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At OOC Chat today, players asked if we'd ever considered removing OOC. Back on Old TI, Tamara eventually did it, and I must admit that it was the highlight of my RP time on TI - so I'd happily remove OOC Channels again.

Alas, this suggestion has never been popular with the pbase, and because we care what the pbase thinks, we've never removed tells again.

I was wondering if, since a player raised it, has people's stance on it perhaps shifted? Poll above!

For me, an online RP game is as much about community as the wonderful writing. There's already options to entirely disable OOC communication if a player so wishes it. While I understand the sentiment, I'd personally be very grumpy with even a trial period.

Completely without ooc channels. Are you kidding me?

With the amount of questions I have to ask the imms and that amount of osays I sometimes have to do in order to clarify a scene?

No, I can't ask a lot of these questions out in the open on visnet or on the mage channel a lot of the time.

How are we going to help newbies if they make mistakes? How are we going to communicate that? How are we going to communicate if we have to go briefly afk for a sudden thing and will only be gone a few moments or will it be more like twenty? Or what if somebody needs to cut off a scene in a hurry? How will they communicate these things?

These are situations that I see come up all the time.

I have other thoughts, but I am going to wait until my emotions aren't tinging my thoughts.

So I am going to come down in the middle:

Complete removal of all OOC is a no go for me. I have played other games where it is limited and you have to come up with awkward IC excuses or just walk out.

Do we really want a game where I have to block out my calendar because that is my TI time? Seems a little draconion.

I whole heartedly agree that RP itself should stay out of OOC but it is a game and we have to have a way to communicate RL issues.

If you want to cut some OOC I would say get rid of the guild chans and GL chan. Keep Jail, Mage, vis, and OOC, and osay because people need a place to ask questions and to develop as a community. If you remove tells remove the XP cost for using it.

Lastly just expect a rise of messages on vis of "Person who sent me a messenger: I am about to go to lunch and have no silver on me so I will try an catch you later."

Gerolf wrote:So I am going to come down in the middle:

Complete removal of all OOC is a no go for me. I have played other games where it is limited and you have to come up with awkward IC excuses or just walk out.

Do we really want a game where I have to block out my calendar because that is my TI time? Seems a little draconion.

I whole heartedly agree that RP itself should stay out of OOC but it is a game and we have to have a way to communicate RL issues.

If you want to cut some OOC I would say get rid of the guild chans and GL chan. Keep Jail, Mage, vis, and OOC, and osay because people need a place to ask questions and to develop as a community. If you remove tells remove the XP cost for using it.

"

I am probably about as anti-nixing OOC as your'e going to find and even I could grudgingly accept this. It would nix certain ooc elements without it being completely draconian. I would prefer tells stay in on a personal level, but it's a decent compromise.

I'm for an "absolutely not" to getting rid of tells. They have a very practical, in-game function. For example... "I may be able to RP in 40 minutes, but I have to see if my friend still wants to go out", or a simple "How are you? I don't have time to play, but just wanted to see how you are"... would be impossible without the tell function. In the former case, you would otherwise (from my experience of no-OOC games) have to find an arbitrary, awkward way of saying this in a messenger (and I would probably just append an OOC note to them, anyway), but this is -also- problematic: people don't always answer messengers in RP scenes. In the latter, I sometimes don't log on wanting to play; I want to find out if, for instance, someone has RP time in four hours from now, or I just want to idly chat.

Please don't get rid of them.

I voted 'maybe': I'm perfectly willing to give it a try, as I am most things, but I am almost certain I will not like it.

For me, playing the game is almost as much about open communication between players as the roleplay itself. I don't always have a lot of time, and to be perfectly honest I'm just not always in the mood, or even a position, for spontaneous and/or public roleplay. Once in a while I'll even be waiting on key roleplay ingredients from others before plots and characters can move forward. Being able to touch base with people to set up scenes is oftentimes paramount to my enjoyment of the game.

Sometimes, when I'm really pressed for time, out-of-character channels have been used to simply give a summary of my characters' actions; Benne certainly wouldn't be inactive just because I had to work 80 hours one week. This can be key to maintaining my characters' relevancy where otherwise I'd have to be making up flippant in-character excuses and leaving loose ends just because of real life constraints.

This is all on top of echoing negative sentiments on the subject already presented: the community is wonderful and would be missed, newbies would be even further removed from the game, confusion on the parts of players would be less addressable, it might not solve the targeted problems, and on down the list.

Has anyone ever played one of the RPIs that didn't have OOC Channels? How did it work? Did it affect the quality of the RP?

If OOC is bothersome, I shut it off. I tried to play a game with a previous player from here, so we could enjoy rp'ing together more, and hated it. I barely knew what I was even supposed to be doing/going to and there was no way to ask anything oocly. It was maddening.

Kinaed wrote:Has anyone ever played one of the RPIs that didn't have OOC Channels? How did it work? Did it affect the quality of the RP?

I've tried other MUDs that didn't really have that stuff or access was difficult. I always wound up back on TI because I could never figure out basics of the game and couldn't just ask somebody, I couldn't communicate to be friendly with anybody so couldn't really form any kind of community at all, and things were just very cold and didn't feel very newbie friendly.

The OOC stuff and the community is why I didn't leave two years ago and stayed as long as I have. If the community building mechanism is destroyed, then this place is really just another mud. Honestly? I like Havens theme better and Sindome seems a lot mor fleshed out and organized. The thing that makes TI special is the community. It's what's made this version different. I'm gone, yes, but I stayed 4 years this time versus the three months spurts I've done on previous iterations since I was 16 (and I turned 30 last month).