Direction
This week, Direction focused on maintaining current staff systems.

• LumosJared focused on Individual Direction and HR, the new Main Spawn, and Tutorials.
• MonMarty worked primarily on fixing some outdated race concepts in our lore, ensuring both more fair representation and sticking true to the long-standing themes of the server.

Game
This week was slow because many members of staff were absent due to other commitments. We were unable to release MassiveVillagers, Netherite dropping mobs, and the new KitPVP, but we will as soon as able. We were pleased with the huge turnout of the PVP Tournament yesterday. Congratulations to Avenqing, Oblivaify, and 5headgang for winning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place! The updated Factions Spawn Tutorial is coming along nicely. Gone will be the days of signs and holograms! We will be implementing GUI tutorials for our important plugins and information to make the new player experience easier.

• BlueChaos hosted events and began restructuring crate items at /tp crates.
• QGMK aided players, handled appeals and reports, set up events, and tested plugins.
• skhosh answered help chats, aided players, and hosted events.
• Effloresce_ worked on updating the Factions Spawn Tutorial and MassiveCommands.
• Sweet_Dreams aided players, hosted events, and worked on updating the Factions Spawn Tutorial.
• Winterless aided players.

World
This week World continued their work on bigger projects — finishing up the new spawn, and working on the secret project. Keep an eye out for an announcement regarding that. Beyond the bigger tasks, World finished up estates, started on new ones, re-purposed old builds, and set up player-run events.

• SpunSugar finished up the Telarel estate, added the new crook back regions to their proper groups, and cleaned up existing crookback to match.
• EdnaMode finished up the new spawn with Patsie, WaterDruppel and Bunemma — decorated the park in front of the cathedral, and an airship for the general spawn. Also did some decoration for the aforementioned secret project.
• Bunemma started and finished the decoration of the Keen estate, continued work on the secret project with WaterDruppel, and started on the de Piedmont estate and Caelfall.
• Patsie worked with Finlaggan to repurpose the Undercroft build into an Ordial temple for future use, and finished up the airship spawn with EdnaMode.
• WaterDruppel helped out with regioning and re-decorating new crookback, worked on the new spawn, finished up the van Hal estate, did the interior of the Sapphire Secrets, and started on the secret project.

Lore Updates:

• Sorcery has been completely redone. https://wiki.massivecraft.com/Sorcery
  • All Sorcery Abilities now have new definitions, and are incorporated onto the Ability List Page. https://wiki.massivecraft.com/Ability_List
• https://forums.massivecraft.com/threads/lore-wiki-updates.54747/page-4#post-996217
• More diversity among the Ailor race. https://wiki.massivecraft.com/Ailor
• The Fae Sepulchre is now live at /tp Sepulchre
• As of recently, we’ve been getting a lot of tickets. In order to avoid us having 20+ docile tickets in the bot, we’re going to no longer be asking “Anything else?” Before closing a ticket.
• There are new ranks to join on the discord.
  • @Abilities is a tag we will use only when making minor updates to abilities. For full rewrites we still use the main tags, for example @ Avanthar when we do a kit re-do for Avanthar.
  • @Old Gods and @Unionism for the two major written religions. Faith of Estel will still go under Exist Com, and Dragon Worship will still go under Primal Com and all Void religions go to Void Com. The rest of the religions are not considered major enough to warrant a Wiki page or Discord Rank.
• So regarding the matter of Slavery:
  • We think that slavery within the context of the horrors of real world Slavery is a necessary gritty detail of the universe, and as such should stay, it forms part of the bedrock of the degeneracy of society among the Altalar, etc. That being said, upon closer examination, we have discovered that there is a problem with Songaskian lore.
  • Songaskian lore proposes a form of romanticized slavery that “makes it alright” and “not so bad to be a slave”. It undermines the historical terrors of slavery, and calls back to an unwanted reference of “Lost Cause” ideologies. This kind of trivialization or romanticist view of slavery actually contributes to justification of internalized racism, and we’re not cool with that.
  • As a result, we’ve scrubbed all slavery references from Songaskian lore. There stil exists an in-line reference to force-conscripted soldiers, but all references to “enlightened racism” have been replaced with standard violent raiding, pillaging, and piracy. The remainder of slavery references will remain in lore, because they are adequately contextualized as the detestable institutions they are, and form the foundation of much of the server’s narrative. Songaskian slavery was irrelevant to the bigger picture however, and as such, was easy to kill without negative effects to the lore cohesion.

World System Updates:

• Geo-Politics Orders are open and have been for a while, we received as of yet 1 order in the past month or some more (which I couldn’t do at the time, but can now, but it seems the order requirements have expired). So. They are open!
• https://forums.massivecraft.com/threads/empty-banks-and-unwelcome-guests.91194/
• Occult Orders still waiting a time slot for the first hook event. Will come soon.

Event Updates:

• https://forums.massivecraft.com/thr…-aftermath-and-the-ruins-of-mantziraqq.91167/

Roleplay Updates:

• https://forums.massivecraft.com/threads/foreign-ministry-on-reply-to-misinformation.91164/

PR
This week, PR has been working on updating the main website and social media, again, as well as guide creation.

• Seoulmate has trained other PR staff on the ticket system.
• Spectec has been helping test Kingdoms and working on a video.
• Wan_Xia has been trained on the ticket system and has been testing resource pack bugs.

Quest
These past two weeks the quest department did a lot of routine work such as clearing up seasonal/limited time content, event acting and event support. Plans were also made for upcoming spring content so stay tuned for that. As we are the smallest staff department we are always looking to grow our team, consider applying here: https://forums.massivecraft.com/forums/staff-applications.11/create-thread. You can also have a look at our methods on this page: https://www.massivecraft.com/massivequest-author

• Lazzulai did event acting at the guard rp event.
• Derpadillo cleaned up the scavenger hunt questline.