Agreed - mandatory "say something" boxes in both directions are fairly pointless. It's good that they're available (very, very good!) but in many cases, players and narrators have already discussed their issues in the forums or elsewhere (*koff* gdocs), and requiring a note that's going to just say "uh, here's that character I said I'd be writing up" and a reply of "okay, just like I said on the forums, this is fine," is pointless.

And if the narrator is turning down a character, there are plenty of reasons why they might not want to make a full explanation of why. They can, of course, just put a period in the box, or just say "no, thank you," but if that's an acceptable answer, why bother making a reply mandatory at all?

In the long run, this is only likely to create more drama, as players get miffed because either their narrator didn't write *enough* of an explanation to satisfy them (people who complained about not getting comments are not going to be happy with a basic "no" instead of just an automated refusal notice), or because the narrator did give an explanation and they don't like the analysis.

Short version: Communication OPTIONS = good. Communication REQUIREMENTS = bad.

In my view, this is an unnecessarily hostile way to address the issue you have.

Tacronicus: I explicitly agree above that it's both polite and desirable that narrators should do this. What I'm saying is that it's not Storium's place to make it mandatory. The option was already there, and it should have remained an option. If narrators want to send a stock reply rather than engaging with their applicants, particularly in games that have received a lot of applications, they should have that option. As I observe, even under the current system they could just type a full-stop and post that, but the point is one of principle: I don't think it's Storium's place to tone-police their narrators.

If they want to foster more communication and community on the system as a whole, I wholeheartedly support that. They could do that, though, by actually engaging with their players and having a presence on the forums ALL the time, not just around a major release. That would be MUCH more effective, to my mind, than schooling their narrators to leave nice messages for their rejected applicants. :-)

While I can see Mo's perspective on this, as a Narrator I do want to be able to tell a candidate why I'm not accepting them for the game. If we're active on Storium in the first place, there's a certain expectation that we're able to express ourselves in writing. Taking 45 seconds to bang out a "Thanks for your application, but ..." type of note with a rejection notice seems the polite thing to do, in my way of thinking.