Inactive in RP

[Kinaed]

Greetings,

I've had a few of our newer players complain (and have recently seen in a review) comments about players who are actively in RP scenes being slow or idling out on one another.

Culturally, it's impacting whether people want to play TI because they can log in and start RPing with someone who does one emote per every 20 minutes, or otherwise idles out in the middle of a scene.

I'm considering implementing some code remedies to reduce this. For example, we already give people an RPxp bonus for emoting within 5 minutes of the previous emote in the room.

What else do you think we could do, codewise or otherwise, to help players be attentive to the scenes they're in and their RP partners?

Kind regards,
Kinaed

[Kuzco]

I'd start auto tracking people who idle out, and when they reach a certain critical (like +3 times per week) then maybe staff can be notified of it.

[Alpharius]

The RPxp bonus that you get right now, from what I have seen, is not too big of a proper encouragement for people to emote quicker and/or not idle out.

I do know that some people prefer long emotes (and sometimes they can be good, really) but they should be kept to private interactions and not public ones with new players, especially cyans, because they give people the wrong idea.

Maybe a system where each time you emote within a timely manner, it's recorded and if it passes a certain threshold (example: 25 in a day, dunno), you can be awarded a bit of a bigger bonus of RPXP at the end of the day by the Daemon, or possibly even QP?

Could also change that a little bit further by making it so that it only 'counts' emotes you've done with cyans/new characters that you haven't RPed with before. Not sure if it'd be codedly possible, but those are my few cents.

Clarification: By long emotes I didn't mean the length of emotes, just the duration that it takes to post a reply.

[Taunya]

As brought up in the OOC chat, autowarning isn't currently functional. I think when it is again, it will be a good reminder and should help to remedy this.
It will show whether you are emoting fast enough to earn the bonus or not.

[plague]

I actually really enjoy scenes where people put a lot of intense work into long, single emotes. I have naturally gravitated toward people who prefer more longform RP, and as such I have never really noticed the benefit of getting more RPXP if you emote more than once per 5 minutes (mostly because I tend to emote longer than 5 minutes and far prefer that style in anything but public multiperson scenes or more casual RP), and if I did, I don't think it would convince me to change that (in comparison to being courteous to other people, who I often try to match). Sometimes, I do just prefer writing more, and I don't think XP benefits will ever outweigh my enjoyment of the game experience. ... and sometimes, that will lead to me idling out because the game has no way of telling whether I'm typing or not.

Now, I understand that if someone is idling out on a relatively constant basis, that's probably a problem. However, I think that it's not always a case of inattentiveness. There's a lot of factors that might be at play, such as people playing on mobile and thereby typing much slower due to various stipulations with it. As such, I think it's best to keep any machine solution with the understanding that there are other factors that can influence play, and some of them combined can lead to people being punished for something else that draws people to the game: attempting to create quality writing. In fact, this is one of the main reasons I have stayed in this game for the past month and a half.

The writing quality is pretty high in comparison to other MUDs from my experience, and the RP is deep and detailed, with a lot of work put into the vast majority of characters. I believe the rebuttal would be, "You shouldn't be taking 20 minutes to write a post regardless of the circumstances," but I have been in scenes where my RP partners and I have all been idling out in the middle of our posts because the game had no way of determining we were actually there.

This is mostly background for my suggestion, which also functions as a TL;DR:

There should be a way to tell the difference between someone being negligent of their RP partners vs someone who is just writing a long time (though I realize the latter is almost universally an issue in public scenes). Maybe something like... a warning after 10 minutes, so that they know to tell the game they're still there before it slaps a flag on them, interrupts the scene with a public notification, and forces them to re-post their actions, would assist.

[galaxgal]

I dunno how many established characters even use autowarn. RPXP kind of stops being an incentive past a certain level. A universal check-in at 5 or 10 minutes for people in active RP would be a better reminder.

[Staub]

I'm bothered by the slow scenes too - it's why I avoid big scenes. In fact, the idling has caused me to pick up bad habits in group scenes where I walk away from the screen after emoting, because I expect the scene to go slow - and sometimes, I end up being the slowest.

The biggest issue I have is... when am I allowed to skip turn order, how long do I have to wait? I personally have no feeling of how much time has passed, so I don't know if enough time passed to skip or not. (I'd have to look at the clock anytime someone emotes... nope not gonna do that). This slows down rp as I keep waiting and waiting for someone to reply and then someone else emotes and my turn was skipped.

I feel this is an issue where many factors play into this - a slow down can be caused by long emoting, by slow writers, or by someone being afk. Whatever solutions we find have to discriminate between the causes so we don't discourage long posts when they're unproblematic, and we don't punish slow writers for something that may be out of their control. (In fact, I just recruited a friend who's a slow writer and I'm a little worried about how she'll fare. I don't want her to be stuck only emoting with me.)

I don't want to feel rushed or want anyone to feel rushed during scenes. I do enjoy the long text posts others write! But, please, not in big group scenes, it's incredibly disorienting.

Possible solutions:

I could imagine a time stamp coming with emotes, that can be toggled on and off.

Or if technically possible, a text showing that someone is typing an emote. That would help me decide whether to skip someone.

A check in whether someone is still there - with a yes/no answer - and being set to afk if not - would also help with this.

Furthermore, we could just come to a social agreement that after a count of 4 characters, emotes should be held short. Or, if there are big scenes with big writers that don't mind waiting... Maybe just that in group scenes with cyans emotes should be held short.

[Dreams]

Turn order is not required unless someone has used the command 'turns'. When a scene gets to a certain size, I have seen that it tends to be disregarded. 'TURNS' tends to be called during tense or highly dramatic scenes, not during typical run-of-the-mill interactions.

I think the general rule is - don't write someone out of a scene. While it is polite to follow turn order, there is no requirement in most cases.. If you are in a scene with enough people that you would only be posing once a half an hour, it gets... eh. I don't like to wait that long between poses, personally. It is less than engaging to be spending 95% of your time waiting rather than playing.

[Puciek]

I don't think this is long emote vs short emote issue. I can crank out a 2-3 line emotes and still keep up the pace of under 2 minute rounds, which generally I think is fast enough, though that requires putting 100% of your focus on the TI, all the time, while you are in a scene. And I think most of the long responses are not caused because it takes so long to write the response, but by people being distracted by work/watching videos/playing other characters.

Which may be fine if you are doing this RP in private, I certainly did all-night-long scenes with average emote round of 20 minutes, but then both parties agreed ahead that that's the pace and we were both doing RL stuff as primary focus, and TI in the background, so everyone was happy and with it.

What really irks me is when I walk into a <name place from whererp with more than 1 person> and you have to wait for 5+ minutes for people to even update actions, not to mention do a round of poses. At this point OOCly I just want to turn around without a single emote rather than possibly being involved in that slowness, which at this point is awkward, as I stood there, waiting for a scene to be set for a while.

To put all that together, how about we time people emotes when they have whererp on (either by location or by manually turning it on) and then if that counter is under 4 minutes they will get tagged like [SLOW], akin how [IAW} shows next to names. This way if I enter a scene and see that people are marked with [SLOW] you know exactly what to expect. And at the same time it shouldn't affect private rp, as this shouldn't happen on whererp anyway. Maybe as furhter incentive make the [SLOW] come with slight RPXP penalty, or flagging the problem to staff if it happens too often?

[Dreams]

To put all that together, how about we time people emotes when they have whererp on (either by location or by manually turning it on) and then if that counter is under 4 minutes they will get tagged like [SLOW], akin how [IAW} shows next to names. This way if I enter a scene and see that people are marked with [SLOW] you know exactly what to expect. And at the same time it shouldn't affect private rp, as this shouldn't happen on whererp anyway. Maybe as furhter incentive make the [SLOW] come with slight RPXP penalty, or flagging the problem to staff if it happens too often?

I think this is... uhm. No. In a scene with 3+ people, people might be using turn order, which means that every single one of them would automatically be tagged with 'slow' because sometimes people take a little bit to react. I don't think the issue is people taking more than 4 minutes, it's people that take 20 and pose a single line, or people that continually idle out of scenes (which takes 30 minutes to do).

Pretty sure this is overkill, and feels very much like a punishment rather than an encouragement to speed up. I wouldn't want to play somewhere that tagged me as 'slow' - and I'm not someone that idles out of scenes. That doesn't make me want to move faster to get rid of the tag, it would feel like the game is judging me. They already don't receive as much RPXP as others do if they're posing slowly - adding a further penalty is... again, overkill.