If you have any Event suggestions for CA's to use, please post them here.
I'll start this off:
1. Question and Answer letters.
Q&A letters are always good - as long as the citizens participate. For them to work, you need people to actually write in with valid points for you to address. To allow them to write in, I'd suggest maybe a small office area inside the Nexus where citizens can be taken and given writing materials - that way, you know they're not going to nab the paper and go stick Resistance propaganda up all over the place.
Being a Civil Administrator can be a boring job. You aren’t allowed outside, you can’t go on raids with the Overwatch teams, there’s nobody to chat to except the random Civil Protection goons around the office and you’re expected to make your own fun. There’s a few ways I found during my time as an Administrator to stay active and keep the RP interesting for yourself – because when it all comes down to it, if you aren’t having fun, you’re not going to be active and you’re not going to roleplay well.
Coinciding with the question and answer letters, one thing that I found was popular when I was an Administrator was simple speeches every now and then. Talk about what's happening in the city. Ask for information on anticitizen behaviour, promising incentives (which you don't even have to fork over - after all, they're just citizens!) for anyone who assists in the apprehension of any undesirable citizens. Ramble on about public infrastructure plans; I spent a lot of time plugging the CWU-equivalent organisation at my old community because it was one of the few things citizens had to do, and a lot weren't sure what the process for joining was.
One thing I'd warn against is going out for meet-and-greets with citizens. Leaving your office as an Administrator tends to get you killed or, at the very least, harassed by idiots. Instead, why not do interviews with citizens? They’d be searched, tied and led to your office, and you can have a nice face-to-face chat with them. Heck, if they raise a few good points about, say, the flavour of the manufactured meat substitute in the ration packs, address it in a speech. It’ll make the citizen feel good, and it gives you something to do.
Another thing you can do is take on an assistant or two. Do a speech offering a position as your assistant and ask for a written application. Get any applicants to do a short interview with you – find out about them, their lives, their interests and their skills. My preference is to handle it all in-character; no need for useless forum applications that reward players for writing a thousand words of legible prose when they can’t RP their way out of a paper bag. Then turn the citizen over to the Civil Protection for a background check. This shouldn’t be a scary, dehumanising process; you don’t want an assistant who’s scared of your shadow, you want a competent worker who you can have a chat with and bounce ideas off. Having another face around the office gives you someone to chat to on a day-to-day basis and gives another player something to do besides sit on a bench and pick up cans, so it’s a win-win scenario!
One final thing I’d add is the importance of interacting with your fellow Civil Administrators. Silent (Slont, as he may go by here) and I spent many an RP session sitting in comfy armchairs in our offices and discussing the state of affairs in the city over a bottle of not-entirely-legal Scotch. He was my character’s boss, and I was his right-hand man. I did the talking, he did the listening. It was a great roleplaying opportunity and I enjoyed it immensely. But you don’t have to be best pals with the other administrators – stuff like petty rivalries or even full-blown feuds over ideological beliefs could make for fantastic roleplay. Just make sure the other player is cool with it so there’s no undue drama.
So that’s my ten cents (which, based on the length, is probably more like twenty dollars, but oh well). Remember that being an Administrator is about you as much as it is about the city as a whole, but always bear in mind that you’re one of the big figures on the server.
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