Hello everyone! Earlier this month on the Plot Planning Pages we discussed a few changes to the clan hierarchies that will be implemented in-game starting today.
The first change is to do away with strict mentor-apprentice pairs in SunClan and instead open up apprentices to be communally trained by the clan as a whole. The current mentor-apprentice system is underutilized and it isn’t uncommon for an apprentice to go through their entire two months of supposed training without ever interacting with their assigned mentor, so changing the system to allow more flexibility in who is tasked with training apprentices may lead to more training being done. As well, it will contribute to SunClan’s unique identity by highlighting their group-before-individual mentality and allowing cats to have close bonds with many of their clanmates, rather than with a select few cats.
The second change is to open EarthClan up to having one to four medicine cat apprentices as a time, under the leadership of one head medicine cat. In-character, this change will allow medicine cats to take a more active role in clan life, account for the size difference between the size of the canon clans and our clans, and will promote EarthClan’s identity as a clan where cats’ unique abilities and interests are valued more highly than the prescribed path of a warrior. As Alienfish put it on the Plot Planning Page, “EarthClan's philosophy supports each individual doing what they can do best - in this case, that might mean opening up room for more medically-inclined cats to become medicine cats and help their clan in that way.”
Out-of-character, this change puts less pressure on the owners of medicine cats to be frequently online to attend to all of the clan’s pressures, allows more members to have high-ranking characters, and gives us more flexibility when medicine cats are inactive or locked into a scene.
As before, any member who has been active for two weeks and hasn’t broken any major rules in that time can make a medicine cat. However, due to the increased number of high ranking positions and the website’s low active member count, members will now be allowed to have a leader or deputy and a medicine cat or medicine cat apprentice as long as the leader/deputy and medicine cat/medicine cat apprentice are not in the same clan. For instance, you could have the SunClan leader and the EarthClan medicine cat apprentice, but not both the MoonClan deputy and MoonClan medicine cat.
The trial period for these changes will extend from now until November, at which point I’ll make an official blog entry in which we can discuss what worked and what didn’t and decide whether to keep the changes long-term, either in part or in their entirety, or return to the current systems. In the meantime, the systems are still open for criticism so if you think something should be changed, you can speak up before that November deadline.