[FC] Syncademy

[Hotelfox]

Chapter Eight: Study Feats
Throw wide the gates! The late summer brought with it a torrential flood of an unexpected kind: as we had just begun bridging the gap between players at different stages of progression through the game by offering two Savage timelines simultaneously, our capacities and ability to handle a heavy influx of new members were suddenly put to the test.

Even though the player flood eventually started to decline, Syncademy's server population has doubled since the beginning of the (unusually long) previous chapter to a total of ~1400 members. A formidable 282 unique players have joined our scheduled raids in the last five months. Luckily, our staff ranks have also received timely reinforcements - an additional recruiter, a few aspiring raid leaders and a new secretary role for all the backstage paperwork. Of course, we remain on the lookout for further helping hands to keep up with the constant growth of our community.

Discord itself also improved and added new features recently. As soon as we unlocked Role Icons on our server, the question immediately arose: could they have a place within Syncademy?
Thus, we came up with the idea to combine several existing systems into an overarching one, akin to "prestige trophies" in other games. The Study Feat trophies are meant to represent the sum of one's achievements and evolve over time.

With the first ever expansion release in Syncademy's history drawing closer, we've decided to do the logical thing and pause raiding for three weeks right after release in order to allow both students and staff members to enjoy the fresh content at their own pace before we take a plunge into the brand-new Extreme Trials and Normal Raid (MIL, of course, as tradition would have it!). For the same reason, we're postponing Syncademy's second anniversary celebration to the time between the release and holiday breaks.

Let's celebrate the Study Feats and travel to the Moon and back together!

[Hotelfox]

Chapter Nine: Raiding Seminars
Last year, Syncademy celebrated its second anniversary - by that time, we’d almost finished all of the game's content together. During the last chapter, we experienced both the highest number of simultaneous sign-ups we’ve ever had and a steep drop in raid leader availability and student participation alike, most probably in connection with the release of Endwalker and the new Savage raid.

Luckily, the activity drop hasn’t affected our parallel Savage progression. We're close to finishing Alexander and have now finally cleared Eden's Verse, which means we're about to move on to Eden's Promise. Running two Savage raid timelines simultaneously continues to work fine but requires a lot of raid leaders.

In the course of the last chapter, we implemented our latest feature - Study Feats - and awarded our students their trophies. We even upgraded our little gems to moons to fit the theme of the current expansion. While working through our participation data it became clear that the system was flawed: it was neither easy to understand nor to maintain on a monthly basis. To remedy this, we drafted an improved concept. It has already been implemented within our database and will replace the old one soon:tm:!

As we’ve lost over 50% of our active raid leaders in the last couple months, we're now going to try to recruit and train new ones with our newest feature: Raiding Seminars. The idea behind those is to use some of our raid days in between two seasons to create a space where our raid leaders can share their experience and knowledge with the students. Besides giving them an insight behind the scenes, we hope to encourage our students to use this learning environment and try out raid leading for themselves or pick up a bunch of basic or even not so basic tricks. As with all our features, the Seminars are an experiment - we’re curious to see them in action.

Let’s be curious together and explore the academic value of our Raiding Seminars!

[Hotelfox]

Chapter Ten: Community Activities
Syncademy is quite a busy place when we offer scheduled raids up to five days per week. Our 6th Rotation Season, where we clear all Extreme Trials in the game, has now begun. And our Progression Raids returned to The Coils of Bahamut after finishing Alexander in the 1st Raid Series while the 2nd Raid Series at Eden has started E11S recently. As always, our Simulated-Blind format offers everyone a chance to experience the fights without any prior knowledge together.

Three months ago we announced the Raiding Seminars and little did we know what the outcome would be. It was meant to be an experiment, but apparently quite a lot of people were interested in the Seminars and especially in raid leading. We can make a note here: Huge success!
During and immediately after the Raiding Seminars we gathered a lot of feedback and processed it. This will hopefully help with the preparations for the next season. Additionally, we recruited several students who started their raid leader training for our scheduled raids.

While we are already raiding a lot together, something was still missing outside of our raids. Suggestions were made for channels as dedicated places for more relaxing and even some non-raiding content, but just adding more channels is not a robust and sustainable solution. Thus we reworked one of our channels to combine its previous usage for finding parties or players to raid with and the new additions and it shall be called henceforth Community Activities.

The idea is that players should be able to use this channel to organize or search for any kind of ingame activity. Anything from Sastasha, roulettes or even Ultimate trials to non-raid activities like treasure maps or Blue Mage Football.
Additionally there is a "calendar" with regular community-organized activities. We hope that our students will enjoy those regular activities as much as they like raiding together with us.

Let's enjoy our time together and add more activities from and for the community!

[Hotelfox]

Chapter XI: Azure & Omega
Wait, four months have passed already?! Well, that was fast. Same as our progression through the 6th Rotation Season. We could clearly feel the Endwalker potency changes and stat squish especially in the Extreme Trials, which had to endure our "kill trains'' each weekend! For the 7th Rotation Season we add more content so that it can last a bit longer and offers a larger variety of fun side content like our Alliance Raid or Storyrun evenings.

Also, our Coils of Bahamut progression was quite fast. After just 4 months of raid time we are already done with it! For comparison Eden requires about 15 months and Alexander was done before in 9 months. We estimate Omega will take roughly as much time as Alexander did. Because of that, the 1st Raid Series containing Coils and Alex needs more content to bring it closer to the 2nd Raid Series of Omega and Eden.

Therefore we've started to offer Blue Mage content from ARR and HW in Syncademy. First we had two kick-off weeks to catch up in levels and get some basic spells, and now we start our BLU progression in the Coils of Bahamut with the knowledge about the fights still fresh in our minds. Additionally, we have added some BLU Extreme Trials to our 7th Rotation Season for ARR and HW too. Based on the outcome of this season, we'll continue to add even more Blue Mage content to our portfolio.

But not everything has been too fast in Syncademy over the last months. The progression through Eden has slowed down a lot and we're currently working on improvements to reach and finish the last half of E12S. It may still require some time, but once it's done, we'll continue with Omega instead of going forward to Pandaemonium.

The reasoning there is that we currently do not have the raid leader capacity to start current content raiding. There are also additional questions like gearing that could limit our mixed raiding approach and also require more raid time (especially Tuesday for reclearing) and therefore we would need more raid leaders to cover those days and groups too.

Given we just BLU through a pile of content, let’s be BLU together! Da ba dee!