Hi all,

It's been a while since I've sent an announcement, and with the end of the year upon us, I thought I'd put something together to wrap up 2011.

Firstly, I'd like to start off with a personal update.

As most of you don't know, I got a big career break 2 months ago when I switch jobs in RL. Besides managing SL projects and consulting, I started working for a new company with big responsibilities. While excited for this amazing opportunity, it also put me in a bind with the things I love doing on the side. If you've had a hard time getting a hold of me the past couple months, it's mostly due to that and a few trips I took.

Though things are keeping me busy, life is stabilizing and I've gotten a consistent amount of work done in SL recently - a trend that should hopefully continue into December to accomplish everything I've mentioned over the year.

That said, on to the announcement!

Management Overhaul

I'd like to acknowledge and thank our dedicated team of community leads, security, GMs, Mods, and Admins. We did a lot of work recently in restructuring our team, identifying new leads, and recruiting fresh blood to help with security. Thanks to Espi, Eph, Kait, Petra, and Stu, new staff guides were drafted and put in place to help define staff duties and responsibilities. We're putting a big emphasis on transparency and disseminating information to the community.

• Live Help Team
• Roleplay Guide / Emote Etiquette
• Available Land
• Available Rentals
• Active Businesses (Yellow Pages)
• Re-Invitation Kiosk
• Staff Guides
• Daily Twitter Digest (Word on the street... notices in-world)
• Business Rosters
• Admin Dashboard (Group Proposals & Directory Management, Player Registration Lookup, Player Presence Overview, Security)
• Security HUD (v2 coming soon)

Finally, I'd like to formally introduce Esperanza Hernandoz's involvement. For 6+ months now, we've been working on both RL and SL projects together. From handling land, rentals, apps, announcements, to helping interpret what players need, she's been a tremendous help behind-the-scenes. To put plainly, I would have been significantly delayed this year if it had not been for her dealing w/ the day-to-day and organizing projects.

Since Espi is in direct and daily contact with me, you can contact her as a last resort on urgent issues in my absence. For everything else, please defer to the help team!

What can Admins do?

Admins can deal with griefers on private land, manage estate settings such as sim restarts / lag / bans, and mediate OOC disputes between players. Admins and a few GMs have also been granted access to the management dashboard, giving them special abilities to help you with the following:

• Lookup a player's application/registration status and re-issue invites (if you missed your invite, you can initiate a re-invitation instantly by visiting the OOC area and clicking on the blue Re-Invitation board there)
• Update Group Directory & Yellow Pages

What can GMs do?

GMs can be contacted to send group notices and facilitate community-wide events. They also can handle all security and RP issues when the above are not available.

What can Group Leaders do?

Official group leaders are now part of the security team. We've also recruited the help of established role-players who rent shops onto our team. Besides bouncing griefers, they also manage rosters if they run businesses, giving them the ability to keep track of who is active. They also help newcomers settle into the community by assisting with any questions, facilitating any stories they have within their group, and provide general guidance.

What's the fastest way to get help?

Management roles, SL names, and their online status can be found on the In-World Live Help page.

glimpse of the management dashboard:

glimpse of business rosters recently deployed:

The Build

Since 2009, our city has visually held itself quite well amongst the league of urban sims popping up left and right. There's been steady upgrades being made here and there on the sim in the last year, however I think we'll be doing a big clean up of the build over the next couple months. I'd like to standardize on common props around the sim to reduce the need for texture/sculpt load, as well as set out quality furniture (the best and nastiest animations in SL ;))

Dead Lock Prison

To make use of the empty space on the corner of the sim, I built the Dead Lock Prison. Though the project didn't take off as I had hoped, it did give us some more ideas...

Dead End Asylum

Replacing the prison, the Asylum is a combination of the Dead End Memorial Hospital and dark dungeon-style Asylum beneath the surface. The area is parceled off and setup for the Asylum to attract new players from SL who are into the kind of themes that the Asylum represents. The relocation of the hospital also means spreading out the RP from the central part of town.

Icky-Quickie Mart

Just released, the Icky-Quickie now sits where the old hospital did ... it's a 24x7 convenience store that's in need of a leader!

Technical Upgrades

There's a lot of work the community is not aware of that makes DE run efficiently… and more importantly, as easy as possible! Here are some major updates that were completed:

• Migrated websites and in-world related systems to a new and dedicated server. Everything loads faster and less downtime than what we were experiencing).
• Dashboards! I built out a few to keep me sane; from managing incoming player registrations, all our rental systems, to tracking leaders, it's all in a pretty format that maximizes efficiency and leaves me with more time to focus RP-related development.
• Bug fix galore! With all the new systems that were developed from scratch this year, I have to fix the errors you guys catch too.

For the most part, any issues we see now are likely due to the grid's instability and constant major updates made on both the sim server and viewer side.

The Weavers

The "weavers" are folks who have volunteered their time to write sim-wide plots, or stories that impact the entire city. This ranges from natural disasters, riots, serial killing, to more. This is a great way for people to flex their creative skills, work with leaders across the community, and help bring people together for a "moment" in Hathian history. We will also attempt to bridge the gap between Dead End and Crack Den by playing out some stories that would impact them both.

How can I Participate?

If you have an idea, there are several ways to approach it:

• post it on the forums for community review
• contact an established weaver listed here

In Summary

We're coming up to our 3rd year now. I'll do my best to keep things running as smoothly and fresh as possible. With the help of good people, we'll continue keeping DE a positive outlet for creative stories and having fun.

I'd love to hear your comments or any questions you might have about things mentioned or that you'd like to know about.

Thanks for reading!