Here's the basic idea: For all existing characters, give them 1 loom point for each year they have played cRPG.
This can be accomplished by looking at the date that a player signed up on the cRPG site. From the date that this event takes place, how many years your account has been signed up, you'd get 1 loom for each year passed. Example: I signed up March 15, 2012. So that's 5 years... I'd get 5 looms.
There's two reasons why this can be positive for the community:
1) It may encourage older players to come back and play if they have a few new looms waiting for them.
2) It's a way to reward the players that have stuck with this mod and kept the community alive.
Mind you, I'm not really sure how exactly you accomplish this. Maybe you could script something to do an automatic roll out all accounts. And it'd just go off their sign up date.
Or you could just make it a manual process where users hit up an Admin that would be put in charge of this event. That way you don't have to send looms out to every player in the history of the game. You only send the looms out to players that ask for them... meaning there here to play. That may be current players. That may be players that haven't played in a year or two but come back for this event.
Two things of note:
1) This wouldn't have to be an on-going thing. Meaning next year on March 15, 2018 I wouldn't get a loom. Unless a Dev could script something to make this happen automatically, it would be way to crazy too keep up with. It would simply be a one-time event where players got looms for being long-time players.
2) I know this will not help new players. While we certainly need ideas for new players... not all ideas & actions have to be just for them.
Anyways, I hope my explanation makes sense.
What do you guys think?