Fellow Aephians!
2022 will not only be an exciting year for Star Atlas, with the upcoming Polis DAO and the first ship creation gameplay loops, but Aephia Industries is not taking a break either! Among other things, we have been busy these last few weeks, expanding and refreshing our organization to ready ourselves for all that is to come!
Today we would like to present you some important changes regarding several of our roles:
- The official formation of our Management team, which consists of our two founders (Prometheus and Funcracker) plus two well-known members from our community
- The Community Experts will see some people going and new enthusiastic people coming as well
- The NFT Degens now have their own category and with it a brand new role to better structure it
- People moving on & clean up of some less-used roles
Besides all that -as these changes tend to lead to questions concerning obtaining roles- we will wrap this article up with an elaboration on why we strive for a flat organization that introduced roles organically as the game progresses.
But before we go into any of this, let’s first dive into why we’re all here!
A Story about Passion
In traditional multiplayer/MMO games, those who organize a guild are intrinsically motivated. Of course, they don’t have much choice as there are -except in the professional E-sports league- no physical or monetary rewards to be gained from doing so. This contrasts with dedicated crypto investors (and degens), who tend to be motivated by external rewards, with the most obvious being financial gain. The primary difference of course here is that gamers seek entertainment, whereas crypto enthusiasts seek profit. Among the latter category, some will regard investing time into a P2E game as putting in work.
Star Atlas attracts both traditional gamers as well as crypto degens/investors, so there is a nice mix of both present. From this, it would follow that our member base is likewise made up of gamers, crypto investors, and everything in between.
When Prometheus & Funcracker started Aephia Industries, they did not do so because they saw a get-rich-quick-scheme. They simply realized there would be a lot to gain from banding together in Star Atlas. At that point in time, there was just one other guild in existence, but that one did not tick all of their boxes. So they decided to start a new one, one that would focus on its members -giving them a strong voice- and the Star Atlas metaverse, with the clear goal to maximize both fun & earnings for all involved. This approach, combined with the focus on shipbuilding, proved appealing to many. Since its inception over 1700 Star Atlas enthusiasts have applied for membership.
The founders were lucky to find that there proved to be a few talented individuals among Aephia’s member base, who had shared their mindset – who came forward, offering their services without expecting anything in return.
With the huge growth of Aephia over the past few months, the time has come to build out the structure a little further. We want to acknowledge some of the individuals who put in a huge amount of time to propel our guild forwards! But we also simply need to solidify our foundation, to make sure we are prepared for future growth and development as well. In the next section, we will go into some of the new appointments and promotions!
The Future
At this point, most of you are hopefully earning ATLAS daily with your staked ships. Though Aephia’s treasury is empty at this point, this stands to change in the future (e.g. see our merchandise design event). In a future post we’ll shed more light on the purpose of the treasury, but suffice to say for now that it is not dedicated to providing our members with a salary.
When our DAO & SPL tokens arrive, we will be able to start rewarding people with our tokens. That might happen later this year, but this is not set in stone. The longer we postpone, the better we can synergize with the DAC solution and tools that will be released by the Star Atlas developers. The maturity of the DAO tooling on Solana stands to improve overtime as well.
The bottom line here is: We will continue to rely on passionate members who like to use their expertise on behalf of the guild for the immediate future.
New Structure for Aephia Industries
Until now, our guild has been run solely by its two founders – Funcracker and Prometheus – who have been solely responsible for all areas of management. This is about to change. With the rapid growth of our member base, the number of tasks and activities we would like to pursue has also grown. For this reason, the management will be strengthened in the future by two of our long-time members who have clearly distinguished themselves through their commitment and skills:
➡️ Sensei Yamura
Sensei Yamura joined Aephia on September 4th, 2021, offering his services to us that very same day. Since then he has had a hand in almost all of our creative efforts. Our refreshed logo and nearly all visuals you’ve seen recently were made by him. But his biggest claim to fame is no doubt his outstanding work on our website!
He has without question put himself on the map with his drive, energy, and many talents.
In his new role, Sensei Yamura will keep on doing what he already was doing: work on our digital strategy, while overseeing our creative content creation.
➡️ StoicMOB
When Aephia Industries launched publicly on July 18th, 2021, StoicMOB joined us that same day. He has since been one of the cornerstones in our community, sharing his knowledge on the game, crypto, and Aephia with our ever-expanding community. When Prometheus and Funcracker first decided they needed a small group of Community Experts to help them manage the many questions and applications, they didn’t have to think long about whom to ask first for this role.
Since StoicMOB stepped up he has been going through hundreds of application surveys, while also advising the founders on many other aspects of Aephia’s day-to-day operations. Besides Star Atlas, StoicMOB is also heavily involved in Aephia’s NFT Degen & Side Operations.
StoicMOB will be taking charge of our Community Experts. He can be regarded as Aephia’s Community Manager, our version of Star Atlas’ Santi if you will. In this capacity, he will keep doing what he has done all this time: guide and inform our community.
DAO
Together with Prometheus and Funcracker, Sensei Yamura and StoicMOB will round out the new Management layer of Aephia Industries. They will jointly decide on the most important future developments going forward. When our DAO will have been formalized, key role appointments will be decided by the DAO as a whole, instead of by Aephia’s founders. From that moment onward, management will be in charge of day-to-day operations at the behest of the DAO.
Community Experts
Early September 2021 we found four of our most active and knowledgeable members willing to step up and become our first Community Experts. They agreed to help out with sharing information, answering questions, reviewing applications, advising the founders, and moderating the community channels.
Over time, as Star Atlas’ release dates started slipping, a lot of members scaled back their interest and effort, which unfortunately also led to two of our experts becoming more or less inactive.
So, it was high time to get new blood in there to keep everything running smoothly 🙂
Adding Expertise
To that end, we will see Proteus and AustinisMORBID stepping down from their function as Community Expert. We want to wholeheartedly thank them for their many contributions to our guild over the last year and for answering our call when we needed them!
The two remaining members, StoicMOB and Ford P. will be joined by 3 new experts, who most will know from our NFT Degen area here. They are:
- Sandbroski
- Valkynen
- TomQH
NFT Alpha Gatherers
Talking about NFT Degens, we are also introducing a brand new role that is completely dedicated to what is -at this moment- by and large, the most active part of our community: the NFT Alpha Gatherer.
These members have shown to be on top of the NFT game when it comes to finding and sharing alpha. The most important difference between them and other members is that they are the only ones capable of writing posts in the #nft-degen-announcement channel.
For now, the following members will get this new role:
- Harel
- Tykken
- CryptKnox
- dz
- apls
- Mantabowl
- miauthecat
- MiXXiM
- Alsipsclar
- SilverStar
Other role changes
Our resident clown (meant in the most endearing way possible), Yossy has decided to step down from his honorary Good Vibes Manager role, as he is moving his focus away from Star Atlas. We want to thank him for his tireless recruitment efforts and for reviewing many, many application surveys over the past few months.
And lastly, we want to thank a special person, who was with us from before we officially existed: Athlassian (also known as 3nes). He was part of the earliest discussions concerning the creation of a new Star Atlas guild and has been a board member ever since Aephia’s inception.
He has now set his sights elsewhere, however, and as such we are going to sunset the Boardmember role as well. Up until now, this role was mostly honorary, and with the contours of our future DAO slowly becoming more and more visible on the horizon, we think it is no longer necessary to set up a full-fledged interim advisory structure.
📣 All of the above-mentioned role changes will become effective later today.
Staying Flat & Organic Growth
As most of you will know, Aephia has chosen to keep the hierarchy as flat as possible and to introduce roles slowly, primarily to meet a certain need when it arises. There are no plans to change this approach, as we think it is the most healthy way to organize ourselves.
No premature in-game roles
Aephia is not looking to set up squads or other game-related departments anytime soon. It will be many months – if not years- before most of these would be able to function properly in-game. People will come and go in between now and then, and the gameplay will change within that period as well, meaning setting up these entities now serves really little purpose.
Organic Growth
For Aephia to become a successful metaverse corporation, it makes sense to adopt some of the approaches and best practices used by real world corporations. To ensure roles have meaning, the vast majority of them will be assigned based on in-game, economic activities when these become available. Furthermore, the goal is to introduce as little hierarchy as possible to keep overhead low and keep the organization lean and mean.
When the team is close to releasing new gameplay, having already shared detailed information regarding it, then it’s time to take stock of who would like to pursue the new associated professions. This is when we will start to discuss and organize the most optimal implementation of the economic activities that these members will partake in, in earnest.
This results in the organic growth of the number of roles, with them evolving in lock-step with the game’s development, resulting in the most optimal fit for the game.
Leaders
When our supply chain and other necessary divisions are taking shape, the time has come to start appointing leaders to make sure our operations continue to run smoothly while they expand. This will be given in by necessity and these roles will be provided to those who have proven themselves capable (to the extent possible).
Non-gameplay Activities
Of course, there are also quite a few supporting activities that need to be performed, which are not based on direct gameplay. We have a website and various social channels that need to be maintained. We have a news channel and a newsletter that require text writers to report on as much news as possible as well. We need a department that can provide content (graphics, video, and sound) to create trailers like the one released last week. We have tons of ideas for various tools, for which we would need developers, and the list goes on.
All of these are relevant already, even before the game is live. So, if you seek to become more involved in Aephia today, there are plenty of opportunities for you! Circling back to the start of this article: Passionate people only though! Extrinsic rewards for some of these positions might come in the future. However, it should come as no surprise that these will first go to our members who already committed many hours because of their passion and desire to help the collective.
Power to the people of Aephia!
