Predator Elder Council - Suggestion and Nominations

[Sneakyr]

For a long time, the predator whitelist has been stagnating into something rotten, not enjoyed by the community or even the players themselves. As of late, it's only gotten worse - but, with new management under Jamie (and extensive discussion in the discord), I and the others believe that we can finally reverse the trend and make predators both enjoyable to play and enjoyable to encounter.
An extremely large part of the problems plaguing predators was identified as stagnation in Elder activity and no predator community leaders with any real power to fix problems. Thus, a new suggestion:
Three elder seats, chosen by the predator community, submissive to Jamie but with the power to decide policy. Sort of like U.S congress and the president - Jamie can veto and overrule decisions made by the council at any time, but the council can remove the unspoken rules, decide lore standards, suggest new application processes, and suggest amendments to the honor code if believed necessary.
I suggested that the three seats come from each of the three main categories - "vanilla" predator players (non-staff with no intention of becoming staff), administration team predators (not necessarily administrators themselves), and originally, a developer seat. However, with the lack of suitable developer candidates, it was changed into a seat for in-between members of the community - mentors and retired staff, who aren't moderation but are associated with CM staff.
Thus, we have our nominees. Nominations were decided by the #yautja discord and were based upon activity in #yautja about predator discussions as well as general perceived suitability (I.E whether that person would make a good leader). Also, unless otherwise stated, each person was consulted on whether they would be willing to accept the role. Those who are consulted post-thread creation will have their unconsulted status removed.

To end this long winded preface, we have our nominees for selection by headstaff. Anyone unlisted who believes themselves worthy of a nomination may do so here, and they will be edited into the post. They may either ping me in the discord or wait for me to check this thread.

Seat 1: Player Chair
Spartanbobby
ReDikAl.ZiP/Simon/ATOM

Seat 2: Staff Chair
Stripetail/Joshua Kincaid
Skysoldier
Kerek/Kneez
x31stOverlord
Ghostdex
ImperatorTitan

Seat 3. Misc. Chair:
Sailor Dave
Renomaki (unconsulted)
Shyguychizzy

Disclaimer: This process has not yet been approved by head staff or Jamie and this thread was created both to seek their approval on the matter and to list the nominees should it be approved.
Anyone can purge their own nomination at any time, but they will not be re-added.

► Show Spoiler

EDIT 1: Inactivity or a general community/rest of the council & Jamie consensus may result in an Elder being removed and replaced with one of the nominees here. Regular rotations are also optional. Whether this will go into effect and how it will do so will be decided post initial election, ideally.

► Show Spoiler

EDIT 2: I have been asked to clarify things.
Being an elder here also makes you an elder in-game.
Community elders are bound to honor code restrictions, and can only overrule them with admin permission (but are allowed to admin help to request it. This is a privilege, and not to be abused.)
Community elders are subservient to headstaff elders both in-game and OOC.
Most Elders are given fully custom armor sprites. To prevent any undue strain on spriters, two suggestions have been made:
By Skysoldier:
Community elders are given only a cloak to denote their status. This can be either the same cloak amongst all community elders, or color coded depending on elder chair.
By Sneakyranger:
The unused armor sprites previously only handed out for exceptional deeds (which, in practice, never happened) by headstaff (only Feweh) will be recycled and used for elder armor. Community elder armor will be tied to chair, not to individual - E.G if Stripes is the initial Staff Elder, he received the Staff Elder armor. If he is removed for whatever reason and Skysoldier becomes the Staff Elder, Stripes loses the Staff Elder armor and Sky receives it instead.

[Kavlo]

I'm not a predator player but I just wanted to mention one thing.

Make them Elites not Elders.

Without going into the whole "non staff elder unga bunga" discussion the base line comes down to the Elders have a fuck-ton of leeway, responsibility and power with the shit they do in CM and in Lore, Elites however, not so much.

To quote the description of the title Elite from xenopedia;
"Elite is the rank of a Predator who has not only completed his basic training, but has successfully killed several dangerous species, such as Xenomorphs, River Ghosts and Humans. This means that Elites are the general foundation of the more dangerous Predators encountered, and are most likely the reason why the Predator race is seen as close to unbeatable by the humans that are forced to face them."

[Sneakyr]

I'm not a predator player but I just wanted to mention one thing.

Make them Elites not Elders.

Without going into the whole "non staff elder unga bunga" discussion the base line comes down to the Elders have a fuck-ton of leeway, responsibility and power with the shit they do in CM and in Lore, Elites however, not so much.

To quote the description of the title Elite from xenopedia;
"Elite is the rank of a Predator who has not only completed his basic training, but has successfully killed several dangerous species, such as Xenomorphs, River Ghosts and Humans. This means that Elites are the general foundation of the more dangerous Predators encountered, and are most likely the reason why the Predator race is seen as close to unbeatable by the humans that are forced to face them."

This was considered in the discussion. However, Elites, while upper tier and above young bloods, just aren't above other predators like Elders are. It also doesn't make sense for elites to be suggesting policy changes and setting behavioral guidelines. It'd just be easier to call the community representatives/enforcers Elders. In a pinch, you could just rename the current elder status to Adjudicator without really changing anything and it'd have the same result of distinguishing them while also having the positive benefit of giving Community Elders authority. Also, could drop the Community bit to make it easier to write.

[Kavlo]

This was considered in the discussion. However, Elites, while upper tier and above young bloods, just aren't above other predators like Elders are. It also doesn't make sense for elites to be suggesting policy changes and setting behavioral guidelines. It'd just be easier to call the community representatives/enforcers Elders. In a pinch, you could just rename the current elder status to Adjudicator without really changing anything and it'd have the same result of distinguishing them while also having the positive benefit of giving Community Elders authority. Also, could drop the Community bit to make it easier to write.

Alright so here's my counter points.

Right now every time a not currently whitelist Elder player joins a CM round as a Predator they join in as a young blood, no matter how much they've done as a predator or how long they've been a predator, so it'd make sense to bump some of them up to Elite which is above Young Blood but below Elder.
I think it does make sense to have the Elites who are the proven mighty warriors of your clans to come forward to an Elder and propose changes and have said Elder take it to the Elder Council to discuss it's change, I mean in reality you could change Elder with Head and Elite with Trusted Whitelisted Person.
Ingame the current Elders have their gear custom named to signify a role, either Apop or Noize already has the gear set "The Adjudicator" while Feweh used to have "The Enforcer" and the other ones have their own set too that I can't remember.
Finally, it's proven that CM's lore doesn't follow the main lore of the Aliens universe for a lot of things as this is a game and there is limited lore out there for things we have to talk about such as the UPP and CLF, so it really doesn't matter too much we stick to the lore of the actual Aliens/Predator universe.

[spartanbobby]

I'm very much on the side of Kavo when it comes to the name, I brought it up in #yautja when we started talking about it this morning.
So yeah +1 for Elite over Elder

[Sneakyr]

While I still don't agree, that's fair.

Right now every time a not currently whitelist Elder player joins a CM round as a Predator they join in as a young blood, no matter how much they've done as a predator or how long they've been a predator.

Except this. I don't believe this is true. More of an unspoken assumption many players have (including me formerly), I believe. If there's somewhere that this is said otherwise, by all means.

[spartanbobby]

While I still don't agree, that's fair.

Except this. I don't believe this is true. More of an unspoken assumption many players have (including me formerly), I believe. If there's somewhere that this is said otherwise, by all means.

I'm sorry frankie boy...not this time

[Sneakyr]

I'm sorry frankie boy...not this time

I suppose that's fair enough evidence, though I never really correlated those quarters being called YB quarters to us being actual youngbloods. Probably should have.

[x31stOverlord]

Pretty good idea to have elders from every section of the community.

I may not be incredibly long served in the community. But I am extremely passionate about CM and our smaller Pred community as a whole. Should it be necessary I would like to nominate myself forward as an Elder, not due to my extremely long lived Pred career as some. But because I am not afraid to speak my mind and that I have a plethora of ideas that can alter and change our stale routines and give both us and the wider community a little more reason to react with each other beyond minimalist hunts and Unga charges to loot our gear.

[Nick123q23]

I think I said something about community elders once. Yes, this is a great idea, though I'd focus less on player/staff/miscstaff chairs and redesignate the chairs to have one dedicated to overseeing the application process, a second one dedicated to policing and improving yautja behavior ingame, and a third one acting as an assistant (with equal authority and respect, mind you) to the two other chairs.

[Ghostdex]

I'm very much on the side of Kavo when it comes to the name, I brought it up in #yautja when we started talking about it this morning.
So yeah +1 for Elite over Elder

Just to toss in my feelings about this since I didn’t get much chance to be involved in the discord discussion. I heavily agree with the points Kavlo brings up about Elite instead of Elder, which also makes more sense to me.

[x31stOverlord]

I think I said something about community elders once. Yes, this is a great idea, though I'd focus less on player/staff/miscstaff chairs and redesignate the chairs to have one dedicated to overseeing the application process, a second one dedicated to policing and improving yautja behavior ingame, and a third one acting as an assistant (with equal authority and respect, mind you) to the two other chairs.

A pretty good way of doing things. Might ease pressure off of headstaff on dealing with the Pred whitelist if we had an elder in position to overlook the whitelist and another one for dealing with pred reports. Interesting and might be a good implementation idea.

[Heckenshutze]

Time and activity in the role should be taken into account too.

[Biolock]

I nominate spartanbobby even though he blasted me with his level 3 caster when I was a young drone... like a year ago.

[Stripetail]

Elder is a rank as well as a position in predator society, but there is actually a rank higher up than it. (Ancient)

Though it would take a little bit of name changing. Making the current elders into ancients to signify their age and power, as well as a good reason they're only seen rarely.

It would be nice to see some progression of Yautja rankings and titles down the scale.

Listing of them from lowest to highest: Unblooded, Young Blood, Blooded, Elite, Elder, Ancient.

Below all of these is the title Bad Blood given to any Yautja that has been cast out of the society, usually for breaking a cardinal law.

So that's four ranks that could be given/removed throughout a player's time as a yautja, with Elder possibly being an elected position if the current elders are made into ancients. (Or it is accepted just to pick a group of community elders.)

Bad Bloods could be used for events as they currently stand or for some other thing. *shrug*


@sneaky, There was a single piece of unique equipment given out to Reno long ago.


I should mention that I too am leaning toward elite over elder due to the sheer lore rarity of elders and the less work that it would take. Then again CM preds aren't really canon to pred lore so I guess it would be up to the heads to decide what all they want.

[Sneakyr]

I think I said something about community elders once. Yes, this is a great idea, though I'd focus less on player/staff/miscstaff chairs and redesignate the chairs to have one dedicated to overseeing the application process, a second one dedicated to policing and improving yautja behavior ingame, and a third one acting as an assistant (with equal authority and respect, mind you) to the two other chairs.

Staff/misc/player chairs were chosen to ensure every section of the pred community had a voice. This idea was brought up to eliminate the problems listed in the preface - and besides, those are already duties of the council. Having them split into groups would just add more unneeded bureaucracy.

[Sneakyr]

Elder is a rank as well as a position in predator society, but there is actually a rank higher up than it. (Ancient)

Though it would take a little bit of name changing. Making the current elders into ancients to signify their age and power, as well as a good reason they're only seen rarely.

It would be nice to see some progression of Yautja rankings and titles down the scale.

Listing of them from lowest to highest: Unblooded, Young Blood, Blooded, Elite, Elder, Ancient.

Below all of these is the title Bad Blood given to any Yautja that has been cast out of the society, usually for breaking a cardinal law.

So that's four ranks that could be given/removed throughout a player's time as a yautja, with Elder possibly being an elected position if the current elders are made into ancients. (Or it is accepted just to pick a group of community elders.)

Bad Bloods could be used for events as they currently stand or for some other thing. *shrug*


@sneaky, There was a single piece of unique equipment given out to Reno long ago.


I should mention that I too am leaning toward elite over elder due to the sheer lore rarity of elders and the less work that it would take. Then again CM preds aren't really canon to pred lore so I guess it would be up to the heads to decide what all they want.

From Feweh:
"a long time ago Josh did some other unique masks and gear that we forgot about.
Basically its the little codes that you can input in the top.

However we forgot to give them away to good Predators."

[Stripetail]

From Feweh:
"a long time ago Josh did some other unique masks and gear that we forgot about.
Basically its the little codes that you can input in the top.

However we forgot to give them away to good Predators."

Reno has a unique piece of armor, he received it from Feweh.

[apophis775]

I am not a fan of this at all and officially state my opposition.

In theory this SOUNDS like a good idea, but in my experience and what I've seen on other servers over the last few years situations like this do not work out well for the players in the end and just creates more work for the staff. It's also an almost a 100% turnaround on our normal policy of minimal to no player interaction with our official functions to goto giving regular players an actual say over other players. I mean, how long until we have the "Synthetic Review" or "Command Promotion board". This is a slippery slope that will lead us to a bad situation.

Not to mention that to me, it seems like an incredibly poor idea to take what is quite literally one of our most salt inducing and hotly debated/potentially abusive roles and put it into the hands of the players. Even with a staff over-ride and staff member on the "council".

Plus, you're talking about taking about promoting elitism in a sub-group that already has a habit of acting a bit elitist in the past, and seems to be going that route again.


I admit preds need a rework and some redevelopment, but I do not believe that creating a whitelist council is anywhere near the best course of action to fix them.
I see this as "You wanna be pred? Better get these 3 people to like/approve it". And I have NEVER been a fan of systems like that.

I imagine management/heads will discuss this, but I do not plan to support this myself.

[Rahlzel]

Elder is a rank as well as a position in predator society, but there is actually a rank higher up than it. (Ancient)

Though it would take a little bit of name changing. Making the current elders into ancients to signify their age and power, as well as a good reason they're only seen rarely.

Fun fact: This was the recommendation I made last night when we discussed it. Staff and others who have been given Elder out of respect for their accomplishments would keep their place on the pedestal by becoming Ancients and players would still get to be more involved with the game they enjoy by having an Elder council.

I'm in favor of this so long as NGGJamie is in charge and has the final say. Elders can propose Honor Code changes and improvements based on changing gameplay that they experience and the Ancients don't. I haven't played Predator in years so I have no business making policy decisions for them. And honestly, I feel my status as Elder or Ancient is undeserved.

It's still a whitelist, a privileged rank, and that privilege can be taken away - Young Blood or Elder - so I don't see this becoming an abuse of power when that throne is always teetering precariously on a cliff's edge. It's simply the community wanting to get more involved.

[x31stOverlord]

Fun fact: This was the recommendation I made last night when we discussed it. Staff and others who have been given Elder out of respect for their accomplishments would keep their place on the pedestal by becoming Ancients and players would still get to be more involved with the game they enjoy by having an Elder council.

I'm in favor of this so long as NGGJamie is in charge and has the final say. Elders can propose Honor Code changes and improvements based on changing gameplay that they experience and the Ancients don't. I haven't played Predator in years so I have no business making policy decisions for them. And honestly, I feel my status as Elder or Ancient is undeserved.

It's still a whitelist, a privileged rank, and that privilege can be taken away - Young Blood or Elder - so I don't see this becoming an abuse of power when that throne is always teetering precariously on a cliff's edge. It's simply the community wanting to get more involved.

Thanks for the comments Rahl, I feel that our ideas were misunderstood as "get rid of current Elders and give us the power instead" I think I can speak for every Pred at the moment that has discussed this that this was never the intention. We only wish for more active Pred players to be able to discuss and propose ideas. As it stands our current Elder roster is not exactly active (no offense to anyone) I have personally never seen a Pred Elder in game in my entire time being on the server, though that may be due to me being on GMT rather than PST.

I think what has been proposed of our "Elder Council" would be just our active members, anything that we wanted to implement or change would obviously be passed towards Jamie as the current leader of whitelistings and to the Elders or (Ancients)? If they have any opposing ideas.

EDIT: We are not asking for more power or to garner more "elitism" we are just looking for a soft compromise, we know we are not likely to get huge/major or even minor changes in way of developers time and resources. But we can at least do minor things that can alter our ingame abilities and scope, flesh out our interactions and hopefully at least to some extent re-invigorate Preds RP capabilities and try to do things to reduce our salt generation

EDIT EDIT: I'm glad this is getting observations and responses from the head staff. Its out there at least! For better or worse we are getting some discussion started!

[Sailor Dave]

The idea of the "council" isn't to encourage elitism in any way. It's not at all a powergrab, and no one is wanting to take the reigns from the head staff or achieve prestige from the position. It's only intended as a source of improvement and direction for an aspect of the game that's stagnated from lack of interest from management, understandably.

I know that predators are often considered "unfitting" as a both a rogue faction in a round mostly focused around xenos vs marines, and as an originally unintended aspect of the community, disrupting things in generally unengaging ways. Even though similar things may have failed in the past with other parts of the community, we want to at least try to change things for the better here and make it work.

One of the biggest issues - at least in my opinion, when it comes to predators - is the lack of direction in-game and unclear rulings, which tends to result in predators doing their own thing mostly aimlessly and stirring up unnecessary salt.

The occasions when Elders have lent a guiding hand and word to the group of predators have often been the most engaging and enjoyable, on the rare occasions they appear. The idea is to allow Elders to direct the goals of the predators during the round in a more focused manner and promote less salt-inducing behavior.

This also extends to the whitelist, which is commonly touted as the most difficult whitelist to get into for a role that isn't favored very much.
I've discussed with the others proposing the suggestion to management to allow new applicants to be judged more by their community and in-game merits as the other whitelists are now, rather than for their fanfiction writing ability, and then maybe optionally undergoing a trial phase as unblooded/youngblood with required oversight from an Elder to better direct them.

That doesn't mean that the Elders would be the judgement callers for whether or not someone gets to be a Predator. No one is wanting to take control of the whitelist. The community is still the deciding factor, and it would hopefully make the whitelist LESS exclusive and intimidating, not more.

[NescauComToddy]

Unfortunately, I have to agree that Elders are practically non-existent and that recently, we are without much management and ways of debating matters such as the honor code, for example.

As Dave said, most of the frustration that causes reports and in general, salt, is caused by our lack of objectives, and that we hunt without any direction. With more Elders, maybe we could end up reducing that issue and even have more variations of unique and memorable experiences for all players, as it happened in the past. After all, most of the events that are in my memory involved an Elder giving a bigger purpose for our existence in a round.

This is by no means an attempt to discredit the current Elders, but rather to provide whitelisted players with greater autonomy.

I do not necessarily agree with the above proposal, but I fully agree that we must solve this problem in some way.

[Sneakyr]

I'll say here what I originally intended and actually said in the Discord earlier to Apop.
While I was manufacturing this idea, I had in mind that the elder chairs would be highly rotational if you're not making the cut, with the order of importance being the following:
1. Discord activity, primarily in #yautja concerning topics relevant to the predator whitelist. Shitposting a lot doesn't count for your activity, be it in #yautja or in #shitposting.
2. Whether they're actually capable of a leadership role - personality type, drive, ideas, etcetera.
3. In-game activity. This is important, but not nearly as important as the first two - in game activity can be reduced due to real life situations (for example, Jamie having academia to deal with). As long as the elder is keeping up with updates and listening to how players feel about them, that goes a long way. Long absences unannounced and overlong absences of several months, however, cannot be tolerated, with a 3-6 (to be decided) month absence being unacceptable.

I should have added this to the main post, in retrospect, but I had figured that the flow and organization of a new suggestion should come first.
I instead figured that this decision would be the first order of business for the new elder council.

[Renomaki]

Plus, you're talking about taking about promoting elitism in a sub-group that already has a habit of acting a bit elitist in the past, and seems to be going that route again.

We have elitists in both the xeno and marine factions, and deeper still we have squad elitist as well who act like their squad is better than any other squad to the point of harassing and starting stupid arguments and fights with rival squads. And yet, you worry about predators becoming "elitist?"

Onto the topic at hand, I myself would love if we had a new wave of elders to look up to. Ever since the fall of Feweh, our last active elder (well, there is another, but he is super rare), the predators now have no proper leadership. We have elder rooms in our ship, but no elders to fill them. No one to go to to seek guidance when one is lost, or to punish those who do STUPID SHIT in general.

I always thought of elders as the sort of predators that lower-ranking preds could look up to, to learn from, to aspire to be like and to seek out when they get in trouble and need advice on the matter at hand. Honestly, only one elder was ever really decent in this role, Feweh being the "shoot first, questions later" kind of elder and Apop... Being Apop. (caughredditdramacough). And of course, we cannot forget the infamous elders of Abby and.. Whatshisname? The one that ate pork MREs, had a blood transfusion done and used a grenade launcher in combat? Yeah, those last two elders were horrible rolemodels...

If we ever got around to promoting a new wave of predator elders, we'd need to promote a certain style of play that'll encourage a more passive playstyle focused around... Being more on the sidelines, kinda? Only getting involved in combat when you absolutely MUST (AKA a Yautja gets kidnapped and must be saved from the marines), generally focusing on watching over and advising. After all, this is the YOUNG BLOOD'S hunt, not their hunt. They should be there to help, not hog the glory (as boring as that might sound).

Again, pardon me for sounding like a broken record, but even with all my experience, I still need help. Every now and then I'll "Pray" when I get stuck and need guidance, only for my voice to not be heard and thus left in conflict, sometimes leading me to do really stupid things. Having an elder to go to in the middle of a hunt when something troubles me would be nice, and hell, could even unlock new forms of RP as well. As others have mentioned, the presence of an elder has a way of adding a little spark to an otherwise normal predator round, the younglings all gathering round them and obeying their every command, and doin all that stuff I mentioned before (unless it was Feweh, he was just awkwardly quiet and liked to kill shit a tad too much)

Honestly, I'm mainly supportive of the idea of having elders just for the fact that we could use some new leadership figures to help organize the rabble of young bloods and keep them from causing too much trouble, just like how marines need command staff to guide them and the xenos need a queen to lead the hive to glory.