MAJOR SERVER ANNOUNCEMENT

The Chrysalis Update

Don’t panic. You can skip this letter and go straight down to the bullet list of changes and the FAQ section, which nicely sums up everything in a TLDR if that’s all you’re interested in. If you’re interested in more than that, keep reading.

Not long ago, I discovered a huge problem with Wings of Fire: The New World. I knew there were issues — constant tension between people, passive-aggressive fighting, disagreements about what content is valid — but I never attributed them to anything more than the continual growth of our community. Frankly, it got to a point where I didn’t want to investigate it because it was too overwhelming. Instead, I turned a blind eye to what was going on and continued on autopilot, patching bugs, fixing claims, and occasionally creating new things here and there if I was afforded a break.

It wasn’t until quite recently that I was abruptly shocked out of cruising by a conversation I had within lore-discussion. I had been mentioned in a thread called stonebark, originally created to discuss the recent changes to the royalty stones. That conversation was long behind at this point, but the thread had returned and evolved into a conversation about the relationship between the community and the staff team as a whole. In that thread, it was brought to my attention that you all feel left in the dark when it comes to decisions made by the staff. Multiple people expressed that they felt confused and frustrated without any explanation or notice of changes. This is why we have chosen to wait two weeks to put these changes into effect. This is why I am currently writing this explanation.

I first found Wings of Fire: The New World in January 2020 through a Google search for the query “wings of fire minecraft server,” where I came upon a thread on the Wings of Fire Fanon Wiki. From there, I joined the recently-created Discord server made up of probably only ten channels and nervously messaged admin MCDoctorWho to add me to the whitelist. I was jumping through a lot of hoops to do this — searching Google for something I wasn’t sure existed, joining a public Discord server for the first time, and direct messaging someone who seemed super scary from their messages in the rules channel.

When I finally did join, though, I found it was worth every single leap. I spawned in the town of Possibility, at the time one of the largest and most impressive towns on Pyrrhia. Having chosen the MudWing tribe, I quickly decided that my first goal would be to travel to the Mud Kingdom. Even on the much smaller Generation 2 world, it was a daunting task with no firework rockets and no food. I had no idea the TP Hub existed, and it was near impossible to get through the ellipsoid mountains. It felt like it took ages to walk south to a river that miraculously cut through the mountains in exactly the direction I needed to go. It was an incredible experience, exploring the world I knew so well for the very first time.

After that, I was all in. I began to get to know the other people within the community, all of whom were kind toward me (even if I didn’t really know what I was doing sometimes). The Wings of Fire Minecraft Server, as it was called at the time, became a familiar place to me. There would regularly be only one or two other people online, but the server was always an enjoyable social space, regardless of how many people were playing. It was incredibly exciting when there were enough people to represent each of the seven tribes.

The spark that the server inspired in me kindled a flame that inspired me to spread it to others. As the MudWing ruler, I spent hours designing and building a new Mud Palace entirely in survival mode for my non-existent population of MudWings. It may have been small and unattractively overrun with terracotta, but it was my first major build on a public server and significantly larger than the last one. I felt that I had made a contribution not only to the Mud Kingdom but to everyone who might join and anticipate visiting the elusive MudWing palace that had scarcely been mentioned in the books.

I had soon discovered the world of Fabric modding and the ReplayMod, and the second ever video on my YouTube channel was a two-minute-long video showcasing the server, complete with music I made myself using Apple Loops in GarageBand. Every time I saw the spark occur in someone else, my own flame grew. I created more YouTube videos, built more projects, and eventually went on to create a new YouTube channel called Bog The MudWing, where I published a video titled “I Made Pyrrhia in Minecraft”.

By fortune and favor from the YouTube algorithm, the video was suddenly shown on YouTube home pages about 55 days after being initially published, skyrocketing to nearly 40,000 views just 14 days later. Of course, this was super significant to me personally, but what stuck with me was the huge wave of people it brought to the server. People like Silver, Raina, and tetchy, who experienced the spark I was hoping to start and did incredible things with it.

Ebelle, the server owner at the time, did an outstanding job keeping it all running. Even with the new wave of people, she and the rest of the team ensured systems ran smoothly, and the community remained positive. I personally admire her leadership and am glad to have her still on the admin team. Last year, as we transitioned the operation of the servers to Heron and me, Ebelle took a step back, and we stepped forward in managing the community now known as Wings of Fire: The New World. Since then, we’ve been working and learning how to best lead and manage this community. Evidently, we’ve not done as well as we thought.

This may sound confusing, but bear with me here. I believe that our fault as a staff team is that we have been too willing to compromise between ourselves and the greater community.

Over time, our focus has shifted from WOFTNW being a primarily Minecraft-focused community further to a heavier emphasis on role-play and the Discord server. That may not seem like a problem to you. Two years ago, I wouldn’t have seen it as an issue either. And it’s not inherently an issue. The issue lies in our ability to manage that, and the truth is that we can’t. We joined when this wasn’t something we had to manage, and we were never trained to manage it.

One possible solution you might consider is simply adding more staff members who are capable and would even enjoy managing those kinds of things. That would be a sensible solution to the problem, but there are two other issues that are problematic for this solution.

The simpler one is that if we aren’t qualified to manage something, we most certainly do not have the knowledge or experience to examine potential candidates to put in charge of that management, especially when it comes to such complex systems. If you’re a company looking to hire someone to manage your finances, you evaluate their credibility based on their experience and education. We can’t do that when it comes to selecting an expert on Wings of Fire role-play-based Discord servers. We need to be able to examine them in comparison to our own knowledge and experience, which is why we would likely be terrible at selecting someone to do that.

The second issue is that the server is unsustainable in the long term. Having two sets of staff that excel at very different things is going to worsen the issue of internal communication that we are trying to mend, not to mention that it could be confusing for new members as to why only a role-play manager can help them with their issue and a moderator cannot. And if we continue to compromise between what we can do and what people want us to do and grow our focus wider and wider, we will inevitably need to establish even more teams with a more complicated structure. At that point, it would be impossible to keep every staff member on the exact same page, and new members would have to check a diagram of names before even asking a question. And that’s assuming that we would have enough skilled people willing to be on staff in the first place.

That leaves us two options. We can either refocus back on what we signed up for and are able to do, or continue to attempt to run a Wings of Fire role-play-based Discord server. Our attempts at running the server like this have been poor. In our attempt to fix the royalty system by adding more positions, we only worsened its potential to be exploited. We discussed for several days how to handle the royalty stones, yet our compromise was unpopular and did not effectively solve their problems anyway. What used to be a casual social space is now a collective story-writing session where nobody knows the story, there are no rules to the story, and anyone can do whatever they want. We have tried and tried, and we can’t fix it, and I don’t even want to deal with it anymore.

Ebelle ran the community in a no-nonsense, low-tolerance manner. Although I’m not sure that I’d go quite as far as Ebelle did, I greatly admire the way in which she led the Wings of Fire Minecraft Server.

Ebelle said it well herself back in October of 2022.

Hi just a friendly reminder, that all the staff here are volunteers and if you have a complaint or concern you need to voice it in a respectful way please. While we do hold polls to get a sense of what the majority of the player base wants, the ultimate decision of what we do with the server is up to me. Do not come after any of the other staff or admins because you are upset with a decision. It is a privilege to play on this server. If you show that you cannot respect that, or the staff members, that privilege will be revoked.

They are a lot more lenient than I am, if I have to get involved it will be an immediate ban process. No questions asked. Treat them kindly, they are here to help you.

This community is, has been, and always will be completely free of cost to join, play, and enjoy. We spend our own time, energy, and even funds to keep this place running because we want to not only maintain but also cultivate a thriving community. We can’t do that in the state that we’re in right now. Because honestly, right now it feels like a job — never-ending, stress-inducing, exhausting work. And it stinks to work a job where you don’t get paid.

I don’t want WOFTNW to become a job. I don’t even want to work here if I’m getting paid. Back in 2021, when I became a trial moderator, I signed up to help cultivate a positive, casual, enjoyable social space with people who enjoy the same things I do. That’s what most of the staff signed up for. But it isn’t that anymore. Eventually, staff will quit. Some have, both publicly and privately, actively and passively. And I don’t blame them. If I had the choice, I might consider it too. Heron and I are essentially chained here with no successors, and eventually there’ll be no one left to support us as we inevitably steer this place into chaos we can’t handle. What happens to WOFTNW then?

Having discovered the issues and discussed possible solutions over the past weeks, we’ve gradually settled on a set of changes, both small and large, that we hope will resolve these problems while being minimally invasive to everything else, so we won’t be scrapping the entire Discord server or anything like that, but we are erring on the side of caution in order to stabilize things as much as possible.

It’s difficult to gauge exactly what percentage of the community is interested in what, but I can say with nearly complete certainty that a number of people will be unhappy with these changes to the point that they will leave. That is okay. If what you want from WOFTNW is not what we are willing and able to provide, I’m sorry. We can’t be the place for everyone, but I’m sure that you’d be able to find a place that has people who can provide what you’re looking for. If you’re willing to, you could even create your own place. I’ll be honest with you; starting a community is hard. But if you have the dedication, you will find people who are looking for the same things you are.

If the place you’re looking for is a community-driven Minecraft: Java Edition server based on the Wings of Fire series of novels, I hope you haven’t lost faith in us to create that place.

Bog


Changes

Royalty

Royalty positions, Eye of Onyx, and the player royalty system will be removed. Royalty will exist as non-player characters. The royalty board has been frozen and will remain so until it is removed.

Lore

The “server canon” will no longer exist as it does now. All characters and events beyond the Wings of Fire books will not be considered canon. You are still welcome to roleplay, but it will not be considered official or canon. We will, however, be introducing more optional RPG elements such as interactable non-player characters (NPCs).

Staff Positions

The Owner and Discord Co-Owner roles will be removed. In addition to the Helper, Moderator, and Administrator hierarchy, we will introduce five new subroles that staff members can self-select.

Builder

Builders are responsible for building projects on The New World. Building projects may include events, Pretarsi locations, and meta locations like the Hub.

Director

Directors are the primary connection between the staff team and the community. These people are responsible for answering questions, resolving disputes, leading events, and generally spending time with the community.

Gamemaster

Gamemasters manage and develop server events and the Pretarsi story. These people are responsible for developing the RPG aspects of the server, writing wiki pages, and planning events.

Manager

Managers are the backbone of both daily processes and long-term operations of The New World. These people lead meetings, monitor scope, and oversee large decisions and projects.

Technician

Technicians are responsible for creating, maintaining, and operating the technical elements and systems of The New World. This includes developing software, resolving bugs, and working with commands and systems.

Wiki

User character entries will be removed from the wiki. Other pages that contain significant lore content may be modified or removed by the gamemaster team. We will not restrict access to the wiki. Wiki pages are not permanently deleted, but if you wish to save the content of a page, you should do so before changes are implemented for your convenience.

Build Team

The build team will be disbanded. We greatly appreciate a lot of the work that you all have put in to help the server flourish and expand in a creative direction, but for right now we have little left to work on. Thank you for all the help in the past year!

Discord

The following channels will be archived:

  • All of the 👑 Royalty 👑 category
  • # memes
  • # lore-discussion
  • 🔊 Not MC
  • 💬 lore-concepts
  • # oc-discussion
  • All of the tribe categories

Economy

Crops and farmable items will not be able to be sold at Seaviper’s Bazaar. Do not fret! Many other ways of earning money are still available such as Bob’s Farm, and more will come in time.

Tribe Change

The tribe selection area will now be open permanently! You are now free to play as any tribe you want at any time. You will also be able to select tribe Discord roles from the Channels and Roles menu.

FAQ

Q: Is roleplay being removed in its entirety?
A: No, just the Server Canon tag in the roleplay channel/forum, but the forum will remain. We want to refocus The New World back to a more Minecraft-centric social & creation space.

Q: When will these changes take effect?
A: All changes will go into effect two weeks from the initial announcement, November 16th 2024.

Q: I don’t play much Minecraft. What now?
A: The Discord server will remain open for communication about the Minecraft server and general chatting. However, development will be focused on the Minecraft server. You are free to stick around on Discord even if you don’t have much time for Minecraft.

Q: Can I submit my character to be an NPC?
A: No, we will not be accepting characters to become NPCs.

Q: How can I become a Gamemaster/help with game development?
A: Wait until staff applications open if you are interested in helping with the project! Also use the #suggestions forum to voice your ideas!

Q: Are the channels going to be deleted?
A: No, the channels will be moved to The Great Archives and will become read-only.

Q: Is all previous lore being voided?
A: All lore will not be considered canon unless decided otherwise by the gamemaster team.

Q: Is the world getting reset?
A: The in-game world will not be reset in any way. Balances, claims, inventories, ender chests, etc. will persist through the coming changes.

Q: Are you removing royalty?
A: There will still be non-player characters as part of the TNW royalty, but the player royalty system will be removed.

Q: Do I have to change characters?
A: You are free to keep playing as whatever character you like! Your character will just be unable to influence the overall world.

Q: I think the server is fine the way it is. Why change it?
A: On the management side, the server has been increasingly difficult to run. These changes were necessary to guarantee the longevity of the server and the well-being of the volunteers working on it.

Q: How can you be so sure the server won’t last?
A: Throughout the years of WOFTNW’s varied forms of existence, there have never been quite as many heated discussions, insecurities rippling through the staff and players alike, and quitting staff, just to name a few outcomes of recent times. It is cruel to leave our community in this state. We have also silently been gathering opinions from members in our community and a vast majority of them share this sentiment.

Q: Why remove things instead of compromising or reworking?
A: We as staff have unanimously decided that this is the easiest course of action. Remember: we are all volunteers and have put in place many reworks over the months. If you have problems, make a ticket with reasonable concerns. You are always welcome to leave if you feel that we cannot uphold your ideal community.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please ask a staff member or open a ticket.

Wings of Fire: The New World Administration Team


Comments

4 responses to “The Chrysalis Update”

  1. I don’t agree with a lot of the changes, but I also do? It’s hard to explain, since I want the server to last as long as possible and none of the changes are bad, it’s to make the server better so really, I have no complaints, thank you staff team for doing something at the very least, and not letting the server fall to pieces, I understand the old community wasn’t meant to last and this is the new course we’re on.

  2. I’m currently in another Minecraft server with a “lore system” nearly identical to what WoF:TNW is changing to, and it works excellently for them. I’m excited to see how decentralized lore is able to allow creativity to evolve!

  3. I like the changes the staff team has decided on, though, when is the next “volunteering” for staff?

    1. Hey! We’re likely not going to have our staff applications open until the very end of this year or sometime earlier next year. All of our changes are yet to be fully implemented, and the staff team has to analyze how comfortable we are with our workload before offering more volunteer positions.

      If you – or anyone else – are interested in keeping an eye out for the next staff application, feel free to join our Discord server at https://discord.woftnw.org. In the meantime, we have plenty of information available both on our Discord server and here: https://woftnw.org/docs.

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