By Espark on Sun 28 Mar, 2021.

Ai-Mo Times

March 28, 2021

“The only literate tribe deserves the best in information and entertainment”

Polytopia News

Bot Raids

The bot raiding from last week continued this week. Over one hundred so called fembots have been banned. This quote from a mod, HelloIAmBush, explained it well:

“I think that they're really stupid thing to start with because no one you never heard of just goes into your dms asking you [to try] dating apps/sex sites. The majority of the active server population (maybe all) is above 13 and by then I'm sure no one would fall for those scams. We (the moderator team) do our best to ban them as soon as they join so they DM scam as little people as possible. We're still keeping an eye on #new-members.

The fembots raid mostly happened during three days. The the first day, they mostly had pfps of females/zoomed in anime girls. On the second day, we also got bathroom shelves added to that. Then, on the thrid, it was mostly just default discord avatars. Most of the bot accounts had a randomly generated name with random numbers in between, or example, amazing87shore. … Pretty much they're a stupid raid material who attempted to advertise sex sites/scam people. [It was] annoying overall, both for members and for the mods to deal with.”

Survey results

68 people responded to last week’s survey regarding server activity in main. Most people found the server to be at least moderately friendly, active, and fun.

Respondents had a broad range of interests. There was significant activity overlap with most people reporting that they participated in at least four different types of server activities. The aspect of the server that the most respondents reported participating in was Elo-bot multiplayer games. Almost half had watched a live stream game or participated in a voice chat event. About a third of the respondents had played PolyCraft and/or submitted art for a contest.

Looking to future events, most people wanted to see new events taking place once or twice a month. The most popular request was for a multiplayer tournament. Even accounting for respondents’ past activities, more people wanted to see tournaments in the future, than any other type of activity.

Here are some of the anonymous comments from the survey:

“Improve communication between mod team and people”

“Make art contest rules as clear and fair as possible.”

“Demote inactive mods smh”

“I feel the staff team really needs to work on nsfw more since there is a lot of nsfw in the server. As well as moderating better so people will not be rude. I have even seen a mod be consecutively rude to people for no reason.”

“Please add #emoji-suggestions back! We have a new boost level now and we need to fill the emoji slots. Other than that, Main is doing really well! Thank you all!”

“Some experienced players could play live games and give comments so others can learn.”

“Make more events that happen and get zoy to talk more.”

“I'm disgusted by the desire to keep inactive members in the server, and then boast of its member count”

“The mods are kinda toxic ngl”

“perfect as is”

“Don't delete major parts of the server without polls or smth (cough Tribe leaders)”

“Emphasize open collaboration, inclusiveness, and non-clique leadership”

You can see all the responses and comments online. Thanks to everyone who participated in the survey and thanks to Paxu for suggesting it.

Ai-Mo News

Thanks to PiKappa, Ai-moya has several new emojis this week.

In the last week we have seen greater activity from members like Rit and Pi. Several discussions took place with them and several other 'older' members. We have been graced by even admins in the the monastery. There has been an increase in activity and there are more idle conversations than we have seen in quite a long time.

There are still many activities that we as Ai-Mo run. However, we always are open to suggestions and cooperations so if you are interested DM Druid or Espark.

Interview with Espark

The following is an excerpt from the Polytopian Interviewer, a weekly podcast with occasional bonus content. You can read the full transcript or listen to the podcast through the RSS feed.

Tntmasta: Welcome to The Polytopia Interviewer, where I interview people on their experiences and views on the Polytopia discord community. I have Espark with me. How are you?

Espark: I'm doing well. Thanks very much for having me today. This is exciting.

Tntmasta: Yeah, there seems to be a lot of pep in your voice. My first question is, what's it like being on the Ai-Mo newspaper team?

Espark: Oh, yeah, I have a lot of fun. Enjoy writing articles for newspapers. And the team is great. I mean, one thing you learn in life is projects are more fun if you get to work with people smarter and helpful and insightful. It feels less like a job. I mean, the other thing I like about being on the newspaper is I get to interview people like this, you know, I get to analyze trends. I get to be involved in the community.

Tntmasta: How do you and your team usually make a new edition of the paper?

Espark: It's changed a little bit over time. I looked back. We started doing it in May 2020 eveyr day. Currently the way we do it is it's a weekly paper. It comes out every Sunday. Usually in the middle of the week, like maybe Wednesday or Tuesday, we start talking about ideas. There's a public channel in the Ai-Mo server Ai-Moya, where anybody can discuss critical ideas, but we the reporter staff have a private chat where we discuss topics and plans. Usually in the middle of the week, we throw ideas out. For example this week, Druid attended Zoy’s story time where he talked about plans for the game dates, like I couldn't attend that. Druid did. Usually Sunday morning, we finalize the content and proofread it and publish it on Sunday.

Tntmasta: Sounds like a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. The Ai-Mo tribe’s newspaper is the only fan based poly news source that is still actively creating content. What's your comment on that?

Espark: On the one hand, I'm really proud that our newspaper is still going and there are plenty of times where I wasn't sure we'd still be doing this. Yeah, like I said, it looked it up. Our first edition was in May 2020s. We've had challenges and I understand that. It takes a lot of communication and dedication to keep a newspaper going, so I understand. I really like the other newspapers. I try to support them. I like the Kickoo paper. I think Hoodrick had one and the Aquazine, I think the Aquazine may not be gone forever. I'm hopeful that it's going to continue.

Tntmasta: They released a December special.

Espark: Yeah. I've contributed two articles to Aquazine. It's good to have different points of view and different tribe purposes. I think it's good for the community. I hope there are other fan publications that either start or again, the Aquazine continues.

Tntmasta: To my knowledge, there is the Ai-Mo times, the Aquazine magazine, the Kickoo newspaper, which hasn't released an edition since like, October, November. And then there's also the Polytopian Art Gallery journal. But since it was a team of one person that was like, “Yeah, I can't do this anymore” in October, it died.

Espark: Yeah.

Tntmasta: So there are other ones out there, but not that many. I was part of the Kickoo newspaper myself. It was the opposite problem with that one, because you had a bunch of different people that either didn't contribute much or just forgot. So you're like, the perfect in between team of working on it and to get stuff done.

Espark: Yeah, it's really a balance, because you need people who are enthusiastic and active. But you also need reliable people. It's a big challenge. I mean, nobody's getting paid to do this. It’s just for fun.

Tntmasta: I noticed that you're in Adventures of polytopia but haven't really been active. Do you still do D&D sessions?

Espark: Oh, that's a great question. So I do play D&D, but not through the tribes of polytopia server. I run a D&D campaign in the Ai-Mo server. We've been playing since May. We have a group of about seven players, but some of them don't come to every single session. It's a polytopia themed world so we have a human Luxidoor bard, dwarf Xin-Xia, a Quetzali dragonborn paladin, and then our wizard is Elyrion. We've had other players that have cycled through. We've had about, I think maybe 10 players altogether and currently six players. I love dungeons and dragons. I’ve been a DM over 15 years.

Tntmasta: Wow.

Espark: Not this campaign. This campaign we haven't even made it a year, which is actually pretty good. Nine months for a D&D campaign is really great. Usually they peter out within the first month or so.

Tntmasta: Yeah, I actually was in a D&D campaign myself, with a bunch of college friends. And then after a couple of sessions, everybody just got magically busy. So, never happened.

Espark: Yeah, that's, that's very normal. I think that's actually more common. People think like, Oh, yeah, let's do D&D, or the DM, maybe they've never done it before. And they're like, “Yeah, I want to run a campaign.” And then either you have scheduling conflicts. The DM gets in over their head. Sometimes you have interpersonal conflicts, or just different play styles and then it peters out.

Tntmasta: And then you also have the people that want to actually kind of stick to the script and the people that just want to mess around and attack.

Espark: That's right. It's a balance between people who want to screw around and like, “Hey, let's attack the tree!” and you're like…

Tntmasta: Why?

Espark: Or, “Oh, that innkeeper is offering me a quest? I'm gonna kill him.” And you're like, No, no, no, no, don't.

Tntmasta: Wow. We might have to cover some of your d&d sessions in the future.

Espark: There’s so much stuff. Yeah, one of the things I say all the time is, playing against bots. Bots are predictable. Human opponents are much more interesting.

Tntmasta: Yeah, even though they sometimes do a strategy that is very strange.

Espark: But that's surprising and delightful sometimes. And you're like, “Oh, I didn't expect that.”

Tntmasta: Yeah.

Espark: I mean, that's the joy of playing against human opponents. I mean, sometimes they are also predictable, but still it's more interesting, it’s more challenging.

Tntmasta: We touched a little bit of polycraft, but we haven't really gotten over it yet. So how involved would you say you are in polycraft?

Espark: I'm very involved. I think that's kind of the new fun thing to do in the server right now because we don't have tribe duels, and we don't have a new tribe yet. So I think the kind of fun exciting focus right now is polycraft. I didn’t really play Minecraft before. I played it a little bit with my children, and actually I used my child’s account.

Tntmasta: Gasp

Espark: Yeah. You kidding? My kids play polycraft as much as I do. Like, half the time if you see my character wandering around polycraft, it’s one of my kids. It’s not me. Yeah. Now this one time, one of my kids I call her miniSpark. She went in and she put dirt all over my Ai-Mo house.

Tntmasta: So you griefed yourself.

Espark: That's the thing. So other players were like, “Oh my gosh Espark. Someone covered your house in dirt.” And then we thought about it a little bit, it's like, but my house is claimed. Okay, so that means only I can place blocks or break blocks. So I can only be the one put dirt on my house. So I had to ask my children who put dirt on my house, and it was my youngest child, and I asked her “What did you do that for?” And she said “It was a prank.”

Tntmasta: Well, that little prank caused quite a bit of drama. Alright. Thank you very much for your time, and wow.

Espark: Oh, my pleasure. I look forward to hearing the finished product.

Tntmasta: It’ll be posted, and I'll let you know when I do.

Espark: Excellent. All right. Have a good rest of your day Tnt. Thanks for having me.

Tntmasta: You as well Espark. Bye.

Espark: Bye.

Read or listen to the rest of the interview with Espark on the Friendly Polytopia server.

Mute ban column

Disclaimer: Many mute and ban commands are executed on admin only channels. Some fields below will show ‘unavailable’ because the commands were not performed in public channels. In some cases, the data can be inferred from context and will be placed in parenthesis.

Credits

Thanks to all our contributors - Druid, Espark, Dust, Tintin, and Tntmasta. A big thanks to Artemis for setting up a new website for the newspaper. Also, thanks to our faithful readers for encouraging the paper to continue. Keep up Ai-Mo!