Inactive in RP

[Starstarfish]

I definitely think that fixing the ticker about why RPXP gain is what it is would help. I admit that I myself have been far less apt to do certain things (hemote/think) since it disappeared. And I think the experiment of "would bonuses for timeliness being an incentive" wasn't given a fair testing based on the fact that information wasn't available to people.

[nemovonfish]

Defending a change that pleases 10% of the people it affects and pisses off the other 90% is... certainly a bold position. As is demanding the vast majority capitulate to your prefered style instead of vice versa.

[BlackSoul566]

Telling players who need fast RP to single themselves out is the same as demanding slow players get a [SLOW] tag.

I'm going be a bit blithe and honest here: TI isn't a game you 'play how you want'. It's a space with rules and expectations set by its owners. One of those expectations has been clarified and expanded. Good change.

Essentially what you are saying then, is that "yes, your specific preference of roleplay isn't welcome here, we don't want you here. Adjust, or leave." Do I understand that correctly?

[galaxgal]

I'm saying is that the game has standards and policies and that if changes and decisions as standard as this make people as upset and angry as some of the remarks in this thread have been then they probably need to have a sandwich. And that 8 people... isn't a majority.

[BlackSoul566]

I'm saying is that the game has standards and policies and that if changes and decisions as standard as this make people as upset and angry as some of the remarks in this thread have been then they probably need to have a sandwich. And that 8 people... isn't a majority.

No, what's being said is that players who take longer than five minutes to write up a pose should not receive experience at all. Thus, have no coded incentive for roleplaying. Eight people out of twenty may not be a majority, but it is a good number of players. The policy as it will become is effectively telling these players that they need to adjust their roleplay methods, or they are not welcome in the game. There is no other way around it, there is no other way to read that. When this policy becomes active, frankly, I have no reason to stay. I'm clearly not welcome.

[Dreams]

I do not think people getting upset over a change that is implemented in a game they love, a change that will negatively affect them and isn't being implemented because of policy violation or abuse, but because people who screamed the loudest (while others remained quiet) got a change implemented that will not have the positive impact it's supposed to have, necessarily need to have a sandwich. We are all adults here, and we are all perfectly able to express our viewpoints as long as we're being respectful about it.

Giving someone a message every time they take 5:01 to pose, instead of 5:00, that they aren't getting RPXP because their pose came too slow isn't going to inspire them to speed up. It's going to inspire them to log off. I think people will leave, and not come back. I think it will make newbies feel unwelcome because they need to take the time to look through some helpfiles before they respond, and they'll get penalized with no RPXP because of it. I think it will drive people AWAY from the game, not drive people to it.

And unlike the last policy that inspired that behavior (the removing tells/guild channels), there doesn't seem to be a real reason to do it, other than it irritates a few people that some take longer to pose.

This thread started out talking about people who constantly idle out of scenes. Not... this.

[galaxgal]

There's no evidence that a minority or majority exists in either camp; the forums are definitely not representative of the entire pbase, and neither is even Discord. Let's stop invoking it anecdotally.

There's a difference between passionate and angry. When this change was announced, the shift went from 'let's be inclusive to everyone' to casually insinuating that 'fast' = ' low quality'. It went from 'I don't care about RPXP, it's secondary to the satisfacton of my RP' to 'being denied RPXP means people will quit the game, including me.'

The tone from the get-go was self-contradictory and openly disrespectful of the opposing side of this discussion, who did nothing except explain their point of view and luck out in a Staff decision out of their control, and emotional in a way that genuinely makes me afraid of how people are going to react when other things they don't like in the game happen to them.

Maybe five minutes is too harsh. Maybe tweaks can be made. But the initial outbursts that amount to 'revert it completely, or else' aren't the beginning of that conversation. They're absolutes.

[cortical_stack]

I'm a new player currently in chargen who had been learning about the game in preparation to join.

This was the first game I had considered joining in two years. One of the main reasons I have been hesitant to get back into the hobby is an observed shift in perspective on the topic of pose length and time taken. When I saw the ruling staff had made earlier this week I became modestly hopeful, and made the decision to start learning more about the game and test the waters.

I have since watched this thread unfold with a great sense of déjà vu. Short poses are described as "shitty". Long poses are lauded as universally the triumph of Quality over Quantity, heedless of the irony that the criteria is "length and detail".

I do not know your game. I have not set foot into an RP scene here. But I do know games of this medium and genre and have witnessed this issue fundamentally alter the fabric of communities. When poses of multiple paragraphs taking upwards of 15 minutes in writing become the norm there are several knock-on effects. Two in particular should be most worrisome:

1) Players who do not have 3-4+ hours to play every day will be pushed to the fringes of relevance and agency. Cliques will form without any forethought of malice simply due to matching availability, and those networks with more time on their hands will of course be capable of making more power moves.

2) Practical matters like org/guild business, political meetings, and anything else that requires extensive dialogue will not survive when every sentence of speech must come couched between 6 sentences of hair flipping, gaze flicking, and meditations upon the wine-dark hue of lips. The content of such dialogue-reliant scenes will suffer, and folk will turn to OOC means to get the bulk of real work done.

I repeat: I do not know your game. Perhaps it possesses unique traits that will prevent this from coming to pass as it has in so many others. You'll have to decide for yourself if you see the signs of this not at all, beginning, or long-since set in. I also lack a solution for you aside from frank discussion within your pbase. This issue is endemic to the genre and, as far as I can tell, has become an almost inevitable trajectory in the past decade. I believe the greater part of this is because the problem is invisible to those who are not particularly concerned with the second point I have cited above.

If you want to see extant examples of the outcome of this process, you could hop on over to some of the other popular fantasy games right now. There you will find communities that have all the outward signs of vibrancy, but utterly lack a core of conflict mediated by dialogue or verisimilitude of politics or intrigue. But you will have no problem getting involved in a trite scene that is primarily about someone's poodle retainer, logging your 300th tavern meet and greet, or finding mudsex. Some of these however are monstrously popular, so perhaps that is just what people really want out of this hobby now.

I hope you all find a good outcome for your game. Best of luck and well wishes.

[nemovonfish]

Cortical, thank you for your input, you've made me put more thought in to what I believed was a simple issue. Where you lose me is that nobody is punished for short two-minute posts, nobody is arguing in favour of a minimum post length/time limit, and those that want to do so after the change could do so beforehand. The crux of why this change is the source of so much contention is -

Problem: People going afk and idling out in scenes.
Solution: Discourage a particular style from all players at all times regardless of context.

Is there some reason people can't use osay to request shorter posts? Has anyone tried this and received any amount of backlash? I've had people tell me they don't have long to meet, and if we could do what we need to do, and you know what happened? I said "Sure!" and reverted to say instead of emote.

It seems a lot of people are being very British about this and saying "Oh I wouldn't want to cause a fuss." I don't want to sound like an old fogie, but when did mechanical punishments become a replacement for communication? Short posts have their place, as do long ones. To say "No, long posts are always bad and you will get less numbers for them" is what is rubbing people up the wrong way.

[galaxgal]

To say "No, long posts are always bad and you will get less numbers for them" is what is rubbing people up the wrong way.

The game has already worked like this for over three years. I keep trying to say this.

People just didn't notice because it was framed as a bonus and not a penalty, which made it feel optional.

I don't have the energy any more to explain why expecting someone to ask for special consideration every single time they interact is exhausting and ostracizing for that player.

Every time I reiterate this it gets bounced off and ignored.

When the codebase and theme and game mechanics of the game are built around one kind of play and a bunch of people come in and force a different kind of play on everyone, the game breaks in the exact ways cortical has described.

We aren't getting enough spicy mage RP because mages dont want to risk being in public for 4 hours.

We aren't getting good Guild activity and population because the expectation is to fluff RP with your boss for hours to justify progressing. (Look at Order's GI caseload, which has been discussed in other threads, right now.)

GL's get overwhelmed because their basic duties require longer hours of RP than ever before.

Really, really active and interesting characters got driven away by the ever increasing time demands of slower RP.

It's bad for the game. It's bad for the game in ways people who weren't here before this trend was just starting to take shape, 3 years ago, or weren't engaged much outaide of their own exclusive circles, probably won't understand.