Post by Andrea on Nov 18, 2018 13:51:34 GMT -5
Greetings, Expeditioners!
We hope you are all enjoying your off-season. We have a lot to talk about today, and we encourage everyone even remotely involved with Sins of a Nation to give it a read, as what we'll be going over today will shape the future of the game.
As many of you know, we are a small and intimate community on the scale of New England LARPing. While this has its advantages, it has one big disadvantage: sustainability. Not since Event 1 have we had a player turnout sufficient to cover the most basic costs of operation, those being camp rental, insurance, and food costs. There are of course other costs of running a LARP, which we have always assumed responsibility for, as expecting player cost to cover every expense of running a LARP would make the experience prohibitively expensive. However, in the interest of transparency, maintaining these basic costs generated an almost $3,000 out-of-pocket cost from our staff this year, after depleting an additional $1,000 in the game's account (none of which was surplus; this was financing previously donated by staff members that was held onto beyond Year 2). Keep in mind that not every staff member is able to contribute to this problem, meaning that the cited cost was eaten by 2-3 individuals at most. To make matters worse, camp costs are continuing to rise such that even 30 players, which was our original goal, would no longer sufficiently cover them. Sadly, this is simply not sustainable.
We have spent the last year considering what our remaining course of action can be under these circumstances. At present, the game is scheduled to continue for approximately 3 more years, but we know that if steps cannot be taken to alleviate this personal financial burden, that won't be possible. At present, we are at a crossroads, which we have come to define as follows:
We must reach a standard of at least 30 players per event in order to continue. At present, we believe that we are going into 2019 with a roughly 25-player standard.
After 2nd Event this year, we will be reconvening to evaluate growth as can be identified in the first half of the year. Depending on whether we believe there has been sufficient growth to reach our goal, we will decide on one of these two courses of action:
A. Roughly 30 players or more have been reached, or we otherwise have good reason to believe that we are about to reach that standard. We will continue to run the campaign for its originally-designed duration.
B. We remain in or around the current 25-player standard. We will then adjust the conclusion of the campaign such that it will wrap at the end of this year.
We have of course considered alternative measures for bridging that gap, should some growth but not enough by observed. These include raising player costs and/or fundraising, each of which bears potential complications. Raising prices may alienate players with less disposable income and cause us to lose players, at which point it would likely negate its own worth. Fundraising bears the dilemma that most players who have the disposable income to contribute have already done so in a variety of ways and have reaped the benefits already, meaning that finding ways to reward their contributions at this point would be a fine balancing act between finding something still of value to them, and avoiding introducing unbalancing elements into the game. We will be gauging interest in these options in the coming days to determine how viable they may be, however neither is likely to be able to replace the core player growth that we need.
Consider this our last call: if you have ever been interested in playing Sins of a Nation, now is the time. If you know someone who might be interested in playing, now is the time. Yes, everyone is super-busy and convincing someone to take the plunge is hard. It doesn't matter. The game's imminent survival is at stake. We need everyone to get involved in order to fully realize the game that this was meant to be.
Now that that's out of the way, let's dig into next year. The following represent our tentative 2019 dates; we will announce any revisions ASAP (though we don't expect any), and release pre-registration forms and update the dates on our home page as soon as they are set in stone, but we know some people are waiting to plan their lives around us, so here we are:
Winter Feast: February 23
Event 1: May 24-26 (please note that this is Memorial Day weekend)
Event 2: June 21-23
Event 3: August 16-18
Event 4: September 20-22
You will note that there is no listed Summer Feast this year. While we like running feats, ultimately jamming one into a 7-week break is interfering with our ability to deliver quality full events now that we're running full 4-event years, which must remain our priority.
We are running the same pre-registration deal as last year: If you pre-pay for all 4 full events within the next month (deadline: December 16th), in addition to the typical CP bonuses, you will get 5 extra CP up front.
Lastly, we want to give a heads up that in addition to our typical staff exchanges, there will be a substantial bonus offered to players who volunteer for Tolgy Wood's Market of the Moons renaissance faire this year, which typically happens over the summer. Dates and more information will be given at a later time.
Thanks for taking the time to read our massive info dump. Have great holiday, and we expect to see all of you and then some this spring!
We hope you are all enjoying your off-season. We have a lot to talk about today, and we encourage everyone even remotely involved with Sins of a Nation to give it a read, as what we'll be going over today will shape the future of the game.
As many of you know, we are a small and intimate community on the scale of New England LARPing. While this has its advantages, it has one big disadvantage: sustainability. Not since Event 1 have we had a player turnout sufficient to cover the most basic costs of operation, those being camp rental, insurance, and food costs. There are of course other costs of running a LARP, which we have always assumed responsibility for, as expecting player cost to cover every expense of running a LARP would make the experience prohibitively expensive. However, in the interest of transparency, maintaining these basic costs generated an almost $3,000 out-of-pocket cost from our staff this year, after depleting an additional $1,000 in the game's account (none of which was surplus; this was financing previously donated by staff members that was held onto beyond Year 2). Keep in mind that not every staff member is able to contribute to this problem, meaning that the cited cost was eaten by 2-3 individuals at most. To make matters worse, camp costs are continuing to rise such that even 30 players, which was our original goal, would no longer sufficiently cover them. Sadly, this is simply not sustainable.
We have spent the last year considering what our remaining course of action can be under these circumstances. At present, the game is scheduled to continue for approximately 3 more years, but we know that if steps cannot be taken to alleviate this personal financial burden, that won't be possible. At present, we are at a crossroads, which we have come to define as follows:
We must reach a standard of at least 30 players per event in order to continue. At present, we believe that we are going into 2019 with a roughly 25-player standard.
After 2nd Event this year, we will be reconvening to evaluate growth as can be identified in the first half of the year. Depending on whether we believe there has been sufficient growth to reach our goal, we will decide on one of these two courses of action:
A. Roughly 30 players or more have been reached, or we otherwise have good reason to believe that we are about to reach that standard. We will continue to run the campaign for its originally-designed duration.
B. We remain in or around the current 25-player standard. We will then adjust the conclusion of the campaign such that it will wrap at the end of this year.
We have of course considered alternative measures for bridging that gap, should some growth but not enough by observed. These include raising player costs and/or fundraising, each of which bears potential complications. Raising prices may alienate players with less disposable income and cause us to lose players, at which point it would likely negate its own worth. Fundraising bears the dilemma that most players who have the disposable income to contribute have already done so in a variety of ways and have reaped the benefits already, meaning that finding ways to reward their contributions at this point would be a fine balancing act between finding something still of value to them, and avoiding introducing unbalancing elements into the game. We will be gauging interest in these options in the coming days to determine how viable they may be, however neither is likely to be able to replace the core player growth that we need.
Consider this our last call: if you have ever been interested in playing Sins of a Nation, now is the time. If you know someone who might be interested in playing, now is the time. Yes, everyone is super-busy and convincing someone to take the plunge is hard. It doesn't matter. The game's imminent survival is at stake. We need everyone to get involved in order to fully realize the game that this was meant to be.
Now that that's out of the way, let's dig into next year. The following represent our tentative 2019 dates; we will announce any revisions ASAP (though we don't expect any), and release pre-registration forms and update the dates on our home page as soon as they are set in stone, but we know some people are waiting to plan their lives around us, so here we are:
Winter Feast: February 23
Event 1: May 24-26 (please note that this is Memorial Day weekend)
Event 2: June 21-23
Event 3: August 16-18
Event 4: September 20-22
You will note that there is no listed Summer Feast this year. While we like running feats, ultimately jamming one into a 7-week break is interfering with our ability to deliver quality full events now that we're running full 4-event years, which must remain our priority.
We are running the same pre-registration deal as last year: If you pre-pay for all 4 full events within the next month (deadline: December 16th), in addition to the typical CP bonuses, you will get 5 extra CP up front.
Lastly, we want to give a heads up that in addition to our typical staff exchanges, there will be a substantial bonus offered to players who volunteer for Tolgy Wood's Market of the Moons renaissance faire this year, which typically happens over the summer. Dates and more information will be given at a later time.
Thanks for taking the time to read our massive info dump. Have great holiday, and we expect to see all of you and then some this spring!