Dodos are turning three!

Our server started on 02.12.2020, so today is our third birthday!

We have built an amazing living community despite all ups and down together with all of you, and we wanted to talk about the promises we want to make to the community, and plans for the following year.

Shortcuts

There’s a lot of stuff to talk about, so here are some shortcuts if you’re only interested in something specific.

1. December Events
   • Secret Santa
     Annual gift exchange initiative with a raffle at the end!
   • Dodo of the Year
     Pick your favourite person and they will receive an award!
2. Website Roadmap
   Short version of the content plan and our promises about it
3. (Raid) Leadership Course and Dodos School
   Our huge project to hone and develop leadership skills for everyone
4. January and February Events
5. How can I help/support the community?

December Events

To kick off the new year of our community, we are organizing two main activities: our traditional Secret Santa gift exchange concluded with a Christmas Raffle, and our first Dodo of the Year award.

Secret Santa

If you love to cheer up others, it’s the event for you!

How does it work?

1. 02.12 – 17.12 – Signups are open.
   On the 17th, I will go through them and assign the Secret Santa 2023 role, and you will receive a DM with the name of the person, who you’re gonna be the Secret Santa for. I will also ask you a couple of questions about your priorities to share it with your Secret Santa if they struggle with ideas.
2. 17.12 – 24.12 – Sending gifts to the Santa’s Little Elf account.
   You will have time to plan your present and a heartwarming message for your “target”. It can be an item or a collection of items. The cost of all the items in the gift cannot exceed 500k gold. You send your gift to my second account (@hot_cocoa) to make sure that gifting is anonymous.
3. 24.12 – 30.12 – Sending gifts to their recipients.
   We will send all the presents through my second account.
4. 30.12 (date and time to be confirmed) – Christmas Raffle
   We gather in voice chat, and our hosts will give away prizes with a help of a wheel spinner. If you can’t attend, don’t worry, your name will still be on the list!

How do I join the Raffle?

The Raffle will be open to everyone who signed up as a Santa, or decided to donate something for the Raffle (donations open until 24.12). If you joined both the gifting and donated to the Raffle prize pool through you will get two spots on the wheel of fortune.

You’re more than welcome to donate more stuff to the Raffle giveaway pool, DM Fox for more details.

Dodo of the Year

It’s our first installment of the People’s Choice Award. It’s our way to celebrate knowledge and commitment and make sure that the spirit of the community lives on.

How does it work?

1. 10.12 – 17.12: First round. Free for all
   We will announce 3 main nominations and a new dodo vote command to allow private voting. You won’t be limited at all in terms of who you vote for, but you won’t be able to use the command more than 3 times, once for each category.
   All the results are saved in a closed channel which will be open after the first round of results.
2. 17.12 – 24.12: Final round. 5 nominees in each category.
   We will adjust the dodo vote command to allow voting for the top 5 people who got the best results in each category. Again, your vote will be private, and you will be limited to 3 uses of the command.
3. 24.12 – 30.12: Announcing the results.
   Our team will manually check the results to see if everything went ok, and then announce our winners!
4. January 2024: Sending out an IRL prize
   We will talk to the winners and figure out the best way for them to send them a little gift from us all. All the shipping costs are on us, of course.

Website and YouTube Roadmap

We have accumulated a lot of knowledge in the community, but it can be pretty hard to find and organize by using just Discord. Our website has been there since early 2021, but we never really committed a lot of effort to it.

This won’t be the case anymore. Over the course of the next few months, we will fill the website with materials and work on their visibility (promoting it, teaching Dodo the bot how to share articles with people etc.).

Here’s how our plans currently look like:

We are starting another unusual progression group: an Addonless group, and we hope to record more GIFs and small videos for our tutorials. Our ultimate goal for 2024 is to cover all the trial content in the game with the best tutorials that explain everything thoroughly and precisely.

After we’re done with the website, we will focus our attention on our YouTube channel, where we want to start creating content about all things PvE, but we’re gonna touch on it in March.

Give us more feedback about the content you would like to see in written form, and what you think would be the best way to make it concise, useful and insightful!

(Raid) Leadership Course and Dodos School

There are many resources that offer trial/class tutorials, but there is one aspect of raid leading that no one really talks about: leadership, management and everything inbetween.

We are currently working on a new service that will focus on helping with exactly that. And there are two initiatives supporting the service:

1. OOPS, the first installment of the group
   This group will follow “the traditional way” of teaching new raid leads: going over trial strats, optimisation strats, and letting every single member experience the leadership role from within.
   But it will be supported by the…
   
2. Raid Lead Course on our brand new Dodos School website!
   It’s a program developed by our team to explain psychological mechanisms behind leadership and building effective teams.
   
   This program doesn’t come out of nowhere too.
   We have people on our team with a lot hands-on expertise in managing and leading teams both online and offline, and the main lead of the program has built a career in training and development, so we are sure after few iterations we will be able to build an amazing, practical product that will be useful not only in any MMO, but also in your everyday professional and personal lives.
   
   We are going to talk about things like:
   • Role of leaders and managers
   • How to plan and react to things, depending on who’s in front of you
   • How to keep your team motivated
   • How to give and receive feedback, building control systems that aren’t invasive but effective
   • How to manage the group as a complex organism and work with group dynamics
   • How to resolve conflicts between group members
   • How to save yourself from burnout
   • How to work with logs, and plan your group’s performance
     
3. Mastermind groups
   Where we are gonna discuss difficult cases together and develop our problem-solving skills
   
4. Your own project to work with and individual help and feedback from the course lead.

It’s a pretty large initiative, and we expect things to change and morph along the way, but we hope that this will help more talented people try and succeed at one role in raids most people don’t think about too often!

We are currently working on the modules for the program and will be ready to launch it in January! Stay tuned for more updates.

January and February events

Raid Lead School and OOPS are not the only exciting things we want to happen this winter. We will dive deeper into details in upcoming announcements, but here’s a small sneak peek into what’s coming:

Winter Crown PvP tournament!
January

Dodo Valentine’s Day
February

Our All-Trial Groups that help people with no raiding experience get better at trials will continue with the 15th and 16th installment of the franchise!

On top of that we will have an Addonless ATG group for people who want to learn the game’s way of telling us about mechanics!

If you have an idea and want us to organise it or you want to organise it yourself and could use a bit of help, just let us know!

How can I support the community?

We get asked quite a bit about the ways of supporting the server and all of those initiatives. We always say that participating, helping others, and just coming for raids is more than enough, because it really is, but some of you are not happy with that answer.

We believe in full free value, and we don’t have any plans on making an in-game server our main occupation, so all of our content here, on Discord or the Dodo School is and will be free.

But if you can afford it, think we deserve it, and are willing to help us pay for the website and bot hosting, domain name, fox’s new laptop, and want to help us make the event prizes more exciting, we definitely won’t be against it.

This is why we set up our BuyMeACoffee page, where you can support us financially. Click on the link to be redirected to the page to learn about details, ask around if you have any questions. You can always find a link to that page in the footer of this website via the “Support us” link.

We currently don’t want to implement anything more complicated than that, no subscriptions, no hidden inner circles for donaters. All of the money we get will be reinvested into the event prizes, hosting fees, and our most active members.

We will see what new opportunities this type of support can bring, and will go from there, and will keep you updated every step of the way!

It’s honestly pretty amazing if you have made it this far. Thank you for your support, enthusiasm and energy! Let’s make our 4th full year something special!

Sincerely yours, E4D team