Many of you probably were wondering exactly what has been going on in the last 24 hours, and why I have been temporarily demoted to Designer.
Firstly I would like to cast off any suspicions about the actions of Fornad and me. Around a week ago, we both came to realise that what we wanted - more than anything - was for the two communities of MCME and ArdaCraft to come together and build Middle-earth as one. In order to organise our thoughts, we made a Google document and sent PMs to one another on the MCME forums.
To begin with, Q only found out about the PMs, and since they didn’t clearly show what our intentions were he assumed the worst - that we were planning on downloading MCME’s map, or something of that nature. In hindsight, we should have made Q aware of our thoughts as soon as possible, but at that time we were in the earliest stage of the idea and therefore were not able to present it to a greater audience yet. That was a mistake and I must apologise for it.
All the time I had the rank with the red name I lived up to what it stands for in any possible way I could: Keeping MCME a friendly and safe environment for everyone and make it get as good as it can only get. There’s many things in my life that had a much greater influence on my very personal future than such an online community could ever have. But the time I have put into MCME so far exceeds everything. However since I accepted the offer of Credoo to take the Head Designer rank, almost all new things I was confronted with, was drama. And the major part of that drama was about this everlasting conflict with ArdaCraft. There was many a late evening that I used for writing one of these long posts pointing out my view on the matter, and after that I used to literally dream about these two communities uniting under one banner and standing in for one goal, instead of using half the passion and energy we have to defend one project against the other.
What I thought to be nothing more than one of my wildest dreams, proved to be a vision that does not only haunt me. By chance Fornad revealed that this would also be what he deeply longed for. It caused a very odd situation, two communities showing not much of a mutual friendship, and then me and Fornad sharing this crazy dream.
I am willing to put all I have ever given for MCME on the line for this dream.
The desire of all players on both servers is to create the best Middle-earth possible. I believe that this merge is the best way to achieve that goal.
I know many of you have problems with ArdaCraft. But where do these problems come from? The rivalry and actions of some of their players? Some of our players have done similar things to them, and after a merge this ‘rivalry’ would no longer exist. Stealing our best builders? This would no longer be a problem. Advertising themselves on other sites? This would also no longer be a problem.
How would such a merged server look like?
The basic idea is really simple: Take the best from both projects and combine it to create something greater than either of them alone could ever be.
I have witnessed it many times on the server by now: Subtle or less subtle comments that areas are too small in scale. Complaints that there is not enough jobs and most of those that there are, are boring river or root fixing jobs. That I have to remind some people not to build castle after castle but to also complete the terrain. That it would be nice having this and that texture also in all other packs, or having this and that new texture added, while our texture artists search through the inventory desperately looking for free blocks and trying to estimate how many blocks future regions will still need. The wish that we had more blocks, or more paintings - or more builders. For builders from the ‘Golden Age’ like Fresh, Ben or even Aando to return.
My deepest desire is to fulfill these wishes.
More concretely, a merged server would most certainly be based on the map ArdaCraft is currently using. It will allow us to have much more accurate and pleasing scales in cramped areas like the Shire, Osgiliath and Minas Tirith (comparison picture:
http://i.imgur.com/WqwvZJM.png). It will - and that would be by far the most important part of the merge - allow us to lay the voxel arrow down for most of the time and focus on villages, castles and any larger structures beyond that. In the MCME Times you would no longer read about some terrain changes here and there all the time.
Beyond that it will be by no means that I and Fornad will “dictate” which aspects of which server get picked. We will make suggestions of course, but the discussion on all these points can and will be opened to every single member of the community. It will take time and energy, but I truly believe it would be time and energy well spent.
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