The NL Apprentice is back - and this year, it’s going to be better than ever. Our resident Apprentice guru Axel has put a lot of time into making sure this Apprentice will be better than our previous one.

Participating in the Apprentice is a great way to gain some valuable experience, meet and interact with new people, prove your abilities, and more. And if you win the Apprentice? You get a job at NL and 250,000 nBucks.

It is a rare opportunity. Applications are open now. Here are all the details of the contest, along with the application form. I know from experience that those who send in their applications early have a better shot.

Best of luck!

Persephone (Brittany) was recently named as the site’s new Head of Content. This was a big thing in NeoLodge’s history and something everyone (including Georgie) is very excited about. Brittany was gracious in accepting the promotion and taking on a big responsibility. I am confident she will do a great job.

Besides that great news, I have something else to announce, though. I’d like to announce that our October Staff Member of the Month is Brittany.

Even before her promotion, Brittany worked very hard behind the scenes. The content team’s hard work isn’t often as publicly noticed as the work done around the forums, but it is just as much work. Our site is very big and we have a lot of quality content. The content team is responsible for a vast majority of it.

Brittany is no exception. She works hard behind the scenes and has done so since she was hired. Brittany always goes about her business very diligently and with a tremendous amount of style and care.

For those reasons, I feel she is more than worthy to be named as NeoLodge.com’s October Staff Member of the Month.

On behalf of the entire team, a huge congratulations to you, Brittany!

About a month ago, I proudly announced that longtime staff member Axel was NeoLodge.com’s first Staff Member of the Month. Well, it’s the time of the month where we announce the next Staff Member of the Month and it is with great pleasure that I announce Ashley as that person.

Ashley has been working very hard since she was hired at NeoLodge. However, in the last month or two, she has been working exceptionally hard (and done very well) at organizing and running NeoLodge’s Plot.

Organizing and running a plot is a tremendous amount of work. It involves working with a lot of people, managing a lot of information, and everything else you might imagine.

Besides managing the plot, Ashley has run a majority of the summer’s giveaways, run quite a few theme days, and organized more than a few contests.

She has done it all very well and I can see why her fellow staff members nominated her Staff Member of the Month.

Congratulations Ashley. We’re lucky to have you on board.

If you are a “number freak” and want to work with us and make some nBucks, check out this topic. It is a great opportunity for people interested in statistics and numbers in general.

Something I have wanted to do internally for a while is have a Staff Member of the Month program. After some prodding by fellow staff members (thanks Ny!), I finally made some time and did it.

Our process was like this:

• Post explaining the Staff Member of the Month
• Call for nominations from staff members. You could nominate any staff member except yourself.
• Based on the nominations and my research, I picked someone.

That someone was Axel. Axel has been a moderator (officially) at NeoLodge since day 1. Axel and I have worked together for a long time (including on the original NeoLodge way back where I think he was a newsposter) and I’ve always had a great deal of respect for him.

Axel really shined, though, during The Apprentice held throughout May, June, and July. He organized, ran, and largely controlled a huge contest that spanned multiple weeks months. The contest went over very well and we hired a great person (Rachel) at the conclusion of it.

The Apprentice’s success was largely due to Axel’s hard work and leadership. He had lots of support from his “assistant” Georgie, the rest of the NL staff, and the members, but The Apprentice was his baby since day 1.

Apparently, Axel’s fellow staff members agreed. He got more nominations for July than any other staff member. Some quotes from the nomination messages I got:

I would like to nominate Axel for July staffer of the month. He did a terrific job with The Apprentice. He was clear headed and showed outstanding leadership.

I’m nominating… AXEL. Because I want to reward him for his amazing job at NL Apprentice! Yes indeedy!

Axel has shown great leadership qualities throughout the entire NLA contest.  

Axel is definitely worthy of the title of July Staff Member of the Month. It has been my pleasure to work with him over the last two or so years and I’m looking forward to working with him again more in the future.

Congratulations Axel!

Here is the quote for today:

The winning staff member gets crap. What exactly that crap is we’ll find out, but it will be good crap I think.

We are having an internal competition. Not sure about what the aforementioned crap will be, but I promise - it will be good. :p

We’ve started up The NL Apprentice. Applications close very soon (tomorrow afternoon!) and we recently made it so that you can apply if you have less than 500 posts. You can now apply if you have 350 posts.

This is a great opportunity. Even if you aren’t interested in necessarily being a staff member at NL (which is the ultimate goal), The Apprentice is a great learning experience. We have a lot of fantastic tasks planned and I guarantee you’ll learn a lot.

So what are you waiting for? Go apply today. All the information is here.

close, not quite. More like a cadence. The “final poll” regarding the Battle System was closed just yesterday.

The results were, as expected, to remove all restrictions. The remove all restrictions option got about 55% of the vote. The closest contender was level restrictions, which got about 20% of the vote.

Now, we’re poking the fire once again. I’ve posted two preliminary polls about the Battle System, which are described below:

Should we reset the battle system? (link)
We had more than a few members comment about the Battle System being “ruined” because of all the policy changes. Resetting the battle system to a point where everyone would start off at 0 is a possible solution.

Should there be a cap on the number of attacks? (link)
Pretty self explanatory. We had a 10 attack per day limit before.

Go vote and comment in those topics. I’m curious to hear what the members think of these ideas and in general, about the recent changes to the Battle System.

If you know me, you know I am not a sports nut. I know the difference between a touchdown and a home run and understand how most major sports work. However, unless it’s the World Series (baseball) or the Super Bowl (football), you will rarely find me watching sports on television.

Another place where I completely avoid sports is when I’m speaking or writing. I know lots of people like to use lovely sports metaphors while describing something. Until today, I have never done this. A lot of people use military metaphors, which I don’t use, either (mainly because I don’t know enough about the military where it would help me illustrate a point).

So, where did I use the sports metaphor? To explain an ongoing debate at NeoLodge. And not just any debate, but the debate about who can attack whom in the battle system. I first introduced my lovely metaphor in the staff chat in the form of a very simple post.

I’ll reiterate that simple post below.

Higher level people attacking the lower level ones is like these guys:

attacking these guys:

While I have great respect for these young athletes, if they played against The Giants, they would get the crap beat out of them. It is a whole different ballgame (no pun intended) and quite unfair. There is no way the pee wee team can stand up against any NFL team (even the really bad ones). Even if you compare high school football (which may be the slightly higher level people) to the NFL (the top few percent), it is still rather unfair.

I understand the other side’s point as well. They want people to hit and it’ll take a while before they have people to hit. They don’t hit the really low level people but even people 20 - 30 levels below them still stand no chance. After defeat after defeat, those people get discouraged and frustrated. It’s a hard problem to solve. I’m not aware of a solution that will make everyone happy.

However, that is for you to decide and to let us know about. I encourage you to read the comments in this topic. Read through the entire thing and form an opinion. Let us know what your suggestions are and we will take them into account. Once the poll is over (we’ll leave it open for a week or so I imagine), we’ll go through the comments and try to come up with a solution.

I look forward to reading your comments. Now, go read, post, and vote!

- Doug
Owner / Lead Administrator

Disclosure: I withdrew myself from the battle system as soon as I could. I do not actively follow it nor can I admit that I fully understand how it works. However, I do believe that people with higher levels should not be able to attack people with vastly lower levels.

While I won’t waste one of my three wishes on a theme song for NeoLodge or myself (anyone watch Family Guy out there?), I think it would be cool to let the members pick what they think would represent NL.

I have never considered myself “into” music. I listen to some music and usually have my Windows Media Player (I hate iTunes) or Pandora (one of my favorite web sites, by the way) open when I’m on the computer, but I’m relatively uninformed and quite frankly, stupid when it comes to music.

I was listening to my music and working on NL the other day and I wondered “What song would describe NL?”

I started thinking and couldn’t come up with much. In the sense I used it, what does describe even mean? Match most closely? Most accurately depict? Represent? I think it is a combination of all of those things and I am curious to hear what you think.

So, that poses the question: What song do you think best describes NL?

The best answer (in the staff’s opinion) will win 75,000 nBucks, a spot as a guest writer on the blog for a day, and a nice trophy to show off in their signature.

The topic about it is here. Get thinking and get posting.

- Doug
Chief DJ (hardly)