Do our emote standards make TI less accessible?

[Kinaed]

I think that a decent emote should be at least one sentence with some nice qualifying words (ie, a 5-word sentence, no - 10 words, okay).

Beyond that, the intent with TI wasn't to get people RPing with ten minute delays between emotes, and I have to wonder if one of the reasons I personally stopped playing TI was because of how arduous it had gotten to write emotes with some of the more established players (like Pixie, I mean that for myself personally as opposed to a judgment on people whose preferences differ to mine).

I'll check with Az and see what the current standards are, then either tweak and publish them OR just publish them.

As it is, I'd like us to foster an environment for differing styles to be accepted and loved, and people to be able to just avoid people with styles that they don't enjoy rather than forcing all TI-ers to write paragraphs to fit in.

[Geras]

For what it's worth, my reply on Reddit was that I tend towards shorter emotes myself and that I've never had anyone criticize me for it, so while the long emotes are the norm for most people I've felt that it was by any means required or expected. I can see how a new player may get a different impression.

He/she also mentioned a lack of OOC channels, so this may be dated back to 2003?

[Zeita]

I'm pretty much on the same train that Pixie is travelling on.

In brief, I'm comfortable with where the community generally falls on this presently, as well as the current expectations for an emote to 'count'. I think lowering those expectations would run the risk of lowering the general standards that we enjoy at present.

[Rothgar]

I honestly don't know how to read Reddit.

That being said, it's honestly just a player and a situational choice. Personally, I get annoyed when I write a paragraph to explain something to someone - like a nuanced discussion about the MO of the Order or the affects of Magery upon the soul or somesuch, and I get a 'Okay, Lord Inquisitor,' in response. Those of you who RP with me know I get booty-blasted pretty easily, however, so maybe I'm just going crazy about it.

With that said, I can safely say (as many others probably can) that TI ranges in the 'high, very high' standards of RP. I've played a good many MUD's over the years, and I keep coming back to TI because the RP standards -are- so high. When the bar is set high, even middling RP can be beautiful and engaging, and I enjoy that quite a lot. So, personally, no, I don't think RP standards should be lowered.

To invoke my inner, coarse Rothgar : if we lower the standards for RP upon the MUD, do we truly want those sorts of people playing the MUD itself?

[Rabek]

I think associating pose length with "RP standards" is a fairly misguided proposition.

TI's RP standards are pretty low, in my opinion. There are (usually, barring nobles and guild roles) no applications to play. Staff do not enforce theme and in fact often bend or break it for players. Immersion-breaking terrible spelling and grammar will not get you removed from the game or even in trouble. There are OOC channels and game-wide OOC note boards, both of which I feel are good things but many MU* players would find them detrimental to RP as a whole. Indeed, having OOC channels at all would disqualify us from RPI status to a not-insignificant group of RP MUD players, even if I feel it's necessary to at least have a Q&A channel like visnet.

TI's pose length standards are high for MUDs, but only middling for RP games as a whole. On some games, multiple paragraphs are standard.

Short poses can be (but are not always) high quality.

Long poses can be (but are not always) absolute garbage.

Lowering the standards for pose length has absolutely nothing to do with lowering the standards for RP.

[Taunya]

Instead of a minimum word count per emote, what about changing it to word count per tick?

I think that could add a lot of flexibility.

[Kuzco]

Agreed with Rabek. I'm a fan of a more gritty and enforced experience, on one hand, and longer poses /= better rp on the other.

[Gerolf]

I still think that it comes back to preference. People who like our theme and standards will stay. Those who don't will leave. If you are looking at retention that is a separate discussion all together.

[Kinaed]

The only reason we'd care is retention, honestly. That said, retention in itself isn't enough - we don't want to retain people who don't enjoy RP, for example.

[Andruid]

I sympathize somewhat with this remark, as I think short, snappy dialogue can be used to good effect in some scenes, and not every scene should require participants to write a novella.

Where I think we could probably afford to make a slight adjustment is in reducing the length requirement on hemotes. Right now, even something like hemote flicks a sharp glance in /bald's direction. does not count toward RPXP rate because it's considered too short by the system. I often have to artificially inflate my hemotes just to make them count toward my RPXP rate. I don't have this problem with thinks, because the length requirement for thinks is much lower.

This would be one simple way to address the above criticism without necessarily dictating -how- people should RP.

BUMP on this suggestion, because I think it's still valid.