Department of Justice

Best way to help usher this sort of thing is to 1) Contact management and provide names and instances where there's favoritism towards friends so that it can be investigated and handled, and 2) Encourage people who genuinely want to help the server grow to apply for staff.     Activity is a tough one because there are people who are on LoA and have made it known that they're gone and when they intend to return.  Real life happens and this is all entirely volunteer-based.  But I agree that we definitely should always keep an eye out for inactivity and self-serving motives.    As far as favoritism towards friends - it could happen of course, though in most instances of reports, WL applications and requests, we make a point to remove people from the discussions who have conflict of interest.  And we hold each other accountable in this too.  I won't say always, because we aren't perfect, and it might slip past that someone is friends with someone else, but it might not be so obvious.  I'm not entirely sure about how to go about this scenario.  If we fully investigated every person's relationship with someone else, nothing would get done.  We do the best we can while trying to stay productive and timely. If you or people you know do have names or examples of favoritism, I encourage you to message Meatloaf, Miamika, Bill or Blueice with it.   I dig the sentiment of wanting sincerity and altruism in the staff team, but we can't make people join as an admin who don't want to.    

I strongly recommend a full re-infrastructure of the administrator roster... Honestly, I really think the admin roster needs to be looked at again. From what I been seeing, and hearing from a lotta people too, there's just way too much favoritism going on, mostly towards OOC friends, and it’s been messing with the whole vibe of the server. You got admins who ain’t really helping or even seem to care about where the server’s heading. Keeping them around just kinda makes everything worse, and after a while it really kills the fun for everybody. I'd really suggest removing unnecessary or counterproductive admins and bringing in folks who genuinely want to help the server grow not those who just want the admin role for personal gain. It’s not just me though other players been feeling the same way, sometimes it doesn't matter how good the scripts are or how fancy the server looks, one bad admin can ruin the whole thing real quick.

I think map limitations are being discussed on the discord now - My personal feelings are that I wanted to keep the large map, largely see this as a failed change, but also that reopening it doesn't solve any issues especially. I guess, that said, it causes few too... Addressing the issues it does cause, like difficulty of finding rp, etc, could be addressed in other ways.   Economy changes I'm so with you on. There's a wild imbalance in affordability, and no easy, intuitive ways for players to make money at the newcomer end of the scale. Old-hats are pretty good at making their money last - new players spend with uncertainty. I like the lack of grinding, but... money should be easy to get for those who want it, it should be flavour anyway - I hate that a concept requires . Grinding is opt in, and some people like money-go-up statistics. I see no harm with improving the ways to get money through solo and intuitive endeavours personally. Would like to see that improved.

Open rest of the map is all im saying. Restricting roleplay is always a bad idea. Especially to such a boring place like West Elizabeth.

Howdy all Tahomies! This is my first shot at the Community Newsletter with the recent shifts in staff, and man is it doozy! We have a plethora of things to cover from the recent release of the Armadillo MLO, impending release of the Grizzlies West and the Stables Update, along with covering some very clear concerns of the community and the impending future of South Tahoma Roleplay. I'll dive straight into the bulk of it, as much of the topics will be discussed on their own! ARMADILLO MLO In our most recent community update on Discord, we announced the launch of Armadillo's MLO. Funded by a generous contribution from @don dada, the town underwent a prolonged event headed by @ZelZel & @Garden Gnome, where the citizens banded together to repair, restore, and touch up the town of Armadillo in the fallout of the chaos that transpired. Great lengths were taken in-character to see to the repairing of the structures and filling and cleaning of the body pits, removing the stain that the cholera epidemic of '81 had left on the town. This is one of the first of many examples the staff team wants to create where participation from the players and community have a long-lasting impact of the landscape and the narrative of the server. WEST GRIZZLIES EXPANSION Rumors have began to amass about a lost treasure hidden away by a late General Humphry in the West Grizzlies.  Though common for disgraced Confederate Generals to flee southwards into Mexico, General Humphry took his men and what riches he could after Blackwater fell to Union forces in the Civil War. When he breached the fridged northern county of Ambarino, a great winter storm fell over the county, and any sign of Humphry and his men were never sited again. That is, until the snow finally let up in the Spring thaw...   Following of the suggestion to expand the map to the Grizzlies West, a team headed by @KV has put together a series of events surrounding the opening of Grizzlies West. As of this weekend, we plan to open the play area to include the new portion of Ambarino County. Due to constraints, the region of Ambarino will not be opened with amenities, and travelers will be advised to pack supplies before making the trek up north in the nearby town of Strawberry. THE STABLES UPDATE Coming soon after some vigorous testing, we plan to implement a new Stables Update. In it we'll see the addition of the Southfield Charger and the Roanoke Ranger; two breeds who had their names voted on in community polls. Along with the introduction of the two new breeds, we are able to introduce a variety of quality of life changes, among which are:  - Health and Stamina of a horse will now improve with levels, and be fitting to their purpose. Trail horses will have more stamina, draft horses more health, etc. - Scaling on horse breeds. Breeds such as the Percheron and American Quarter Horse will have their own size to distinguish them from their parent models. - /horsefeed command will enable your horse to eat from piles of hay much like /horsedrink allows it to drink from streams - Horse Fences will allow players to sell stolen NPC horses for a small chunk of change Also in listening to the feedback (as much as I wished to have name suggestions) in the New Horse Breed Name Suggestion Thread, we will be adjusting some horse costs and reworking the breeder and stablemaster rolls to be able to better facilitate getting in a variety of horses. FUTURE DEVELOPMENT ROADMAP Our development team has been hard at work shifting their priorities to scripting projects that support a wide variety of roleplay. Many of these topics haven't been touched since as far back as 2023, and some are brand new to STRP. @Blueice has set out a roadmap of scripts he intends to develop in this order: STRP Traits - A new way of allowing our players to do more with less. The trait system we integrate into our new scripts, characters will no longer have their abilities locked by their jobs. Jobs will be shifted to being more business and property based, while the new trait system will focus on characters skills and knowledge, allowing them to have a number of them at once.  STRP Farming - A new revamp to the farming system. Some expanded features will include having extra plant limits based on properties that have gardens and farmlands along with the ability to take care of plants to get multiple yields from them before they perish. STRP Ranching - Another overhaul to the ranch script. The STRP Ranching is intended to operate similarly to the STRP Farming script, allowing certain properties to have a variety of animals to tend to for profit and produce. STRP Stables - Our own custom flavor and take on the stable script using our own from the ground up flare. Horse taming and training, shoes that require maintaining, horse care & breeding, and a rare horse spawn system with varying stats within their own breeds are just a few intended features of our own home-grown stables script. RPQM & YOU There is no doubt that anybody playing on South Tahoma has encountered at one time or another a character that has stood out from the norm, be it good or bad. Since the departure of a good degree of our RPQM Subteam, the management team has decided it was in the server's best interests that all Staff at South Tahoma should take interest in upholding a standard of roleplay. What is this standard we always so vaguely refer to? Well it often varied player to player what they personally wished to see. Some players are of the casual variety, preferring a very light degree of roleplay and realism with very little care for portraying the exact struggles that many people of the era went through. Other players have advocated for achieving as close to reality of the time period as possible, taking a very strict interpretation of history into account for their portrayals. It is no doubt that South Tahoma, upon relaunching earlier the year in 1884, strived hard to adhere to the latter. I'll be frank in admitting that this has undoubtedly alienated a large degree of our player base that took a more casual approach. At the end of the day, however, South Tahoma Roleplay is a game. A game that people portray characters within the frame of 1884 and the frontier of the Wild West. Adhering too much to historical reality has stifled a good deal of portrayal and creativity, and conflicted with creating an environment inducive to allowing multitude avenues of portrayal and a diverse cast of characters. So with this newsletter, let me be clear with the "Standard" we have ambiguously tossed around in terms of roleplay quality: South Tahoma Roleplay is and will always be a roleplay first community. In order to allow for the diverse cast of characters and to keep the story telling appealing, we will allow a degree of creative, ahistoric nature to characters and roleplay. We're striving to tell stories much like a Hollywood Western would; a degree of romanticism in a fledgling country that's taming the new frontier. A land where a person was what they could make of themselves through their own trials and tribulations. Some may find roleplaying the intricacies of the average person of the era appealing, and we're not here to stop them: But I do believe a vast majority of players wish to strive to be unique characters telling interesting stories, not working land until they die of cholera. So what does this look like in practice? Certainly we don't wish to loosen the reins of our quality to the point where we have underprivileged groups ascending to mayor or law enforcement walking around and totting neon colored Call of Duty style guns. But we also don't want people portraying these characters to see the need to sit on their hands and do absolutely nothing. Players may choose to handle such things ICly by dropping everything everybody is yapping about to chastise a woman wearing pants, but we as Staff certainly will not care to action it. THE FUTURE (AND PAST) OF STRP I'd like to sign out of this newsletter with a small heart to heart with the community; I personally feel we have failed you in some regards. When it came to the hard reset, we polled the majority, and we didn't take into the account the results of the poll in its entirety, mostly in regard to setting (both the year and the map). Since I've taken the reins, I've done my utmost best to try to listen to the suggestions that are posted and bring them to the rest of the staff for consideration and implementation of changes going forward. I know often in the past suggestions have fallen on deaf ears, but if you look at the names on the Staff Roster, we are largely a different team than the staff team we had even two months ago. I want to make sure that moving forward we have the most accountability and transparency we can as possible, listening to the constructive criticism everybody has for the server. We might not always do exactly what the community demands to a T for the sake of keeping with the vision of the server, but we'll always do our best to incorporate what we can from these suggestions to improve the server for all. At the end of the day we're all players - none of us above one another- and we all just want to see South Tahoma Roleplay be the best Red Dead Text Roleplay environment it can be. So moving forward I'll be opening a series of polls to see how the community feels about opening the rest of the map amongst other discussions. This may cause the existing player base to thin out, but in the end, it'll provide the largest array of roleplaying opportunities and diversity. We also have an improved property script and economy changes on the horizon, and for the sake of brevity of this newsletter, I'll save the finer details for when we have those polished up. P.S.: We'll be opening General Chat on the Discord once more. Please remain constructive as we strive towards a more light hearted environment. Doomerism and mockery will be met rather harshly.

I just wanted to share some thoughts and open up a discussion about the current state of the South Tahoma server. I used to absolutely love playing on the server almost every day before the reset, but lately, it feels a lot more depressing to log on. Judging by the lower player counts, I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. I have two main ideas about why the server might be struggling right now, and I’d really like to put them out there not to be negative, but in the hopes they might be taken into consideration. 1.Map Limitations  While I understand the reasoning behind the new map limitations, they unfortunately discourage both new players and returning players who once enjoyed and preferred the now-closed portion of the map. This area, notably, was among the more popular regions even during story mode and its closure has had a noticeable impact on player engagement. 2. In-Game Economy Changes The changes to the in-game economy have also contributed to the decline. Currently, the economy is primarily player-driven; however, with such a low player base, it is difficult to sell goods to other players and earn a reasonable profit. Additionally, the NPC stores, which previously served as reliable buyers, have been significantly nerfed. While the new stackable item system is useful for managing inventory space, it adds a layer of frustration for players like myself who do not particularly enjoy crafting. Being required to craft just to sell basic items for minimal return makes the gameplay feel tedious. These changes might be more acceptable if there were a consistently active player market, but with the current conditions, it ultimately discourages players from engaging in the grind that once served as an enjoyable pastime and a natural segue into RP interactions. Would love to hear what others think. Have you guys noticed the same issues? Any ideas on how things could maybe improve a bit?