Greetings.

All of you have been asking: "When will CivTemp come out?". And the last weeks we said something along the lines of "We might make it this weekend" and we were not lying, we truly believed that it could be done, but new issues kept piling up and those prevented us from getting the things done that were supposed to be done weeks ago. Our internal thread on CivTemp is called "Civtemp launch Feb 7th" and serves as a constant reminder how far we're behind the planned schedule

We are as unsatisfied with that as you are and we want to do our best to fix this. The main issue currently is: We have less than 10 people at this point who are working towards 3.0 and most of those are sysops/devops working on getting code/scripts behind the scenes to behave. Some of the devs tried to work on general economy/balance stuff at the same time, but it's too big of a task, especially if you can only invest 25 % of your spare time, because you have code that needs to be written on another front.

Originally the Illuminati was created to get tasks like this done. For those of you who don't know, the Illuminati is a hidden category in the forum, which was created together with the forum about 8 months ago to make 3.0 happen. The people added to this group were picked carefully and we managed to have no big leaks regarding 3.0. All discussion was done behind closed doors, because of course we couldn't ask publicly for help without announcing the end of 2.0 (which continued for over a year after the reset decision was made).

At this point there is no big secret to keep, we have a lot of work that needs to be done and because of that we decided to outsource some of the balance decisions, configs etc. to the community.

For this purpose we want to recruit individuals who will be added to a group, whichs purpose will be to figure out specific balance/economy related stuff for 3.0. You've been complaining about balance decisions made by badmins for the past few weeks? You think you have ideas that could help? Great, this is your chance.

Requirements:

• Be willing to comprise. Noone will get the task "Decide how X will work in 3.0", but instead the goal is to figure things out through discussion as a group

• Be able to accept negative feedback. If you get a breakdown whenever someone criticizes your idea, then you are wrong here

• Be able to discuss without directly attacking people. It's pointless to work together, if you can't make a point without insulting someone.

• Be able to put your ingame grudges aside. You might have to work together with people you've had conflicts with before, if you can't let that go, don't consider applying for this.

• Be willing to invest time.

To sort out the people who don't do much and to get a first idea of your competence, applications for this will be in the form of a balance suggestion for SkilUp. This is one of the things that actually needs to be done and aside from the concept that was presented in the AMA we don't have much at this point.
Your suggestion may slightly differ from the AMA, but the basic idea should be the same.

Whether you submit something that explains at which level which exact reward is gained for every class or a general overall balance concept is completly up to you. Note that while we're expecting people to put effort into suggestions, those should be focused on quality and not quantity. You don't have to write 20 pages. Also at least for now don't feel limited by any sort of implementation, just assume we can code it somehow.

Any applications should be made as a comment to this post, they should include the concept mentioned above, a short description why you want to help out and why you think you would be suited for this purpose. You may also comment any questions here.

EDIT: People have been chosen and PMs have been sent out