TominaHey Tomina, in response to your suggestions:
When it comes to including new members, there is always someone in Discord who is willing to help, staff or otherwise. The community has been incredibly accepting of new players from what we have been able to see and if a new member feels left out or like they are having trouble fitting in then they can always message anyone on the staff team to help them get started. We're happy to help in any way we can in both terms of RP and Character creation, as well as any questions they might have about the rules.
Now in regards to the rules. If something is unclear, again, members of staff are always here to help. However, we ask that new members PLEASE, read ALL the rules before claiming to not understand them! Far too many times have we had members try to understand all the rules through asking us for explanation instead of reading what is written. If something truly is unclear, then we will clarify and make any necessary additions to make sure it's easier to understand for the next person. That said, we are going to try and reorganize it again to try and make it easier for people, as well as create a more member friendly step by step guide.
Now, communication between members and staff. This is a bit more iffy, while I agree certain things do need to be discussed with the membership before being implemented, there are other things I believe do not. When it comes to changed to things like Mechanics and races, it's always with the best interest of the members in mind. There is an announcement made immediately after the changes are implemented to inform you of anything that might affect your character. However, even the recent changes to saiyans, have had little impact to the existing characters. It's a simple cleanup of the transformations to make it more balanced and cleaner. Now, for a further example, there are changes coming to Demons as well as they are very unbalanced compared to other races. These are not changes I believe need to be discussed with members as it's nothing character altering.
There was a suggestion to change Demon's transformations, that would be something I would include the membership on since that does affect currently existing characters. It's not like we are trying to hide anything, but bringing everything to the attention of the membership takes too much time, and we do need to implement certain changes in a timely manner.
On to your suggestion about non ROD threads. I'm not sure where you got the idea that you couldn't skip anyone, the same 48hr rules apply to any regular thread. If someone is MIA, then you can go ahead and skip them if you are comfortable doing so.
Now onto the Approval process for Schools: That's definitely getting stricter already so I agree 100%, and certain schools I think are going to get re-evaluated and tweaked with the involvement of their creators. This is all stuff that's going to be happening in the new year though, since the holidays are kicking everyone's butts.
And here's the big one, ROD changes:
I have to say I disagree with pretty much everything there. While it is true that things were very stressful with so many ROD's going on, why wouldn't an opposing force take advantage of their enemies being gone? So lets go in order here;
Jarvis' ROD, This was the first one posted and had a heck of a lot of people involved. With all of those people there, fighting together they could probably have brought Jarvis down through sheer numbers. So why then did 3/4 of the people involved int hat ROD leave to join the one started by Nasu afterwards? It was already clear that Komatsu was involved in Nasu's ROD and alone he was a good powerhouse against the Kingdoms forces. He might not have been strong enough to take everyone on without the backup that arrived, but it did not warrant everyone leaving the planet buster alone to fight 2 people who couldn't handle him.
That was a personal choice for all of those involved, and I don't see why they should be able to rejoin the ROD after the ToM was done. That would have been incredibly unfair to Jarvis oocly. He was long gone before ToM was done, so it wouldn't make sense to bounce between both.
Now that brings us to the Saiya ROD. It was just a string of unlucky coincidences for the Kingdom tbh, Nakiya reviving and Ash making a power play was good planning on Ash's part, and great luck on Nakiya's.
These kinds of things happen, and it's the first time such a large amount of RODs happened on site. However, things like this will keep happening as characters try to outdo one another. I don't think limiting the amount of ROD's makes sense from an IC standpoint, and as long as the reason for a ROD isn't metagaming and makes sense, then I say let it happen.