This was originally a response to Morwen's post
here. As I wrote it, I realized that I wasn't actually writing a response to
her post, but a response to what I see as a problem in Eve RP in general.
This may get a little long. Feel free to skip it and go right to the second post in here, which is the meat of this thread.
Some time ago I left Eve and went to go play Lord of the Rings Online. I'm a huge Tolkien freak, so this was a reasonable thing for me to do. I played it for a while, got my character up to level 50 (which was the cap at the time), tried raids, got bored, and left. After a while, I came back to LOTRO, and realized that I didn't want to
adventure in Middle Earth, I wanted to
roleplay. I'd created my character on the unofficial US RP server, and had done some RP my first time in, but I noticed LOTRO had the same thing going on, RP-wise, that Eve did when I left: There was plenty of RP, but most of it was going on behind closed doors. And when there
was some public RP happening, no one knew about it.
In a fit of uncharacteristic energy and drive, I created both a new channel and a website. The channel was modeled after an existing global channel for people looking for groups, and was called "LFRP" - Looking For RP. I promoted it pretty heavily, and it ended up being a good resource for people who wanted to find other people to RP with. The website was a GuildPortal website designed to mirror that channel. GuildPortal, for those of you who don't know, is a hosting company that does websites for MMO guilds. It's pretty heavily used in the LOTRO community, as it provides fairly easy-to-create websites that include all the basics you'd want: news feeds, forums, member lists, calendars, etc. It has an interesting feature where you could set up two guilds to be allies, and they would share things like calendar events. So I promoted this GuildPortal site I'd set up as a sort of common calendar. RP guilds would ally with it, and then their public events would show up on the calendar. It got to the point where you could go there and see an average of 5-6 public RP events every week, which isn't bad at all.
Over time, though, what I noticed is that people would interact OOCly in LFRP, and they'd get their social interaction fix that way. They'd interact in LFRP instead of actually using it to find RP where they could interact ICly. This is the same sort of thing I'm noticing here. We have all these OOC channels, and a ton of IC channels (mostly bars). There are a solid handful of IC channels which routinely have over twenty members in them. With the exclusion of The Summit, however, most of these channels don't actually see a lot of RP in them. However, OOC (and Red's, and the other OOC channels) routinely are quite active. I understand the desire to say "Hi" there, and all that, but it seems to be at the expense of actual IC interaction.
Lemme use an example. I don't want to single anyone out, but this is just one example that happened to stick in my mind. There was a new Minmatar RPer in OOC yesterday. Her character held the position that the Gallente Federation was holding the Republic back, and that it was a bad thing. This is a solid RP position, especially from a new RPer, and it would be interesting to actually RP around that position. Instead of RPing, though, she was talking about this position in the OOC channel. She could have had her character argue with (say) Seri about how the Gallente Federation is bad for the Republic. She could have presented that position
as her character. Instead, she was talking
about the position her character held. Instead of an IC "You Gallente bastards are keeping the Republic weak!", she was merely saying "well, my character believes..."
I'm certainly guilty of this as well. I've spent my fair share of time debating Shin's motivations in OOC, rather than interacting with people and
playing those motivations. So, I'm going to take a pledge to change this...
Author
Topic: A pledge to grow the arr pee (Read 3700 times)