Laurentis: for reference - "Throwing your keys in the bowl" the start of Swinger's party, in which married couples go home with different partners for sexual encounters at the end of the social party part of the night.
The moral of the story is you should be
very careful as to what you agree to do with Veikitamo.
Anyway, the questions. Yeah there are ways, but see, everyone who is a bittervet (or a returning vet) is also a metagamer and a PvP speciliaist, and anyone not waving your corporate flag - is an enemy.
Don't bite my head off yet, let me explain.
EVE is
about the meta. It's nearly unconciously ingrained in us. Would we walk our character into a room with a group of people we basically know OOCly are evil fucks (they MUST BE. If they weren't, we would have been *friends IC with them already*.)? Even with an OOC promise of 'You will not not be bled Dry, infected with Nanites, or be forced to go to Church every Sunday' as some varying examples of Eve-vil
.. people will start even generating connections in their heads (and if quicker, parsing Summit logs of years) to find where they heard each bad thing that would IC-ly in a "PREVENT RP META CAUSE AINT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT!" way to prevent their char from going to that place in the first place. You can META-LOSE as easily as you can META-WIN, and in general, none of us wanna lose. (Topic was disccused earlier/elsewhere), which.. forces us internally to meta to not meta to meta again. See?
Say you can *avoid* all that with OOC pre-planning. Well, now we're scriptwriting. Some roleplayers in some communities have no issue doing that sort of shit and more power to them - I was always a wild card 'you see what you get' sort of person and that seems to fit with the emergent gameplay dynamic which is EVE. That very dynamic though prevents scriptwriting - one person does one thing and breaks someone's script, and woops, OOC feelings get hurt, people don't know how to shoot from the hip.. I don't friggin' know. It's always a mess. People get mad enough that they can't change another character's mind IC with what they OOCly fell is "steel trap logic!!!" .. Imagine these archetypes of players trying to scriptwrite and then rolling with it when 'someone ruins it'.
(As an aside, RPing here i finally feel more like the rule than the exception when it comes to RP. I used to love blowing people's minds to smithereens in EQ2 cause it never seemed to occur to people that somoneone saying something in character
could actually be lying, and then
never actually tell that person OOC it is a lie -- and that was fair. I'd never OOCly tell them I told the truth (and be OOC lying)- but I never told them I was ICly lying either, this telling them the truth. But, I mean,
come on. a Good Templar is going to HELP an evil ceremony? Their fault for being stupid, not mine or the 12 other players I brought with me..
)
And that is THE THING, or -- that's where in my observations - a lot of fractioning started and stayed and has been for.. well, forever.
These people can not go to this place because THEY WILL RUIN IT, and they can not have alts in our corp because OOC META.
Maybe somewhere somewhen (checks watch) mm last incident I can think of is at least a .. year.. old.. now.. of some faction ZYZed showed up and RUINED A THING. An RP thing, robbed a corporate hangar with an alt, whatever.
We're EVE Players. We have long memories. We remember the "a thing" happening even if that person isn't playing anymore. We remember the thing even if it was 2, 3, 4, years ago. There is still a name thrown around of someone I have
literally never seen as if this person's head is going to pop up on IGS any second, and I think they were gone 6 months before I started RPing.
And the other side does, if they're active still.. well. They remember too. It widens, like a gulf, and has been widening, for months and months and months. Once in awhile there has been some nose touching, but the number of those noses has been getting ess and less.
The Community Leader types of people we've had are vanishing. I don't mean the ZOMG THESE ARE EVIL RINGLEADERS (and they may be to some -- but guess what, they ARE community leaders to others, and YOUR community leader is an evil ring-leader to the other side of the fences...) but all of them, those painted with both brushes, or solely one brush, or the other brush, are vanishing, having run completely out of Fucks for Bullshit.
Anyway.
Which is why I said - send an EVEmail to people! The first EVEmail I ever sent to Shere?
I had NEVER SPOKEN TO HER IN MY LIFE IC OR OOC. - I JUST KNEW SHE WAS A RESEARCHER.
Throw crap in your bio that might make another Capsuleer contact you. Find some idle reason to contact another Capsuleer.
This isn't D&D. Not every adventure needs to start in a bar.
Specially since, most bars are factional, and why? Not because they were DESIGNED as such, but because we as a community DEFINED them as such, based on the creator, its location in space, etc.
Which creepily, this stream of concious nonsense has proved that the RP community has turned into a metaphorical pile of squealing miner carebears who don't wanna lose a ship or fly one with guns on.
But anyway.