I was recently poked with a stick by Tullia, the forum admin at forum.travian.in who I had worked with very briefly at the tail-end of my (by then, soul destroying) duties on travian.co.uk and was tasked with developing a set of staff bars around a concept she had devised. I agreed to begin work on this set (Having worked on minimalist staff & user ranks for the forum at travian.co.uk previously) and the rest of this entry collates the various stages of that process, from the early drafts to the subsequent edits based on feedback from the server/community team…

Tullia wanted to match the staff ranks to the national colours and symbols of India, loading meaning behind the different types of community role. The first set was very much an attempt to court the simplicity of the .co.uk ranks with the more vivid imagery, which broke away from the simple shield motif used on those .co.uk ranks. Feedback from staff was varied (and in some cases conflicting) but the poor old ‘cute’ Tiger got the thumb down for the crime of being cute. The ‘life bar’ Ex-Crew was also a no and someone even believed the tiny text for each symbol would lead to confusing… Really? Someone is going to be confused by that? You’re honestly telling me someone will go, “Is that a Multihunter or A TIGER?!” But overall the feedback made a lot of sense.

Many (if not most) Travian domains mark the Forum Admin in similar colours to the game server (overall) admin or removed from the Mod/SMod colouration, Tullia wanted to ensure her Forum Admin rank identified clearly with her sphere of responsibility.

The response to the massive feedback dump made Tullia wish she’d limited the feedback she sent my way, because I went and ticked pretty much all those boxes and made something I didn’t much like and which actually ended up departing from the sort of thing we were aiming for. I should take this time to point out the less cute tiger is based closely on an existing tattoo design, though I’m having trouble pinning down the originator so I can credit the reference…  If I had my way we’d be using my cute tiger. I won’t say these are bad ranks, but they were a bit too corporate, clinical, forum chic? I can’t even find the word for it but they didn’t really fit with the community.

Note: The crowns marking seniority of roles between the different crew areas were expanded to introduce ‘senior’ Support and MH staff tiers, a Head MH was provisioned for even though there isn’t one on .in at the moment.

The tweaks of the third version staff ranks (above and below this text) offer one set with a border to the bar and the other set border-less with a small, grey ‘Travian.in’ text. While trying to solve the lack of concept for the Ex-Crew bar I proposed using the stars (replacing crowns as marks of seniority) to create tiers to Ex-Crew that would allow the community to identify more experienced Ex-Crew when seeking help or gauging the authority of Ex-Crew insights. I also found an excuse to save the cute tiger from the graveyard. Discussing the Ex-Crew idea with Tullia and the Admin of the server, the three star Ex-Crew was marked for a change to Ex-Admin. The borderless set with text emerged as the favourite and was a few tweaks away from being implemented.

Many Travian servers have a Head MH but .in has none and there are no plans to have one in the near future, in the final set above (and the earlier feedback based revisions) we provisioned for the existence of that staff rank… Due to width constraints it was made to mimic the senior ranks and the Head Supporter bar was modified for the sake of consistency. The Head Supporter rank in actual use does not have this treatment and will be retired if a Head MH is introduced. Feedback acted on includes dropping the flag colouration on the admin stars and making the Lotus flower a little bigger.

They were put into active use a few days ago and this is the part of the announcement where Tullia explains the design concept:

b> New Crew Userbars and Colours

We wanted to refresh the look of the forum and bring in something unique to this forum, and to show a real Indian inspiration – and so we used the colours of the Indian Flag and the national symbols for the new userbars.

Multihunters
The saffron represents courage.
The national animal, the tiger, symbolises the hunter and protector.

Forum Crew
The green represents hope and growth
The peacock, the national bird, represents beauty and creativity.
The SMods and FA are now green instead of having our own colours, to show unity and make it simpler for users to understand who does what. However, SMods and FA have bold names to make us stand out a little more.

Support
The blue represents truth and serenity.
The Lotus, the national flower, represents wisdom and learning.
The Head Supporter is now blue instead of having her own colour, to show unity and make it simpler for users to understand who does what. However, the Head Supporter does have her name in bold to make her easier to find!

Admin
The purple represents leadership and power.
The Flag unites all three strands of Crew together in one role.
OK, it’s a little cheesy… but nice. We believe that the symbolism tells you something about each of the roles.
There’s also a new set of userbars for ex-crew which show what level of Crew they were, through the star ranking.

There are some ideas floating around about event and reward ranks for users, any one of them could possibly happen… and here are some demo ranks along those lines. I have discussed one system at present for user ranks but it could be quite some time before it is considered.

Staff ranks: Active (Can be seen in use on http://forum.travian.in)

-Tom

Sleepy errors must always be excused! zzzzZZZZZ

Tags: Forum ranks, India, rank bars, staff ranks, Travian

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 12:18 am and is filed under Blog, Doodles. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.