Interactive Timeline for All Orgs

Tyrus

I'm not sure if this idea has been proposed before, but I would love to see an interactive timeline that can be maintained and deemed canon by admins (or maintained by players with admin approval) that will show the timeline of major events in every org.  It would be a nice visual representation for all orgs to not only view their own history in proper context, but see how those events may relate to other orgs at the time. If possible, you could have references to quests, divine-approved books, NPCs, in-game events, guild visions, etc. Would people be interested in this?

Aonia

This is a fantastic idea, but it's unfortunately not something we would be able to maintain and support.

We do have timelines on the back end - I'm pretty sure we've talked about that elsewhere! The main reason we don't release them publicly is that we are constantly adding to them, sometimes revising them (where it makes sense), and generally maintaining them. We have separate timelines for separate areas of history and they are, in many cases, huge. But we don't have timelines for 100% of everything lore wise. In some instances, the information is scattered - and often an admin will undertake a project to unify some of this together. That's how several of our existing timelines were formed, by people wanting to work in an area and finding it necessary to bring that information together to do it more easily.

It's really valuable to us to have that flexibility. If there is a public timeline, it gives less room for us to add those things or modify it. We lose the ability to give depth to history in the future, because it would be wrong to go "this timeline is public and canon but also we might change it when needed". It would reduce our storytelling ability and thus the depth of the lore we can bring to you.

This is not to say that you won't gain anything from working on a timeline of history yourself. You might find it super interesting to hunt out all the dates you can get, and it would make a really cool scholarly book! But I'm afraid we won't be producing an 'official' one.

Tyrus

Thanks for the reply, and I understand the need for flexibility. My idea arose from hearing people trying to be consistent about when some events occurred in relation to others, and in some cases it went into argumentation. It seems to be important to those who want to be as faithful to the lore and history as much as possible when making works or criticising works, and I just wanted a higher source that one could point to and say, "This is the correct sequence of events..."  I personally would not wish to bind your hands in terms of bringing more creative lore to the game, and so would have been fine with an "official" timeline that periodically was adjusted when inconsistencies are found in-game, or could be used as a tool to re-design said inconsistencies. I'm happy to hear that this is generally done behind-the-scenes already. I will be content with making it a personal project then!