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[Sakaane Eionell]

There have been times recently when I've logged in, realized I didn't know a damn one of the characters floating around the Summitt and IGS, and thought to myself:  'hey, maybe you should make a secret alt and get to know these people'.


The urge generally goes away after I smack myself around.

Some of us new guys are worth getting to know.

QFT. I think it can be difficult sometimes for newer RPers to 'break in' to the existing community, because the community sometimes ignores or can't be bothered to invest in these unknowns, and gravitates to what it is already familiar with. Granted, the well-known players in the community got to be well-known by putting in a lot of effort, and power to them. But this can make places like IGS intimidating too.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and seeing sentiment like what Vieve posted (sorry for singling you out) probably would not leave the little guy with warm 'n' fuzzy feelings about sharing their own, unknown stories with the big guys. So there's probably other RP going on out there...just under the radar.

[Katrina Oniseki]

There have been times recently when I've logged in, realized I didn't know a damn one of the characters floating around the Summitt and IGS, and thought to myself:  'hey, maybe you should make a secret alt and get to know these people'.


The urge generally goes away after I smack myself around.

Some of us new guys are worth getting to know.

QFT. I think it can be difficult sometimes for newer RPers to 'break in' to the existing community, because the community sometimes ignores or can't be bothered to invest in these unknowns, and gravitates to what it is already familiar with. Granted, the well-known players in the community got to be well-known by putting in a lot of effort, and power to them. But this can make places like IGS intimidating too.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and seeing sentiment like what Vieve posted (sorry for singling you out) probably would not leave the little guy with warm 'n' fuzzy feelings about sharing their own, unknown stories with the big guys. So there's probably other RP going on out there...just under the radar.

I just strong-armed my way into the Summit. It's hard to ignore a genuinely friendly person who often has fully worded opinions and comments to a discussion at hand. You have to speak up to stand out. These days, I tend to actually be noticed when I join the channel.

[Julianus Soter]

I don't think it's so much an issue of vets not wanting to know the newbies. It is more that that many vets don't touch the summit with a twenty foot pole.

If, for example, someone convo'd Soter out of the blue, I'd talk their ears and eyes off with Trinary Data, the Sleepers, the Sansha, and the Jovians, even if they were a day old. I'd ask what their vision for their career was, their background, their motivations for becoming a capsuleer. So much possible roleplay.

The summit entirely destroys those opportunities, in my opinion. It becomes an arena for chest beating, falsifications, abuse of roleplay privledge, and other issues that run rampant on a daily basis. Not to mention the horde of alts that makes genuine RP experiences few and far in between. What's the purpose of spending hours of communicating with something that is only there as a sockpuppet to further the players metagaming ambitions?

[Katrina Oniseki]

Well, I as a newbie, am not sure exactly where else to go.

[Graelyn]

You know what you guys could use? A Revan Event.   

Honestly, these are not terrible things. Several solid folks have been introduced to the community through them.

[Kaleigh Doyle]

Honestly, I wasn't being facetious. I just know how riled up people get about them when they happen and thought i'd add some fuel to the fire.

[Julianus Soter]

Roleplay is, normally, conducted between a small group of individuals, numbering between two and five. Hence, DnD games and other tabletops. The fallacy of a large channel populated by twenty or so characters competing for equal air time in a single channel is that the person who shouts the loudest gets heard, regardless of what he or she is saying.

It degenerates rapidly into the standard norms of large unregulated internet chatrooms, with the additional cornucopia of roleplaying and additional layers of anonymity through multiple alt accounts.

I'd recommend approaching individuals as you start your roleplay, make real relationships, contacts, connections, as you would in real life, and branch out from there. Chat channels and their denizens will naturally open themselves up to you as you do.

[Arkady Sadik]

I think it can be difficult sometimes for newer RPers to 'break in' to the existing community, because the community sometimes ignores or can't be bothered to invest in these unknowns, and gravitates to what it is already familiar with.

One of the biggest problems newbies suffer from is the "btdt" syndrome. The 10293th "AMARR ARE EVIL MINMATAR ARE GOOD WE COME FOR YOU ARRGH" thread stops being interesting, even though the first might have been nice (dunno, too long ago). RP stories tend to get deeper over time, more complex, so that newbies will feel threatened by them, and vets feel bored by the newbie stories.

Having some kind of "hook" for newbies to enter would be nice, but then those who like to have spotlights on them and jump for such hooks the fastest often are not the ... most interesting people to have around.

That said, seeing my alliance blamed for all sorts of Evil Things on OOC channels does not make me feel like I want to hang out there, so the splintering of "the RP community" (if there ever was a single one) is probably not just a newbie problem.

[Morwen Lagann]

Once I've started socialising in one channel, it just tends to stay in that channel, even though some of it could be in an IC channel.

I need to do some math/fact-checking first, and then Morwen may need to give Ulf another business call. They're overdue for a chat anyway.

QFT. I think it can be difficult sometimes for newer RPers to 'break in' to the existing community, because the community sometimes ignores or can't be bothered to invest in these unknowns, and gravitates to what it is already familiar with. Granted, the well-known players in the community got to be well-known by putting in a lot of effort, and power to them. But this can make places like IGS intimidating too.

Everyone has to start somewhere, and seeing sentiment like what Vieve posted (sorry for singling you out) probably would not leave the little guy with warm 'n' fuzzy feelings about sharing their own, unknown stories with the big guys. So there's probably other RP going on out there...just under the radar.

It can be pretty hard. It took me a few weeks of hanging out and trying stuff in Sakura's "Three Sisters" channel after seeing the opening post on IGS before I was exposed to larger parts of the community, and I'd been playing EVE for almost a year at that point, even if Morwen was newish at the time.

Unfortunately, the only tried-and-true way of "breaking in" is to just suck it up and start doing stuff- it doesn't have to be in a big channel like the Summit (and for many characters, probably shouldn't be) but you do have to start somewhere. The real problem is finding those "somewheres", which you often can't do until you shove your foot in the door. Same with "under the radar" stuff. It's an annoying catch-22.

When it comes to investing time in "unknowns", I tend to get bored with the same-old-same-old after a while, and really enjoy getting to interact with new characters regardless of whether I know them as a player already or not, in the vast majority of cases. (On that note, I think I might need to poke my head into FreeIntaki sometime soon - got a few OOC friends that I've not really interacted with IC yet, and need to fix that. Plus, after poking through your blog, and some other IC stuff going on, might be some interesting things to talk about. )

I just strong-armed my way into the Summit. It's hard to ignore a genuinely friendly person who often has fully worded opinions and comments to a discussion at hand. You have to speak up to stand out. These days, I tend to actually be noticed when I join the channel.

It definitely worked out in your favor in this case - Kitkat makes for a good partner on the Summit for general tomfoolery and shenanigans - but unfortunately it doesn't work for everyone. I could name a few examples where I think it didn't work, but I'm not sure if it would be productive or helpful to do so. :\

I don't think it's so much an issue of vets not wanting to know the newbies. It is more that that many vets don't touch the summit with a twenty foot pole.

If, for example, someone convo'd Soter out of the blue, I'd talk their ears and eyes off with Trinary Data, the Sleepers, the Sansha, and the Jovians, even if they were a day old. I'd ask what their vision for their career was, their background, their motivations for becoming a capsuleer. So much possible roleplay.

The summit entirely destroys those opportunities, in my opinion. It becomes an arena for chest beating, falsifications, abuse of roleplay privledge, and other issues that run rampant on a daily basis. Not to mention the horde of alts that makes genuine RP experiences few and far in between. What's the purpose of spending hours of communicating with something that is only there as a sockpuppet to further the players metagaming ambitions?

I'm going to agree with the first paragraph wholeheartedly (though I'm not one of the vets in question), and have to ask you to clarify some things (bolded) in the last one before I can say whether I agree with it or not (either in part or as a whole). Also, it's a bit extreme to assume every alt in the Summit is just "a sockpuppet to further the players metagaming ambitions".

Second paragraph is more or less how I ended up leaving rookie corp on Morwen, though, as you probably well remember. Even though it technically started with you dragging me into Elpida either from OOC or the Summit and not me opening a convo.

Also, what Grae and Kaleigh said. Revan's events are pretty decent at bringing in fresh blood - a number of the people who participated in the recent NENTM contest hadn't RPed in EVE much before or at all, and several of them stuck around afterward (Jason, Othar, and Uraniae to name a few, though I haven't seen much of Othar lately).

[Nakal Ashera]

I'm pretty darn new to Eve RP, so I'll freely admit my cluelessness, but I have to admit that it seems a lot more dead then when I briefly poked at it in the past/looked at before joining. Like others have said, I'd probably put my bets on it being due to the Incarna stuff and the followups more then I would on it being summer, because it's not just the numbers. It's the general... Er, I dunno how to put this. The "Feel" of everything, I suppose. It seems like it's winding down, like it's in a twilight period.

Like, hell, I know that Eve has always been full of a zillion bitter vets, but it feels like almost everyone I talk to says something like "Eh, I'm only really playing until an alternative comes along/until my sub runs/until my corp mates leave", or talking about how they never really play the game anymore or will be running for the hills if CCP doesn't fix everything up by the winter.

There really seems to be kind of an atmosphere of desperation and "it was fun while it lasted"ness amongst a lot of people I've been seeing, and it feels like every time I sink my teeth into actually interacting personally with someone and doing some "Proper" RP, they seem to become less and less active. It's kind of depressing me to the point that sometimes I feel like I'm already sort of losing interest. And I'm used to Eve except for this one aspect - It's gotta be even worse for brand new players.

[kalaratiri]

I sort of managed to start RP entirely separately from everyone who wasn't EM. For about five months or so, I didn't do any rp outside of EM, and didn't even join the summit until about three or four months ago (mostly because Ava kept talking about it  ).

[Lyn Farel]

There are mostly two big, major issues for newbies to get into RP :

- As you said above, the vet barrier with all that it implies. You also have to prove that your character is interesting to interact with : who wants to RP with tasteless characters ? This is not always easy, because you will sometimes speak a lot in the air at the beginning to make yourself noticed.

- The PF ignorance usually found in every newbie RP. So yes, everyone has obviously to start somewhere and the PF is huge/deep and even more, it is blur and vague, sometimes hard to grasp, with a lot of little details that are actually very important. And all of this gets extremly important as soon as newbies want to get into a politicaly oriented RP. This is also why a lot of them avoid it at least at the beginning and focus on more mundaine things on places like the Summit, for example.

Somewhere, I was lucky when I started to RP in the general RP community 2 years ago, because I already had played Eve since 2006 and be part of a smaller local RP community. I do not even want to imagine how my RP would have been welcomed if I had been brand shiny new to Eve RP when I started in this community (2009-2010). And I do not want to even think to what it would have been if I had been a newbie to RP in general too.

[Malcolm Khross]

I've done a lot of RPing in big environments, such as persistent worlds for Neverwinter Nights (DnD) and tabletop groups of seven plus people, with the former having up to twenty or thirty people RPing in a single area at one time.

Yes, you're going to run into your chest beaters, your ignorant newbs, your abusive vets and your obnoxious character. That doesn't destroy the RP that you get out of it though, you just learn to work around it or ignore it entirely. There is a "block" function in this game, after all. It's handy for that sort of thing.

Besides, the best way to help a newb who really wants to learn how to RP, is to direct them, not bash them and ignore them. Even if you have to pull them aside OOC and give them some resources and help them flesh out their character and make them feel more comfortable as a player, you're going to make them a better RPer and transform them from an ignorant newb to a contributing member of the RP community. And we can never have too many of those.

[Vieve]

Everyone has to start somewhere, and seeing sentiment like what Vieve posted (sorry for singling you out) probably would not leave the little guy with warm 'n' fuzzy feelings about sharing their own, unknown stories with the big guys. So there's probably other RP going on out there...just under the radar.

Uh, okay, a little freaked out by being called  one of the big guys ... but, hey, no need to apologize for singling me out.   I should have been a little more clear about why I was smacking myself around:  it's not from lack of interest in the new stories that are out there, it's my resisting the urge to create a new alt and steamroller my way into try to explore them.  I don't have as many opportunities for ingame time as I used to have -- as it is these days, the majority of my RP winds up happening via e-mail exchanges and scheduled sessions¹.

And why a new alt?  'Cause most of the existing characters have substantial baggage.  Some are also kind of creepy.  But that said, good grief, even the creepiest among them are generally open to being contacted out of the blue by a complete stranger.  Just ask Seriphyn².
 
¹Though Maris does randomly turn up in Heiian; she's avoiding The Summitt these days for IC reasons, and her guardian An ... er, never mind, what was I saying?
²http://cruxmeander.blogspot.com/2009/04/beholders-eye.html

[Bataav]

The IGS in particular does seem to have the main spotlight swinging back and forth between Amarr / Minmatar and Caldari / Gallente (with Intaki thrown in to get everyone angry )

Right now it seems like both are enjoying a fair amount of activity with the whole debate on slavery going on, a really good debate on the State happening and the Gallente / Intaki relationship being explored.

It means that most interests are covered at least to a degree and it provides those curious RP beginners with some reading and names to go searching for to try and make a connection ingame.

Personally I always really try to maintain some level of composure during my posts and the feedback I've got so far suggests I'm going some way to achieving that. I just really hope I'm not one of the IGS chestbeaters... but... let me know if I am