December Summary 2011

Greetings,

As opposed to the normal IC and OOC news, I will be mixing everything up this time around so you’ll have to excuse me. The end of year has been tiring ;)

2011 is over! We are half-way through our second year of existence and it’s been rather action-packed IC-ly and OOC-ly. We have gained many new friends and members and on the sad side, lost a few to RL, inactivity and other reasons. I hope you are all doing alright out there, no matter what you are up to and Happy New Year, to you!

And a happy new one to us all on the Winds of Fury still, as well! The activity check has revealed a nice gang of folks we can continue the story of Enkala with. Now, we’re going to have to do a little discussing on how to do that and what we want to do. I look forward to your ideas, crazy and not so much. The thread for this discussion is here: http://www.dancingshadows.net/Windfury/index.php?topic=2001.0

Welcome back to Charlie, Star and Makato(Becky). It’s good to see old members return. I hope we’ll find plots, scenes and other fun together J That said, we have a returning bluerider D’jan, a green Weyrling Ny’ko and a new Weyrfolk character Zaria to play with so it shouldn’t be difficult to get stuff started.

I was thinking the other day about superlatives – the longest scene, the spam game that got the most views, the character with the most IC posts but then I decided that all characters created and played on WoF on the year 2011 are winners. We’ve had a lot of fun, there have been a lot of exciting scenes and our members have come up with such amusing OOC games, posts, opinions, etc. Thanks for being there, you’ve given me a lot of good stuff to look back on the year for.

We had two OOC-IC events – one of which was a roaring success and the other a bit less so but darn if we haven’t had fun going through with it! During the Valentine’s Day event we chose a Mister Pern 1758(M’rman!) and a Miss Pern 1758(Rayna!). Both are absolutely gorgeous, amusing, talented and went through an excruciating process of a beauty pageant in Enkala(both Weyr and Hold). That was also when our first alternate universe(AU) scenes were had with fantastic pairings that otherwise would never happen. Or they might, now that we know how they play with each other! You never know what those crazy Enkalans do.

In the other OOC-IC event, the Halloween, all characters that had been signed up, dressed up as something completely different. Monsters, werewolves, ghosts and Faranth knows what a leviathan is, flooded the boards in this AU posting match. For a while, WoF was quite the scary place to go to! The HW-tagged scenes can still be found on the forum so if you stumble upon them, be sure to have some popcorn to have on the side.

In September, we switched from the safe and cozy phpbb3 to a more modern and exciting SMF software. The transition was easy enough and we installed a few good mods to make the WoF experience even more enjoyable for us all. That said, if anyone is still having problems with this, please let us know and we’ll try to fix it or advise how to make it work.

In RP-world, the Weyr had a new set of dragons from Ista Weyr that transferred a whole Wing to help out the flailing Enkala and then a Clutch of 22 eggs! The Senior Weyrlings are preparing to graduate while the Gold Talmeth is getting ready to Clutch again. The Weyrling Barracks are still standing so I guess the new Weyrlings are a bit more tame than the previous ones. All can change, of course, so stay tuned!

Thread started falling and first losses happened both in rider and dragon deaths and injuries. But as always, Enkala Weyr pushes ever forward, ignoring the possibility of failing. How will the story continue is in our hands so get involved, jump into the RP and tackle the plot.

I mentioned the activity check but now I’d like to elaborate a little. With the last newsletter and in the beginning of December I posted the last Activity Check of 2011 to get the sense of what we have and who we still have around kicking. 13 people replied to the check, one of whom wanted their characters set inactive. I haven’t dared to count the number of characters that was set inactive but it’s pretty high this time which makes me very sad. Of course, the hope always remains that you will return and yoink the character back into activity(it’s as easy as sending me a PM with such a request by the way) and play with us again. Although Star and Makato did not reply to the check, since they had some sort of activity during the check period, I included them in it. 18 people who were previously active, had their characters set inactive. Perhaps you got busy, maybe another game caught your attention or something else came on the way, I don’t know. It’s entirely possible that you did not find on WoF what you wanted and stopped coming by. For you, I recommend the plot discussion to speak up on what you are looking for and what would make this place more attractive and interesting. Keep in mind, that you are always welcome back.

Again, happy new year and lets have a prosperous year 2012!