Rick7475 wrote:DF had tons of players when we had regular DM's, then when we had tech issues, people went where the other DM's were.
Funny. I've been mentioning that for almost 3 years now. Statics are just baby-sitters to chew up time to keep players online until other players log in or a DM shows. No matter what though, ALFA is all about the DMs because it's that level of interaction we're all after.
I think the new toolset is so complex that concerns about ALFA2 ramping up 12+ servers is no longer a concern at all which means that when we start the do over that is ALFA2 we should have far more DMs concentrated across fewer servers... and that's exactly what we need.
DM/Player ratio concerns will become a moot point imvho.
I very much agree with this. It's also why DMs burn out so quickly. My hope is that less servers due to the complex toolset will mean HDMs will have larger teams. In the end though, we need to do whatever we can to mimimize the red tape and admin hoops so that when a DM logs in they can maximize their time interacting with players.Also, one more thing, HDM's are like principals (sorry, teacher here), they have a lot of admin crap to deal with that takes away their DM time, so we can't go expecting HDM's to be as available to DM as ADM's. Access to the server needs to be shared for all ADM's for updates to storylines, but if the HDM is involved in a lot of plots, the admin stuff get's put down the list, and bottlenecks happen. We have to expect that the main DM lovin is coming from ADM's. HDM is really a part time DM.