatic's members list for the time being to keep up with any character posts that may be made on DW. Once this poll closes, we will either rebuild the add/remove list or open poly_chromatic for posting with character journals (and we will be using [thatrainbowcity] for mod posts and announcements). Please be aware that if the game stays journal-based, it may take a day or two for us to rebuild the add/remove list and you may have to use the member list for a little while after January 15th.

→ If you are going to be using a journal on DW with a different username than the one you have now, please reply to the first comment in this post with both your old and your new usernames. Please do not reply if your journal name is the same on both sites.

→ Please comment to the new [Taken List] with your character(s). This will be a fresh start and will help us to update the Taken List.

→ Please bear with us while we work on making these changes. We will do our best to get everything up and running as soon as possible.

We will also be making another post here in POLYchromatic and mirrored on the Dreamwidth equivalent (poly_chromatic) with the results of the poll, what those results will mean, and a few final notes and suggestions before the 15th.

Thank you, POLYchromatic! We'll see you on the other side!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm just curious, is there anyone who will actually be unhappy or feel their enjoyment of gameplay will be hampered by staying in the journal based format?

I do wonder if that might not be the question to ask, simply because everyone here signed up knowing it was journal based and so is likely to be able to tolerate keeping that system. I myself will be sad if it switches to a comm format but it's not a deal breaker. I'll see how I deal with it, I'm just aware of people with more issues than myself related to playing in a comm style.

The biggest specific/technical pros I can see with switching to a community format involve making the transition to dreamwidth smoother for the mods when it comes to compiling an initial friending list, and then the worry that people will forget to click both grant and subscribe when adding individual friends later. And, obviously, some people just prefer the community format - but have been playing in a journal based style and joined the game with that set up.

I feel that a small note or table to throw in to new character tldr posts saying "please grant AND subscribe to -username-" would go some way to solving the two-click problem, and we'd get used to it, though I'm sure there would be small slips.

However, in switching to a community format, we lose some of the tradition of one of LJ's older panfandom games - and while poly may always have put a few people off who only like comm games, there are many alternatives. Far fewer alternative journal based games.

We lose the back story of the characters. We'll all either have journals that look abruptly cut off, or those of us who like things neat will delete or hide imported entries and start over. Either way it will be harder to trace a character backwards.

We lose the more personalised feel and sense of ownership others have mentioned they get from having their character's entries in their own journal.

We lose the ability to filter friends pages: I know some of us with more than one character like to have one main friends list and smaller friends lists for individual characters, for those days when you can't read everything (more necessary when the game was faster).

Yes, we can track community posts in our own journals, or even fake-cut link across, but both of these options feel somehow distancing.

Ultimately, I'll go with the game and see how I get on with it, whatever the decision may be. Making the change to dw is already quite an adjustment and it's great that there are efforts all round to be accommodating with it. I just wanted to shape my opinions a little bit more and stop overloading people's plurks. Sorry to be so srs over what is a silly little thing in the scheme of things. It's just 4 1/2 years in the game is a lot of tradition to miss.

Edited 2012-01-11 08:58 (UTC)

+1 to all this. Well said.

Just clearing up any confusion re: smaller friends lists - I just mean that people with several in game characters may add everyone to their main journal flist, then add smaller groups to individual character journals for ease of finding main cr on busy days. Not to filter people out.

I absolutely agree with everything here. I completely loathe the idea of inconsistency in content and losing the ability to tag my posts.

Also, edited to add: I don't believe the "granting access" step matters unless there's friends-locked content in the journal, so even if people only subscribe to one another, they should still be able to see all the posts? I don't see why there would be friends-locking of game posts.

Edited 2012-01-11 15:13 (UTC)

The only reason the grant/subscribe issue matters = the grant access is right in the spot (on the profile page) where the " friend " button was on eljay. If someone is new to dw and don't really understand how dw friending works, they can easily only grant access, without recalling to subscribe - which, as you mentioned, is not v. useful.

This could be helped if everyone remembered to both subscribe and grant access (or primarily to subscribe), but, yes.

I don't love journal-based, but I do love the game. I've never been fond of the journals, actually. But I suppose I'm a masochist? I usually have trouble and feel overwhelmed by the amount of journals that are not only active but ones that aren't anymore and might have info in them but are locked down.

Not that anyone else might care, but it's just my $.02. It would definitely make me more inclined to stick around longer and I generally play better in a comm-setting. (unsure)

Just want to add another +1 to this.

I'm very uncomfortable with the notion of a comm-based community. One of the reasons I play at Poly rather than anywhere else is because it's one of those very rare journal-based games. I like the control a personal journal offers. I like being able to see a character's history in one place.

The one other RP game I've played in was comm-based and it just didn't work for me. I would certainly try to stay with Poly because this is an amazing game with amazing people and amazing mods.

Thank you for figuring out a way to say all of that because it is exactly what I was feeling. All of this combined with how much more personal it feels to have individual journals and how much more legitimately comfortable it is commenting on both mine and other peoples' posts when they aren't all conglomerated en masse in a comm. I've been in community based games before and constantly wind up feeling as though I shouldn't be posting somewhere even if it's labelled as open, solely because of the location in which it was placed. Poly's the first place I've been with a journal format and I've been in Poly about a year longer than I ever wound up consistently posting anywhere else. Adjusting to the change in website seems like a big enough difference without having to adjust to a new format of game as well.

I'm sorry I've blathered all over your well-stated comment but I am honestly agreeing just with too many words.