Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Louella Dougans]

People complain that Amarr and Caldari RP is dominating, and that Gallente and Minmatar RP is nowhere to be found.

I had a thought about this.

For Amarr RP, there is a substantial amount of what people call 'internal' RP available - the methods of the Reclaiming, the treatment of slaves and commoners, the politics of Holders and Family rivalries, and so on.
Any Amarr character can join the internal factions, with fairly little difficulty. Swapping between factions may be slightly more difficult, because of oaths of fealty and so on, but it's not necessarily impossible.

For Caldari RP, the most obvious internal RP is the Megacorporation system, where the different megas will have disagreements and rivalries. There's also the foreign policy factions.
Again, any Caldari character can join any internal faction with little difficulty. In fact, Caldari might be able to move between internal factions with greater ease than in Amarr RP. It's simply a matter of changing employment contract.

For Gallente RP... the internal factions are difficult for me to pick out. There's voting blocks that are mentioned in chronicles and such, but they're not really obvious ingame.
Anyone can join Gallente RP, anyone at all, even non-gallente characters. You can be who you want to be in the Federation.

For Minmatar RP, then, the obvious internal RP factions are the Tribes.
But, a Sebiestor cannot join the Brutor Tribe. Game mechanics mean that you can only choose between 3 of the Tribes, and the poor Vherokiors get sent to Native Freshfood, instead of Vherokior Tribe. Why?
There's no real way to be a Krusual Tribe supporter, because you can't make a Krusual character. You can claim to be adopted or something, or a half-Krusual half Sebiestor or something. But by the game mechanics, you're not.
This makes a hard limit on being able to move between internal factions, and with only 3 actually represented by character creation choices, then it makes it a lot harder to set up internal RP.


So, that was my thought, on why Amarr and Caldari RP always seems to be doing better than Gallente or Minmatar. There's enough stuff for people to form internal RP, and to keep it going, through occasional changes in loyalties. A gentle stir every so often.

[Mizhara]

There's also the fact that Amarr and Caldari both have it much easier to have a unified front than the other factions. There's unifying politics, faith and social structures throughout both of those factions which are in a much lesser degree present in the Gallente and Minmatar factions. Just politically, the whole Republic vs Tribal conflict is huge in tearing apart any potential unity, there's the appeasers versus the staunch, there's the power struggles between the Tribes, the problem with Minmatar literally being spread across every faction in New Eden in damn near equal amounts (which is heavily abused by people creating Minnie sockpuppets vocally praising Amarr at every turn) and so on.

So the factions with the greatest ease of unity have the greatest population of roleplayers to start with, allowing for a huge critical mass for pretty much every internal faction and the factions with the least population can't get critical mass for even one internal standpoint in the faction.

I'm also pretty convinced they also keep getting the most CCP attention and fiction buffs.

[Shaikar]

It's worth considering  how the current situation came about - the majority of the "blame" for how the RP scenes are today lies squarely with the players who have been a part of it over the years. Things as they are now are not how they've always been and those changes were mostly player-driven.

The main exception I can think of is the Federation, which has always had quite a uphill struggle as it's "shared background" of lore is remarkably sparse for one of the 4 main factions in a game this old. Doable, as Fed RPers have shown in the past, but definitely harder to maintain a viable group as it's lacking a lot of the initial interest grabbing highlights.

[Lyn Farel]

In the Federation you have a double layer of internal politics.

- The voting blocs define the citizens and how they tend to vote. Hawks, Doves, Ostriches, Magpies, Vultures... They define the political leanings and interests. Militarist, pacifist, apolitical, opportunists that vote for the bling, and the amoral ones picking up what profits them. Those voter blocs can vote virtually for any political party depending on the moment. They just define the leanings of a characters, that will then vote accordingly to what propose the political parties at instant X.

- The political parties: right wing Progressives/Liberals (Foiritan), left wing Sociocrats (Blaque), far left wing Minmatar Unionists, and far left right various U-Nats successors. You can probably add to the lot minor parties like the candidates like Celes Aguard that was probably a party for all the lowsec colonies, or the last candidate that was concerned about Caldari Prime.

It's very rich when you know where to dig.

[Morwen Lagann]

The Amarr community wasn't really all that 'active' until about two years ago. At least not visibly.

[Lyn Farel]

The Amarr ebbed and flowed..  But mostly, it kept its integrity yes.

[Morwen Lagann]

I'll clarify, I guess, from my perspective at least. Over the last... six years, I guess, most "Amarr" RP has happened entirely in private settings with zero visibility to the outside world.

Until KotMC was formed, there wasn't a lot of Amarr RP happening that was visible to the average person who wasn't in PIE (or, I presume, some parts of CVA) unless they were doing it on the forums or in local through pew. A few people RPed in public (Aldrith, Koro, Esna, Math'ra and Max to name a few) but most Amarr RPers were only names to me (Arline, for example, who I really didn't actually ever actually meet - IC or OOC - until the last year or so) and I never, ever saw them anywhere. Ever.

While KotMC was active, there was a brief period of publicly visible and accessible Amarr-flavored RP, partly because Aldrith maintained a couple open channels that were, for the most part, welcoming to most characters save those that would have legitimate issues getting to them. There were periodic events as well either at the Basilica or Mercy's Keep, and the ones at the latter tended to be a bit more open-invite as well. Outside of those channels (and the ones affiliated with them, since Mercy's Keep had an entire network of channels associated with it), it was still pretty rare to see anyone who wasn't in KotMC RPing in public. Occasionally there'd be a PIE member or two in the Summit. Maybe in OOC as well, but both of those were pretty rare.

After KotMC closed and its members split off and went to do their own thing, there was another quiet period. There was still some activity in Summit and on the IGS from a few people, and periodically one or two things in private, but nothing publicly visible anymore.

It wasn't really until the last couple years when that changed - the result of that change is what we see now.

[Nicoletta Mithra]

I'm a staunch believer that RP is done and driven by people, not by 'external' factors like which 'internal factions' are accessible by game mechanics. If you have people that are dedicated to roleplay they will come up with interesting storylines, plots as well as the necessary deliniations along the characters can differentiate themselves. It's also about building an OOC community.

Yes, background and such may play some role, but it is really quite irrelevant compared to having people dedicated to make RP work and build a healthy community for it.

[Nissui]

I'm just kind of bummed that CCP doomheim'd our Tribal Council delegates. They were the actors that gave us a direct link to a unifying governing body, rather than the RSS, TLF, or RF, which are all paritsan.

[Lyn Farel]

I'm a staunch believer that RP is done and driven by people, not by 'external' factors like which 'internal factions' are accessible by game mechanics. If you have people that are dedicated to roleplay they will come up with interesting storylines, plots as well as the necessary deliniations along the characters can differentiate themselves. It's also about building an OOC community.

Yes, background and such may play some role, but it is really quite irrelevant compared to having people dedicated to make RP work and build a healthy community for it.

I usually tend to agree with that. I may not be good at all at creating communities (I suck at it), but if there is a problem with the minmatar and gallente (and maybe soon caldari too) is not a lack of numbers, but a lack of willingness to come together and leave their current actual non-RP entities (nullsec, lowsec, whatever).

Those people make the choice to favour gameplay over RP (which is totally fine and legit!), but complaining then that there is a lack of factional block is a bit forgetting that fact I think.

Amarr RPers for most of them, are NOT in non RP entities.

[Esna Pitoojee]

I'm just kind of bummed that CCP doomheim'd our Tribal Council delegates. They were the actors that gave us a direct link to a unifying governing body, rather than the RSS, TLF, or RF, which are all paritsan.

Wait, they what?!

Urgh. I can understand why they would want to slim down the number of characters to watch, but not giving you a non-military contact is mildly problematic.

[Mizhara]

I'm a staunch believer that RP is done and driven by people, not by 'external' factors like which 'internal factions' are accessible by game mechanics. If you have people that are dedicated to roleplay they will come up with interesting storylines, plots as well as the necessary deliniations along the characters can differentiate themselves. It's also about building an OOC community.

Yes, background and such may play some role, but it is really quite irrelevant compared to having people dedicated to make RP work and build a healthy community for it.

While I'd agree, I'd want to point out that this isn't all that it takes. RP itself is certainly driven by people, but to get the people you need some sort of a draw. Something to gather people together. The Empire does this quite easily, with a unifying faith, goal, overarching philosophy etc. It doesn't really matter where in the faction you are, as long as you are in the faction you have a common ground and commonality to use as a uniting force.

The Minmatar faction simply doesn't. It's spread across three whole factions, with the majority outside of the main one. Gather together any five Minmatar characters and chances are you're looking at a five-way standoff between damn near mortal enemies. Just a quick example of how absolutely ludicrous it gets:

Amarr loyalist capsuleers arrange event X. Minmatar Loyalist capsuleer A goes "Let's crash the party. I'll cover the ships." Minmatar loyalist B goes "Absolutely not! It's a religious event!"  A: "... we're supposedly terrorists. You literally called yourself a terrorist yesterday."  B: "Sure, but it's a religious event. The one true faith!"   A: "..."

Even the ones that are ostensibly loyalists are spread out on such a huge spectrum with so widely diverging loyalties and backgrounds that any kind of unified community just isn't possible. An IGS post cheering the death of a leader, of the most dangerous, hostile and vicious faction in all of New Eden gets five #NotAllMinmatar posts for each cheer. By other Minmatar.

When the faction itself is so fractured and broken that any random sampling of adherents will inevitably mean finding more enemies than potential allies, it's just not so simple as "getting people dedicated to roleplay".

[Lyn Farel]

The mistake might be then, to identify to the Amarr and what the Amarr do and not what the Minmatar are, I think...

Nissui and very few others concentrated on the Minmatar identity (and the Republic for those who like). They didn't need the Amarr to make events or parties to crash to gather together very, very diverse Minmatar characters.

If you think that the Amarr bloc do everything together with the same goals... Well no. We play in our respective corners depending on our affinities. We come together when there is a reason to. On the IGS we spend our time sniping at each other, cause subfactional conflict is great.

[Mizhara]

I have no idea what that first sentence means.

And I really have no idea what you mean about needing the Amarr to make events or parties to crash.

And that last sentence also has pretty much no relevance to what I wrote.

... in short, I don't get your post.

[Lyn Farel]

Ah er... I think that the Minmatar players and characters in general try to identify too much in their relation to the Amarr, and not enough in their relation to the Minmatar...

That some players have done that, but they are a minority.

I get your example between player A and player B, and I agree that the minmatar lore itself makes it more spread out... And maybe it was just a bad example but the fact that I read that here was telling to me : again, it's identifying minmatar actions and stuff happening ingame in relation to what the Amarr do.

And well, I really think my last sentence is relevant actually. Maybe I didn't get it right but it seems reading you that the Amarr are all unified and do everything together... Well not really. They just talk to each other OOCly a lot. Which can result in a few common actions at times. I do feel it is relevant because you could achieve a similar result I think, minmatar lore or not.

Well, that's my opinion in any case. Take it as you will...