Is there a place where non members of the Council can see the progresses?  

You don't need to be a member of the Metaverse Council to see what's going on. Just check in the Metaverse forum at The Galactic Core. You don't even have to register at the Core to read what's going on, however if you wish to add your own comments you need to register which only requires an email address. We certainly encourage any and all to make your opinions known.

Also we're working on a Metaverse Council Blog as well as intending to continue with various posts here in these forums. I've been disappointed in how little progress it appears to most folks that we've been making, but I assure you that the Council has been hard at work with the mundane tasks of getting organized and we'll soon be able to demonstrate some actual progress in achieving our goals.

Please excuse my idiocy, but I'm just starting to read up on the alt metaverse and am not quite sure I understand what direction you're going. I'd like to post this on the MEtaverse section of the guide I wrote... but I should have a clue before I did that - hehe.
Is there a quick way to bring me up to speed? Mumble, when you said I've been disappointed in how little progress it appears to most folks that we've been making, but I assure you that the Council has been hard at work with the mundane tasks what are you referring to? Is this all geared towards the alternate Metaverse, or the whole Galactic Core site?

Thanks

Right now and for at least the immediate future we're concentrating on the AltMeta because it's something that's within our power to change. Ideally and eventually we would probably like to see some of the things we've proposed be incorporated into the "real" metaverse as well. We figure that showing by example is the best idea. If what we come up with is a good idea and is popular, I'm sure Stardock is a lot more likely to look favorably on it then if we're just spouting off a bunch of hare-brained, half thought out ideas from the peanut gallery.

Please stop by the Metaverse forum at the Core to see what we've been up to.

jpinard - I believe you will find that this is geared toward the altmeta and the official meta too. I believe the idea is to bring more awareness to the GCII player of the benefits that the metaverse provides by creating incentives through medals / rankings and the like whick are more 'realistic' than the official meta scores .Another aim may be to bring attention to the Empires and the merits of joining one ,and indeed promoting the smaller empires.
I hope I have answered some of your questions. I am sure Mumble will be along soon to clarify anything I may have missrepresented   






edit; You must have got there as I was typing Mumble. Good to see you   

Wow, all of this sounds excellent. I would so love to see more development in the official Metaverse. Taking the Metaverse map and wrapping it around an animated 3d globe would be pretty cool too (and have a lot more than 10 empires on it).

Please, please don't be offended as I know it's not my place to critique but as a newbie to your site, I honestly think it's almost overwhelming. When the page opens up there are so many text links between the top and stickies it's hard to know where to start. In fact, I posted in this thread before registering there because I wasn't quite sure what/where to do or go.

If you've seen my guide, then you know I have the same issues, but I do try and think about how it'd be easiet to use for the new visitor. I think you should merge the Global Annoucement, Announcement, Web Links, & Sticky sections all into one. Because, between those and all the text links up top you can't even see the start for the daily forum threads and it takes several scrolls of the mousewheel to get to active posts.

As another aside (as a new visitor) I thought most of the text links up top were actually cross-link advertising... since so many sites have lottery, casino, quiz ads etc. Also, for smeone who doesn't take the time to look carefully further dwon, at first glance it looks like the forum is dead. A lot of people (like me) are fast skimmers and automatically look at the date/# of posts (sad I know)... and sometiems use that as criteria on whether to register and spend more time.

And once again, I offer my humblest apologies if you didn't want/need advice. I just figured since I worked on the part of the game and still was a bit overwhelmed at the site... others might be too.

<>

Although as I read more of the threads I'm a little confused as to whether it's supposed to be an open forum or not? I thought you wanted input from general players... so if that's not the case please ignore my long stupid post.

BTW - I love what you're doing for trying to get more instituted with the Metaverse and more participation.

I am assuming that you're talking about the Core and I can see how it can appear that way at first glance (or even 2nd and 3rd). I'm just a member there but I'll be sure to pass along your comments to the management there. The intent is that unregistered folks can read all the public forums but not post. Registered folks are free (and encouraged) to post to any public forum. I know that for example in the Metaverse forum that most of the posts are from Metaverse Council (MVC) members and the general public might look at that and be inhibited from contributing. That is not the case. We do want input from all about anything that interests them. Why we have the bulk of our discussions there versus here is mainly because most of what’s been discussed have been mundane issues about how MVC business is conducted. Most of this is extremely boring. I would encourage everyone to not be put off by what can admittedly be confusing. The Core has been around for quite sometime but has recently been going through a tremendous growth spurt. All I can say is that it’s worth the time it takes to poke around a bit and figure out what’s going on, and please don’t be shy, feel free to chime in on any topic that interests you.

The MVC is currently working on three major tasks that should be of interest to the average metaverse player. Again we’re keeping the preliminary discussions at the Core simply so that we can come to agreement about what it is that we’re recommending. However, anything of significance will be thoroughly discussed here before implementation. I don’t really want to steal the thunder of more “official” announcements to come about these issues, but to quickly summarize we’re coming up with a plan to institute brackets in the AltMeta so that people can compete more fairly with people that play similar type games. We’re also conducting an email outreach program to make contact with metaverse players that have become isolated from other players, in some cases even players within the same empire. We’re also working on a Metaverse Blog that will be the “official” mechanism for the MVC to make announcements and for folks to get a summary of what’s going on in the MVC without having to wade through twenty mostly boring threads. Actually this Metaverse Blog will not be limited to just MVC related concerns but will address all things metaverse as well as GalCiv2 topics not even related to the Metaverse.

I do appreciate your input particularly when it's so obviously intended to be constructive. For now we’re staying away from trying to make any changes to the “official” metaverse for a couple of reasons. Although Stardock has often demonstrated the willingness to consider player requested changes, it’s not something that you can depend on. Even if they decide to implement some player requested change, the timeframe and details of the change are not something that there’s much player control over. Finally, you do need to realize that such requests are effectively asking Stardock to spend time and resources for free, that’s not really a fair thing to ask of them.

Our point of making changes to the AltMeta is that, as a player sponsored site, it’s something that we *can* change ourselves. Also, if we can implement the things we want *and* it’s apparent that these changes are something that the general GalCiv2 community appreciate, then we feel Stardock is far more likely to consider their implementation. Finally, the Metaverse Council (MVC) as an entity has yet to actually accomplish anything, why should Stardock consider the suggestions of a random group of a few players. If the Metaverse Council (MVC) is successful in demonstrating that it can accomplish something positive *and* speak for a wide range of players, then again, Stardock is far more likely to consider our requests. In any case we feel that it’s in everyone’s best interest to wait until the MVC has “proven” themselves before trying to suggest changes to the “official” metaverse.

Jpinard i thank you for your observations. Now and again it takes an outside opinion on the site to make us look at things again. Some of your points are quite true and i have taken steps to alter the way the cores topics are displayed. As of now you should all see the treads are now returned back to a singular look with only the announcements easily defined. The text links at the top of the Core will also be getting looked at in the next day or so.

Thanks once again for your input

Drengin
(The Galactic Core webmaster)

Its nice to see a few new faces in this thread.

By the way, everyone is welcome to state their opinion here or at the Core. Nothing would be thought of as a critique as long as its put in a friendly maner.

A small suggestion: maybe in future the MCV will ask to Stardock to make some changes to the Metaverse, so it could be useful show that MVC is supported not only by few but by many letting all the people post a brief comment in an apposite post; I know that is too soon, but make such a post now will give time to all players to read it (there are people out there that may not check so often internet).

I just hope you can understand what I mean  

I'm not quite sure what you mean but I do want to.   


I don't know what you mean by an apposite (opposite still doesn't make sense to me) post. Could you please explain?

To clarify the MVC position it's definitely true that at some point in the future the MVC may want to ask Stardock for changes to the "real" metaverse or even possibily to the game itself. It is also the MVC's desire to be supported by many. I am interested in your suggestion but I'm not quite understanding it. I suspect that English may not be your primary language. Could you please explain further?

Create a new post where the people can write a simple note to show their support to the MVC; create such post now so there will be a lot of time for people to see it and decide what to do.
It will be better if everybody just write in it only one time, it will be also useful to keep it "sticky" so will not disappear.
Soon or later the MVC will, maybe, ask to Stardock to make some change, at that time could be helpful show them that MVC is speaking on behalf of many players (it seems to me that Stardock try to follow the suggestions given in here when possible).
I hope this time i make myself more clear, if not maybe is better just forget it.  
As you said Mumble enlgish si not my languaga, I'm italian.

OK thanks. I understand you now.

I have been hoping for a few things to happen before coming to the forums and asking folks to support the Metaverse Council. Foremost among them is that I want to have something to actually show folks that the MVC has accomplished. So far there's been nothing concrete to show.

Most of our initial effort has gone into making rules about how the MVC goes about it's business. All this is very unexciting and very boring. The main thing that we've been dealing with that should be of wide interest is the definition of AltMeta Brackets.

The idea is that we want to divide up the types of games based on their scoring potential. That way if someone prefers influence victories in medium galaxies they can compete with folks that prefer similar types of games having similar scoring potential.

The MVC has been discussing this topic now for close to 6 weeks. We've come up with a number of ideas and are fairly well along with what we want to propose. One wrinkle that turned up is that our initial definitions of the brackets resulted in a lot of the same folks appearing in the top ten in multiple brackets. This really pretty much defeated the purpose of instituting brackets in the first place. For the last couple of weeks we've been discussing how we can get around this issue. I think at this point we're pretty close to resolving this. We still then have a way to go to come up with a complete solution.

There are a number of things in the works that should have a positive impact to metaverse players. Ideally, we're trying to generate interest among those to not currently interested in the metaverse.

I guess the bottom line to your request is that the MVC most certainly does intend to try and gain a wide level of support among the GalCiv2 community, but that we want to be able to show that we can actually accomplish something before doing so.

Eloquently put, Mumble   

Well, I have a few suggestions.

As has been stated elsewhere, one of your goals is to increase interaction and activity among the "metaverse community". To do this, you need to drive users to place which supports this interaction. Stardock doesn't do an especially good job of this currently - the metaverse manager links to a page that is an insular list of your accomplishments. Even if you join an empire, you only get interaction with other players if there is an independant empire website set up. There are no links from your metaverse profile to the metaverse specific forum threads that stardock hosts.

You need to get casual gamers into an arena where they interact with other people in connection with the metaverse. The best way to do this, in my mind, will require a small change from stardock:

and that is to add a link to an "interactive area" right from in the game. (very rough mockup pictured above)

This link could be to the Altmeta or to the Core. The Core does not strike me as an especially good place to support your idea however. The layout is confusing, it requires a lot of information to get signed up - Both times I tried to activate a new account I had problems, and I am not exactly the least tech savvy guy out there, ultimately Alex Atticus had to manually activate one of my accoutns. There are rarely a lot of people on, and there are links to too much content that isn't metaverse related - not a bad thing on it's own, but bad if it is going to be a metaverse community specific boosting location.

The Altmeta is better, especially if it is expanded. Give it a forum where people can post just on metaverse topics or tournaments. You have already suggested medal and bracket changes. Have it host tournaments. Basically, although the game doesn't have multiplayer, you want to design an area that 1) takes minimal effort from a casual player to access, 2) promotes natural interaction between players in some way, 3) provides an additional sense of accomplishment over what can already be gained through the metaverse.

Personally I think tournaments are the best way to promote interaction, because it offers a way to turn isolated, single player accomplishments into something which matters against/with other players. But you need to be able to drive traffic and advertise so that you get more than the few dozen people who already spend all day hanging out on Stardock's message boards. Ultimately, I think you will need some assistance/support from Stardock to make that happen.

Just a suggestion.