Hello everybody! Today we would like to inform you all about a drastic upcoming change to the lore team and lore's place on TallTalesRP. 

It is no hot take that lore tickets have, as the server grows in size, become an unsustainable foundation for player-lore interactions. There are many issues with this system, from roleplay and written lore being overly dependent on tickets and overwhelming the lore team's workload. This leads to burnout within the lore team and this ends up directly affecting ticket response times, which further lead to unsavory comments and attitudes toward lore members. Recently, the TallTalesRP Discord server reached the channel limit of 500, which was largely due to lore tickets. This affects every team and their own tickets, including some very important functions such as Administration and Moderation tickets. 

Over the last year, we've slowly been working at reducing the reliance on tickets, we've introduced Teacher Applications and Feats, Random Encounters, the Wiki, and improved communication toward Storylines and Eventlines. However, this process is unfortunately too slow, and therefore causing a bottleneck between how fast we can fix these issues while still needing to focus on current tickets, and future ones that get opened. The Lore team will spend upward of 4-6 hours per day on average handling tickets, giving barely any time left over to fix the problems at hand.

Therefore, Lore team has made the decision to heavily reduce the amount of ticket categories. Only two categories, General Lore Tickets and Magic Tickets will remain open for core functions. So, without most tickets, what is the lore team's plan moving forward?

With the time the team reclaims from removing tickets, we will be able to put much more focus on maintaining engagement between the lore team and players, and making sure there is still lore available for players to interact with. Here are a few of the changes that will be implemented immediately and over the coming weeks. Of course, other changes will come as we continue to move forward and learn new ways to continue engaging lore without tickets.

We're aware that many people have been working with Lore team for months on a single ticket, and we absolutely don't want those to go to waste. The team will continue to finish up tickets that were opened 3 or more weeks ago.

Depending on how many tickets that leaves us with, we may be open to extending that time to more recent tickets. However, tickets made within the last week will be closed.

Players who need to have progress logged, e.g feat progress, can do so via a general lore ticket. These should remain easy to sort and close, as they are simply observing the information and roleplay is adequate, forwarding into the lore log and closing the ticket.

Item Tickets & Runewalking Tickets 

While alternative systems to Item Tickets and Runewalking are being created, lore members will maintain Primshire and Nights Edge stores and services. These services will offer a forge for players to craft modular items where the player may pick a base item and an ability from an array of preset abilities. The name, description, and flavour of the item remain for the player to apply. The hosting lore member will approve the final product. 

Wandering Artisans will appear in random encounters, giving players the opportunity to craft an item and have it approved using the aforementioned preset abilities. While it is unfortunate that moving toward preset abilities retracts from some of the complete creative freedom tickets offer, it is not possible to allow the same amount of freedom with an in-game lore host. It takes many hours and multiple lore members to approve those kinds of items via tickets. 

Runewalking will be reworked to be in a similar vein to other feats, so that it is not ticket-dependent. 

• Mana Ruptures will be done with flash-pinged events & groups of players instead of tickets.
• Mana Control opportunities will be done with flash-pinged events & groups of players instead of tickets.
• Exploration into world lore, such as testing material properties, will be done with flash-pinged events & groups of players instead of tickets. 
• LTPC’s will be announced via a flash message without a ping when they are active, without their location to avoid being swarmed. LTPC’s will begin to appear in random encounters. 
• Eventline and first discovery opportunities will be done via the random encounters system. This should also help add diversity to the pool of players who are making first discoveries in lore, and push players to work together in order to piece together necessary information.
  • Especially important pieces to the puzzle will be offered multiple times through different random encounters to ensure a variety and spread of players have this information 

For now, a heavier focus will be placed on random encounters and flash events until we create a better foundation for an alternative quest system.

Quests will be temporarily unavailable. 

We will be opening Lore applications shortly to allow those who previously did not want to join because of tickets to join the Lore Team! For this batch of lore members, we will be placing a heavier focus than usual on bringing in people from EU timezones to better support those areas. 

We would like to give you all the opportunity to ask for clarifications and express your concerns. We will be hosting a few QnA’s over the coming week, and will open a discussion thread on our Discord for you all to talk to the Lore Team about this change.