What’s gained by switching this over?

It may also need some explanation for usage; as a Discord novice, I can’t see a way to get a list of people who have a particular role. Is the intention that the Emperor would click through the profiles of all active players in sequence to see who has the role?

We tend to organise mentorships on Discord anyway, so it’s a tiny streamlining of the process.

In terms of usage, I expect that the emperor would just go into the relevant channel, type “anyone available @bn-tenured” which will ping everyone in that group, and then wait for responses.

Ah, the ping makes sense and I guess I’ve forgotten about it as a feature. Maybe that should be documented for the sake of future Emperors who don’t know about it.

But mulling it over, the idea of locking even a small and social part of the BlogNomic gamestate away on Discord feels wrong. An Emperor who doesn’t use Discord shouldn’t have to ask someone else to report back about what the gamestate over there is, and trust that answer in order to perform an action correctly.

This is also saying that it’s impossible for a player to become a Mentor if they don’t use Discord, which I don’t think should be the case.

I’d be happy with a milder, informal recommendation along the lines of “players who are Tenured are encouraged to request the @bn-tenured role on Discord”.

I do understand the reluctance to make the off-site platform in any way mandatory, but the concern here is more about the obverse case: I *am* content to require that mentors have to be available through Discord as that increases their overall utility. The case of the new player who wants to have their mentorship discussions via Discord but is instead corralled through EE’s stuffy, obtuse DM system bothers me more than the case of the veteran Mentor who doesn’t want to catch up with Discord, with all its kids and slang and whatnot.

The Emperor having to check Discord for gamestate is a marginal cost that I’m prepared to accept; as an inefficiency it seems counterbalanced by the slim overall efficiency of the proposal cutting out the wiki-check step of the same process, especially given that most Emperors will be on Discord.

I’d expect Emperors to already optimise for communication channels - and timezones and personalities, even. If a new player asks to be Mentored by a friend of theirs who’s playing, because they know them from another chat site or real life, we shouldn’t have to ask that second player to join Discord before we can formally make that happen.

Are we definitely losing a visible list of Mentors if we do this? That if somebody wants to know whether the game has enough Mentors or could use some more, there’s no easy way to find out?

No, depends how its implemented but it’s definitely possible to make it trivial to list members of a role.

In general I think that the Mentorship mechanic is for the mentees’ benefit rather than that of the mentors, so my instinct is that mentors should increase their flexibility rather than demanding that mentees limit their expectations to what is available. Giving Emperors another thing to triage in their selection also doesn’t seem like a worthwhile cost to retain the right of individual mentors to be as inaccessible as they please.

Why can this simply just be done in addition to the current list without requiring a rule about it?

*why could this not

Why duplicate? Just have it be tracked where it’s tracked.

[Josh] Wanting Mentors to be more flexible by making themselves available for real-time chats is fair enough, but sounds more like something for the “Things that a mentor should do” list.

This does seem too limiting otherwise, if we’re saying that Emperors and Mentors have to be on Discord, and that it’s harder for everyone to find a list of Tenured players. I’m not sure the advantage of being able to ping the entire group at once is even a given - for the most recent Mentoring, Bucky selected and pinged a single player from the list as their first choice, and went from there.

> This is also saying that it’s impossible for a player to become a Mentor if they don’t use Discord, which I don’t think should be the case.

> But mulling it over, the idea of locking even a small and social part of the BlogNomic gamestate away on Discord feels wrong.

mostly for these reasons.