Hi! So, as you know by now, Event 7 has started and teams are still split.  I need to make an announcement regarding that for everyone, especially new teams:
You may choose to do Event 7 as a reuniting event for your team, if it was split before. You may also choose to start out a new team split up by having two Pokemon who don't know each other meeting.  You may ALSO choose to act as if your team did know each other but got split up, even if it's a new team.  You have freedom here to act as you want.  Either split, or together again.

PMD-e is going to undergo a sort of split where Missions are more story-oriented, though more openly-worded than before.  They were always supposed to be a thing where you basically do what you want as long as you do (or mess up) the general goal.  Somewhere along the line I got too specific in the goals in order to make it line up with the Epilogues I had in mind, which was No Good because people interpreted that to mean they were very strict when that wasn't at all the intent.  My poor wording was the issue here.

So... what I've wanted to make clear for a while is: You can do whatever you want in Missions.  If you completely do not ever acknowledge what the Mission is about, that is grounds for not being judged.  That's basically the only penalty.  It's not a big deal if you just want to tell your story, and shouldn't happen if you just interpret the Mission however you feel like, which is what you should be doing from the get-go.

Soon, sometime in January, we will be introducing something which won't be main-story-oriented: a Group Bulletin Board, which will be updated monthly with "Tasks" - which are mini missions.  There will be a Task Card which you can use to keep track of how many you've done and which ones of which month, with a running tally of how many you've done total.  Tasks won't be judged, but the amount you've done will factor in to receiving accessories, eggs, new team mates, evolution scrolls, and any of the other stuff we add into Missions as prizes.  The whole set of details will be released later, but we still want there to be ways to earn the same stuff without participating in the more involved Mission stuff.  This way, people can jump into the group easily, and then work up to participating in Missions too, when they feel confident enough.

Speaking of which, upcoming is a summary of all Arc 1 stuff and all Arc 2 stuff that's current.  We've badly needed some sort of summary for a while, and had planned for something cool for it but I've simply not had the time.  So I'm gonna have to suck it up and just have a regular sort of summary made for everyone who needs a TLDR version so they will feel more confident about jumping in.  I mean, I can totally see how it would feel intimidating to just... start in the middle of this stuff!  

Essentially, if you're new, don't worry: we're working on making it easier for you to participate without having to wade through hours of stuff all at once.  The summary will link to all of the relevant material, and the tasks will be Mission 1-esque and not relate to the main story at all in order to make it easier to get a feel for doing stuff in the group.  Look forward to this mid Jan! (I'd do it sooner, but I'm in Japan right now.  Apologies!)