Announcement: Forum-based country descriptions

[jamescfm]

Over the past few months, Moderation has heard from players that the descriptions of many of the forum-based countries in the Forum-Based Countries Information thread are difficult to interpret and make role-playing in some of these countries difficult. In an attempt to overcome these problems, we are hoping to provide new descriptions for all of the forum-based countries in the coming weeks.

On the whole, these will not change the cultural background of the countries, instead the focus will be on clarifying and better explaining the existing culture. In general they will be slightly longer than the current descriptions and will place less emphasis on the period of colonial rule now that most countries have been independent for approaching a thousand years and have shed most of the residual colonial influence (with notable exceptions).

The process of updating these descriptions will be gradual. For each country, Moderation will work with QV73 (Pragma), our Forum-Based Countries Coordinator, and the player who controls the country (if there is one) to provide an initial draft. Once we have reached some agreement, this will be posted on the forum for community feedback for a period of no less than seven days and potentially longer if there is discussion that isn't resolved after this time.

In following this process, we will attempt to group countries together to avoid having many different threads open for feedback at the same time. In particular we will group together countries by geographic region and cultural background, to enable discussion that may affect multiple, similar countries to be concentrated in the same place. With all of that said, the first two countries for which we are presenting updated descriptions are Rapa Pile and Vascania. The feedback thread is available now for you to share any queries or suggestions.

If you have more general thoughts about this project, not necessarily linked to the proposals for Rapa Pile and Vascania, then please don't hesitate to share them.