Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

Map update, current events
Admin CavemanJoe – 2021-01-08 22:05:19 [Permalink]
Hey folks - my last MotD was only a couple of days ago, and it aged even quicker than last June's Monthly Memento. That MotD from June aged like milk - the MotD just before this one, wherein we all wished for good things to happen in 2021, aged more like a saucer of liquid nitrogen left out on the kitchen counter on a hot day. Mere hours after posting, the US experienced a violent coup attempt in Washington DC, where several of our players live.

Because we no longer have a policy of "No politics" (see Code of Conduct appendix B) but we still have a policy of "If someone's uncomfortable enough to speak up and ask for a subject change, go with it" (see Code of Conduct rule 1), in sudden events that require commentary or communications, remember that we have two chatrooms accessible in most places on the Island, Player Chat and Character Chat. I trust that you will be able to sort yourselves out between those who want to discuss current events and those who want to escape them, and move between rooms accordingly. This is a crazy time for everyone so please try to be extra understanding with each other right now.

In nicer news, I've made some quality-of-life improvements to the Travel and Map pages. The biggest change is that the West-East axis now uses letters, rather than numbers.

There's a convention that when talking about map coordinates, we do it in the format (x,y) - since until today both x and y were numbers, this often ended up with players turning up at (y,x) and wondering where the party was. Now that the map uses letters for one axis and numbers for the other, you can say that Improbable Central is at M11 or 11M and both ways of saying it will get players where they need to go.

Because it's gonna take a while for us to get used to this change and Place descriptions updated etc, I've added a note beneath the map display that explains to new players that we used to use numbers for the X axis, and how to map old-style coordinates to the new system.

If you find references to the old-style coordinates in the game outside of player-created content like Places or Mementos, please use the Problem link to let me know so I can update the game code to use the new letter-number convention.

January is a double Monthly Memento month, see the last MotD for details.

Have fun, and stay safe,

~CMJ

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