OFFICIAL New Berserker Changes

Let me start with a quote from a previous conversation:

Glad you asked.

*takes a deep breath*

At our last monthly meeting we discussed how Vikings and Berserkers "in practice" have no appreciable difference. Over the years Berserker had been kind of neglected and relegated to a "this person's been here a long time, so... congratulations on being a Berserker?" The other problem was that the rank was never distributed well using the same defining standard. We have many people here who have been active for years and never got "Berserker".

A separate, but compounding problem is that we've always had the community "service" medals that do EXACTLY the same thing. Remember these?:


Essentially, the Berserker title had become completely redundant.

We have two solutions:

1. get rid of the Berserker rank entirely.
2. use Berserker as a "gold star" to reward members for active participation in the community.

For now, we are going to try the second option:

DEFINING "ACTIVE PARTICIPATION"

Now tracking activity is difficult. Our old method of simply checking to see if you've simply logged in to the forums in the past 30 days was not sufficient to meet the standard of "active participation in the community".

Currently, we are defining active participation in the community as:

For the time being, we are defining "X" as 30 days. ANY planned activity counts (including our monthly meetings), so you can literally still qualify even if all you can do is sign in to discord on your phone to join in our discussion during monthly meetings. Keep in mind, all of this is subject to change as we get a feel for how it is working in practice.

SO WHAT DOES BERSERKER DO NOW?

Like Vikings, Berserkers are still both "member ranks"; they have no officer-like responsibilities or powers. Both will have access to all the same forum threads. But are there any drawbacks to NOT being a Berserker? Honestly, not really.

If having the Berserker rank does anything at all, it is simply a strictly ceremonial way of rewarding members who are actively involved (basically a "school-days" gold star next to your name). Honestly, the biggest impact it will have is helping admin more easily keep track of who has been active (which is VERY useful on our end). To summarize, the new Berserker will be an "all carrot, no stick" reward.

CURRENT STANDARDS FOR QUALIFYING AS BERSERKER

Now here's the tough part: originally we had planned on using a Discord bot to track this activity. However, we've had some setbacks with that. So for now, we will be setting the bar extremely low for Berserker. I am working on alternatives to track activity, but at this point we are basically using the "honor system" for this:

• If admin or officers notice you have been active, you will be awarded Berserker.
• If we forget to add you and you think you meet the standards for Berserker, you are encouraged contact an officer and we will review your case.
• If we find you don't meet the standard, we will try (within reason) to work with you and your schedule so that you can qualify for Berserker.
• While you might be temporarily removed from the Berserker list for inactivity (it happens to everyone), you will never be excluded from it.
• Admin is open to calls for "temporary leave of absence" for set periods of time as necessary to help members avoid losing their Berserker status.

Again, all this is subject to change, but for now, that is what we are working with. We will announce when the update to Berserkers is implemented here. We will also continue to pursue the plan of implementing a Discord bot to help us better manage this.

Worse case scenario, nothing works and we will just retire the Berserker rank until a time better suited for it. But for now, we will try to keep it using the system described above.

 

We have not yet done an audit on our current list of Berserkers, but I will announce here when we have done so. If you are already active on Discord and/or coming to our monthly meetings, you have very little to worry about. Even if you haven't, as I stated above, we are willing to work with you as long as expectations are kept reasonable.