- okay - I'll keep an eye out for curbdirt and julie.

Are we contacting the one strikers personally to ask what's up? And just how much activity are we expecting? It hasn't even been 24hrs since Amdir's last test and her only posts on subeta since her last test were to help trollers with vesnali...

I think we need to be careful not to take our group grooming into the overbearing zone. I think that has to do with the intimidation factor. Lots of rules and pinging and expectations when we started out just being a group out to help each other.

I've contacted them all already :) Once every few days activity at least. Oh didn't notice that amdir was a newer member, sorry ;3; We have these rules and pinging because a lot of people are spoiling it and taking the win without doing work...

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I'm not sure whether or not julie was actually every assigned pages, but she said that she was told to test pages 4 and 14 (the same as mine) in this post post by julie

curbdirt was offered a page by me in this post post to curbdirt on the same page of the thread

last questions from curbdirt here questions followed by his page assignment by me here page assignment

Thanks for looking through the pages of posts! huh strange Well Tenka seems to have newly assigned julie to 4 and 11 and curbdirt to 18 So all solved already?

Yep I totally understand the why I just don't want us to scare good testers away by getting too strict. I agree, once every few days is good. So, we should be worrying about people who haven't tested since what, the 23rd yeah? And as long as we give people a headsup/chance to help more before booting them.

We've just morphed a lot in the past couple days. I know at first when I would come online there would be so many trolling pings that I just deleted them all since I figured they were winning weapons I missed out on. If I hadn't signed up to be admin I probably wouldn't even have noticed all the changes XD oblivious so some people who haven't been on in a few days might still be in the 'grab a page and let us know if you win' mode while we've moved into this more structured 'page-assignment, sign the rules, check in with each testing' plan.

You're right. I probably got to this a bit too fast u.u I felt pressured to push the change since people were still spoiling it within minutes of pinging.

Yes 23rd,I've given warned people until the 27th to have some sort of activity.

I believe most of the booted people were never active since the first few days of the group starting.

I don't have time to double check the old testing thread. If someone could do that and someone booted was active more recently we could make a secondary list and invite them back?

- for what it's worth I agree with Kellijuana's concerns. It's a balancing act between making sure everyone has a fair chance to beat the troll and remembering that this is a game that people play for fun. Naoto has done a great job so far but the group has grown so fast it's getting really hard for any of us to keep up.

I don't know what is up with julie, but think that curbdirt is just confused and should maybe be given a bit more help. If they keep up with the pages assigned by Tenka, that would be okay with me. I prefer to err on the side of leniency/education, especially because this is a game.

On that note, I sent an smail to the member I mentioned earlier and was told that he didn't feel harassed and had started coordinating with the other page testers. But something clearly bothered him or I wouldn't have received the first comment. I also noticed Aloysius telling someone that he thought they should not do their testing until our new Master List is available which I find out of line. No test is wasted. Even if two people test the same pages at about the same time one of them could happen upon a winner the other one missed due to a reset. Also I don't think anyone who is willing to test should be discouraged. And the bigger the group grows the more people will share a page. They may not all want to coordinate and schedule - that can start to feel more like work than fun. Since the immediate problem is solved, I'm going to think about this some more before doing anything.

Here's the list of users I noticed had joined in the past couple of days:

4/24 ClaraBella Shantal Amdir_tithen Riedy julie? - don't know when she first showed up

4/25 Phantomhive Chook Kristy Kestrel pandemonium Trubble

4/26 Ocelot Hamda Cutie

Didn't see the post assigning Cutie a page and sending links, so I'll resend now that and add the new tutorial.

I really need to be off admin duty for awhile. I have some real life to get to and I haven't even done my first quest yet. So I'll be here on and off for a bit.

Best of luck with that troll.

I hear ya, I definitely wish we could get a better hold on it, I guess I just figure it's gonna keep on keepin on... Even the active members might feel bad/want to help others, and go around smailing friends the active weapon... Maybe we could get to consider posting a guide to his battle blog about the troll and including our helpful hint that if you want any of your friends to get in on the win, DON'T HIT SEE RESULTS! after your fifth battle, and spread the word about the weapon. He's a Lairbear, I could talk to him, or I saw her around here <3 and see what his thoughts are on this challenger. Though, he did just have a baby <3 so he may not be up to it any time soon, or even like the idea of adding our info... but who knows? ^_^ Never hurts to ask...

The good thing is that we don't always have to search the forums. If we have concerns about any member's participation, we can just look at their recent posts. Even if it's not on the profile you can usually figure out their user id and plug it in here: https://subeta.net/forums.php/recent/posts/###### Now that won't work for everyone, as some people really hit the forums hard posting in all the 'what did you get today' threads hunting forum points, but for the most part, it should show their activity around here. ^_^ combing the threads can be a last resort thing for members we can't figure out through recent posts. :)

Yeah, it has definitely blown up! hehe That's good though yeah?! :D We'll do our best to hold the rreigns until it goes wild and runs off (after all, everything is temporary, that's life!) I agree, coordinating is a nice suggestion, but should be just that. Some people like having things super planned out like that, others will feel more like, whoa man, I joined so I could help out when I get a chance... I hope your RL stuff goes smoothly. ^_^ Today was alllll RL for me. :/ Now it's 1am and I have GOT to get some sleep tonight :/

Gnight!

- yes, definitely good because the bigger the group, the more active members and the more wins for everyone. I enjoyed your pun about rreigns - for some reason, it made me smile. Real life was fine, just little things like family here, needing a break to eat/sleep. Hope your real life is also going well and you got plenty of sleep yourself.

- congratulations on being all done with undergrad finals! Now you can look forward to graduation and your job. What have you been studying?

The way I see it, we have a few choices:

We can share everything including the winning weapon, etc. I'd love to do that, but I don't think it will work. Too many people would start to feel that someone else will do the testing and not bother to do the serious grind work that makes this all happen.

We can keep the winners in our private forums and openly teach everyone how to share wins. This would help when someone finds out about a current winner, either from a group member or some other way because they would at least know to wait. The problem, of course, is that if they're not in our forum, or in active real time contact with a group member, they don't know when to finish. We could tell non group members something like wait overnight (or an hour, or ...) but I think most people will tend to get excited and finish so our sharing periods will become limited.

We can keep doing what we're doing knowing that it's not perfect and some people will take advantage. I agree with Kellijuana that this is going to happen one way or another no matter what we do. Even if we were a paid workforce at a company somewhere, we just can't plug every hole. Last night one member mentioned on the winning item forum that a friend said that the winning item stopped working after the friend had only won twice. In accordance with our current policy, I sent an smail later mentioning a concern about how the friend knew the winner and asking that they encourage friends to join the group and share the workload rather than giving it away to outsiders citing fairness to other group members. So we can make it "official" policy not to share with non group members, state that explicitly in our rules and encourage that as our communal ethic, but it can't be policed.

In any big group some people are just going to be more intense and/or work harder than others. I also mentioned that to Aloysius in an smail. Last night he found a winning weapon, shared it with everyone, then freely shared his battling knowledge with members having problems because it was one of those that breaks for the current battle (a few thought it broke forever, some didn't know that they could use a second weapon with the winner and didn't kill the troll before it broke, ...). Then, when the price went up to 2.5M in just a few minutes, he actually bought two more of them with his own funds just to lend them out to anyone in the thread that didn't have one. That was great teamwork and he was totally supportive to all. So I sent him an smail talking about his earlier frustrations, reminding him that this is a game and it can't (and shouldn't) be made work for others. I asked him to try to be positive and encouraging even when things weren't perfect, then complimented him on his generosity and teamwork in the winning thread. So, hopefully, that is done for now.

My own feeling is that patience and education are the right course to steer unless someone is blatantly out of line with our group objectives. That should get easier with more organization of our data and more coordination between admins.

On the positive side, we SOLVED the troll puzzle (!!!), our members are getting lots of wins, I'm seeing some wonderful acts of generosity and sharing, and many in the group are also feeling impressed with the togetherness that is happening. Personally, I'm getting to know (and value) my fellow admins and several group members which will enhance my time on Subeta long after I've stopped fighting that troll. Which was almost certainly the idea that staff had in mind when they thought up this opponent. It looks like the troll was always intended as a community building effort.

(I loved the rreign joke, made me burst out laughing xD and thanks for the recent posts link, I totally forgot about those oops)

I’ll just address both of your posts at the same time since it’s all mostly addressing the same stuff >.<

Yes thank you! Finally finished u.u I was studying physiology with a focus on research. My job is more of a full-time summer job that is an extension of the research/thesis project course I was doing in my final year.

Yeah when we have 70+ members there has to be some sort of organization otherwise it would be complete chaos. Since activity is dying down, I think most of our monitoring and duties are too, at least until/if there’s another activity boom. Most people have 5 wins I believe (except the new members) and are sticking around for the token drops or additional 5th win drops.

It looks like curbdirt and Julie have been addressed now? So we’ll just watch and see if they need more help :)

We had 2 people leave so some pages, so when we push the masterlist we can ask if people would like more pages or to be reassigned? We can mention that if people want to coordinate it’s fine but that they are by no means OBLIGATED to do so. We’ve seen with Reo 2 people discover a winning weapon at almost the same time but one person beats them to it first, so the weapon can reset at ANY TIME. So no test anyone does is wasted at all. We can mention this in the announcement too.

Thanks for checking for the new members! I’ll pop the dates beside their names in the masterlist.

I think keeping the winning weapon within the group is best, like arixen said, some people might feel cheated out of their work testing their weapons. I mean we could teach people how to do it, so they can start their own mini groups, but coordinating the group with people outside of the group won’t work I think.

We’ll always have spoilers, there’s not much we can do about it. Most people have 5 wins except the newer members so there’s not much pressure for allowing people to get 5 before the weapon resets anymore. Yes there was another member who was giving people outside the group the winning weapon identification and letting them get 5 wins. We can make a policy, but of course there’s no real way to police this other than just politely addressing someone about the policy privately when they post that they helped people outside the group.

Arixen, thanks so much for addressing Aloysius, I think he’s just more intense about battling the troll which is why he wants to coordinate but will help people as well.

Yes, we’ve almost? finished organizing, I think? We just need to make the stuff more complete and tell the other admins about any changes we’ve made to policy and push everything in 1 announcement. Things are easing up, and a lot of students are entering or in the middle of finals still so it’s pretty cool right now, especially with Vesnali as well.

Yes I think this troll has been great for the community and us! I like helping people out with these sorts of things, I tend to do stuff like this in multiplayer games haha, so it’s been an A++ experience, even with its bumps, for me too. It’s also great at driving underpriced weapons to overpriced ranges =_=”

Both of you take a break! You’ve been doing so much for the group! I really would not have been able to handle it on my own u.u