Ten years ago this week, we announced that we'd be opening a new game called Fade Rift. ('We' being Cass pretending to be a fully-staffed mod team while she tried to lure MJ into coming on board. Thank god it worked.) It's been a ride since then, with its highs and lows, missteps and triumphs, sex amoebas and blood sharks and many ruined Satinalias. More than once we thought the game's end might be near only for it to be kicked back to life by some new burst of enthusiasm, yours or ours, the one feeding the other until the whole engine turned over and started running again for a few years more.

For all of the time and interest and creativity that our players past and present have contributed over this literal decade; for your patience with our total inability to meet a self-imposed deadline and our endless capacity for reinventing the wheel; for your willingness to embrace a different style of game and make the most of its opportunities; for your ideas and your encouragement and your April Fools jokes; for reading at least some of the surely hundreds of thousands of words we've written and for writing so many of your own, thanks.

This sounds like a goodbye, so important note: we're not closing the game. It is, however, time for yet another of our great restructuring experiments. It's probably no shock to hear that our tanks are running low, and after some reflection on what we can realistically handle it's time for us to admit that this isn't a busy patch we'll get past in another month or two, we just no longer have the bandwidth to continue modding the way we used to.

The good news is, you don't really need us to do that anyway. It's always been the case that much of the game's plot is player-generated, including many of its most successful and impactful events. And Fade Rift's strength has always been in the combination of a collaborative atmosphere, an open world, and everyone's "yes, and/no, but" mindset. So we're going to lean into this and try officially stepping back from plot/content production and into being administrators and facilitators for a more collaborative game.

Basically: we don't want to quit, but we also can't write mod plots anymore. And we think that turning the main, overarching plot into a community effort is a viable alternative that will let everyone have more agency and make things happen more quickly, since lately we've been doing more to hold things up than to drive them forward.

So from now on, the kinds of major developments that would traditionally have been mod plots will instead be done via player plots and community consensus. If you think it's high time for Ferelden to get consumed by the Blight, you can propose it to the game for brainstorming or requests like "could you have it not affect my character's hometown though, I need it for reasons"; then you can make it happen, no plot request/mod approval required. The same goes for killing Corypheus, tearing down the Veil, destroying the Gallows so Riftwatch has to move, etc. With a common-sense "give everyone who might be interested or affected time to weigh in before you do anything huge" rule, we think we're small enough and communicative enough for this to work, with minimal conflict and maximum people having a good time. And we'll still be on hand to facilitate and help find compromises when there are impasses.

In addition, this is what we will continue to do:

1. Support RP and plotting by answering questions about the rules, lore, or game history, like about whether entering the raw Fade is generally deadly in FR or not (it is).
   
2. Handle applications for new players (more below).
   
3. Maintain lists, stamp rewards approved, and other admin duties.
   
4. Post activity check-ins and game updates, which will now double as plotting posts/bulletins where you can let everyone know that you're blighting Ferelden in case they missed it elsewhere.
   
5. Handle conflicts and help maintain plot consistency as needed, such as stepping in to untangle the timeline if someone's about to destroy the same city someone else is planning a long-term arc for, or organizing votes/discussion if there's not a clear community consensus on something.

We'll also still be in the game, plotting and posting things! Like, for real, we have a thousand ideas still. Just not the ability to turn them into large-scale plots for the full game on a regular schedule anymore. So we'll be around brainstorming and doing plot things in the same capacity any of you now can.

Survey Results

We've put the results of our gamewide survey in a doc — the raw charts and summarized takeaways from the open-ended responses. The overall result is that despite some of us being here for ten (TEN!) years as of this October, most people in the game have some game left in them! People have things left they want to do and are open to shaking things up and taking big swings and have thoughts on what sorts of swings might be fun. That's neat, and we look forward to seeing where things go next!

IC Leadership

Since we're now asking everyone to do what we'd previously asked Division Heads to do, which is proactively create plots for everyone else, we're also going to expand the Division Head system into a larger leadership council. Every player can pick one of their characters to be on the council and have an IC vote in gamewide decisions. Within that council characters can have areas of expertise or oversight — it isn't a big deal if there's overlap in people's spheres, so don't stress about that — and collectively lead the divisions they respectively belong to.

While we think it's overall the best way to proceed with making things more collaborative in the future, it is kind of a bummer for our existing Division Heads, who have been doing a great job. So we're going to start off with those two characters (Cosima and Gela) being co-chairs of the new council, in charge of driving this change ICly, shepherding everyone through and directing those meetings for the foreseeable future.

This system isn't being implemented immediately IC. There will be an IC announcement when it does, and we'll have a spreadsheet similar to the housing spreadsheet where everyone can indicate which of their characters (if any) join the council at that time.

Likewise, we're going to keep the other leadership positions (head archivist, mediation officer, etc.) as-is, but we're not going to take new applications for them. They'll be grandfathered out as people vacate them in the future, replaced by an "anyone can sign a character up for this responsibility at any time" structure that allows those jobs to have teams of multiple people at a time rather than just one.

Survey Results

Since we won't be posting mod plots, we'll also be unhitching our rewards system from them. We'll go back to a static list of rewards, and you'll be able to buy them each quarter during the activity check with links to three on-the-comm log threads.

Applications

We're going to continue to screen and respond to applications from brand new players as we always have, to make sure we don't run into major issues from folks who don't yet know the vibe and history of the game. For existing players apping new characters, you already know what you're doing by now, including how to nerf your character's abilities to meet our "no more powerful on the whole than a native mage and that includes taking into account non-magic skills and resources" standards, so we won't be processing apps for you anymore unless you all go mad with power and force us to revoke your privileges (please don't). There will still be a place to post your apps so everyone knows who's here and what their deal is, but you'll no longer have to wait for us to respond to begin RP.

Timeline

Everyone has permission to start plotting collaboratively and posting big plots starting right now. ICly transitioning to the council leadership will happen over the course of the next month or so to give Ammmy and Cadence a chance to RP about making it happen.

Implementing these changes will require updating our info pages, so we've put a moratorium on new applications from new players until October 1, 2025, so we can update the information pages and make sure any newcomers know what they're signing up for (and do it in the right spot). Existing players can continue to app new characters as described above.