New Rules For Placeholders
I’ve noticed a huge problem on Mizahar. It is a problem that has plagued character after character and seriously stymied their ability to live in the moment. And when we don’t live in the moment, we don’t get to experience the joys of season change, utilize Storyteller Calendars, or even get to be in on the cutting edge of new things that happen in the game. The problem is placeholders. Placeholders are vacant threads that are posted usually just before season changes so you have a thread to go back to finish when you've ran out of time during a current season to finish things like jobs, training, or to finish out a storyline.
Let me explain.
So many people simply either over plan or get busy in their lives and don’t find the time to complete two simple job threads or finish events or training they anticipated doing in a specific season. Rather than push the plans off onto the following season at season change, they post up placeholders to fill out later. Only, later often doesn’t come. And characters end up ALWAYS being behind, falling further and further and further behind. It’s a vicious cycle.
Suddenly the season change creeps up and people have to frantically post placeholders that are everywhere about everything. How often do they go back and fill them out? Do they finish their plans? Rarely. And it’s tragic because everyone that plays this way looks behind them and not forward into their character’s future. Placeholders are empty threads that are posted usually just before season changes so you have a thread to go back to finish when you've run out of time during a current season to finish things like jobs, training, or to finish out a storyline.
I equate this to the same sorts of problems people who hoard have. They collect and collect and collect and it gets to be too much. But you don’t realize it, often, because it’s the classic case of the frog boiling to death in a pot that’s slowly heated up. Placeholders are completely out of control. And people have really screwed up their RP life creating them. This needs to stop. Characters should not be spending all their time on a collaborative Storytelling rpg site writing solos.
And believe me, this negative cycle is draining. It kills the fun. It turns Mizahar into a game of ‘catchup’ instead of a game of possibilities and hopes. Placeholders remove the fear of being impoverished, enslaved, or even rping yourself into a corner. A placeholder always gives players an out. It lets players be lazy and have ‘contingency plans’ to their actual plans. None of this is a good thing.
Living in the now is a far better way to go. It breaks the downward negative spiral that causes so many people to drift away from Mizahar because it becomes ‘too much’. Planning ahead and being forced to carry through with those plans gives people an incentive to live in the now. For this reason, I’m implementing a new set of rules for Placeholders. This set of rules will be enacted on the first day of next month. This gives people 5 days to process these changes and make some serious decisions. This is your sanity intervention. This is your purge. This is you throwing out anything you haven’t touched in years.
Here are the new rules:
- Placeholder Threads may be no more than one season behind the current in-game-season to be eligible to be expanded and written to.
- All participants in placeholders must have posted to the placeholder thread in the season it was posted. No late or ‘after the fact’ joiners allowed. This means no one can join a placeholder who was not in the original thread.
- Individual characters can place no more than five placeholders per season. No exceptions.
- Placeholders older than one season behind the current season can and should be deleted by any member of the staff (or the player themselves) that are capable of doing so.
- A thread that has a minimal effort put into it (a paragraph or two) is still considered a placeholder even if it is started. To move from Placeholder to Grandfathered status, a placeholder must have two or more posts in it of at least 500 words.
- Placeholders should be a last-ditch effort. Everyone should strive to play in the current timestamp and move the overall thread arches of the game forward!
- There will be no back wages paid out via STs or through the Help Desk older than one season behind the current season.
- The Help Desk may consider ‘exceptions’ to these rules on a case-by-case bases. You must apply to the Help Desk to get any sort of placeholder rules relaxed and then this will only be for extreme circumstances.
So, In Summary… placeholders can be no older than one season behind the current season the game is actively roleplaying in and considered ‘legitimate’. Threads older than one season are not considered placeholders. All participants in a placeholder must have posted in the placeholder thread before the season change which moves the specific thread from current to placeholder status. You have until the first of April in order to convert your placeholders into active grandfathered threads via adding at least two full-sized posts to each one to get the thread started.
You have five days to flesh out old placeholders if you want to keep them.
I hope this causes everyone to live more in the now, enjoy the staff efforts, and plan for the future by writing for today. Any questions? Please post them below in this thread.
Gossamer
