Alright.
I'm a noob, but noobs can write States of the Amarr RP, too (just no one has to read them):
Your level of bitter is admirable for a newer player. I award you honorary vet status, so I can pull no punches.
I cannot see emergence or reemergence of heterodox or minority Amarr RP happening at this point.
I sure hope you don't mean, say, liberalism, when you say 'heterodoxy.' And all Amarrian roleplay except world-level event roleplay has been minority roleplay.
The guy Graelyn referenced in the quote I supplied up above was Nebuli. Or Nebulai, I can't recall. He ran the plot department for AURORA for what I recall as nearly the entirety of its lifespan; it was at least the entirety of my time ingame.
In his day, the attitude was that mainstream Amarr was the only kind of Amarr; the folks in AURORA all worked for a guy whose actions supported the empirical observation that he understood only one line of valid roleplay, and that was roleplay at the faction level. The posture of the man in charge of AURORA encouraged reciprocal postures that got no more complex than "I'm an Amarr."
— CCP's own writers have largely abandoned the theme.
— Since the end of the event system, there is really no in-game way to play such opinions. (Back in the old days, I gather, people were more naive or at least more willing to play things that didn't square with game mechanics; these days people are pretty realistic or cynical about what they can do).
These two points are tied together.
Aside from the fact that people still roleplay
at all, in any conceivable way, and aside from the fact that I know a ton of people who are in player-led arcs without dev or volunteer involvement, down to the level o the news crew in MERCURY, and aside from the fact that other than Talisman, who was tied to the world arcs by the nature of his position, the writing staff never really engaged the roleplayers terribly directly in tier-three events in terms of good ol' fanservice (cue pics of Eris in panties, I'm sure), there's simply this: You can't DO much that directly correlates with a lot of the PF.
You can visit the locations mentioned in PF, but most of the people involved were never accessible.
Frankly, fiction submissions to E-ON magazine getting adopted to be in PF is probably the most significant way a player can affect the setting unless that player becomes a dev or CCP staffer in the right departments.
In short, people have just about never been able to not play things that didn't square with game mechanics; this is because game mechanics have little to no bearing on the setting. Now, things that are
presented mechanically (where certain rats spawn, how long an average asteroid takes to deplete, the breadth of market fluctuations), that's one thing. But I'm not sure what an undock counter gets you. Active people in the community have also never really gone for the mainstream with terrible enthusiasm, though they've consistently ended up in it. But this isn't to get shit done, which moves us into the next point.
— Noob-specific problem: anyone going into to this area is walking into a minefield of ancient chronicles, ancient in-game events, and bitter old vets who nonetheless have hundreds of millions of skillpoints and long memories. Why the hell would any noob commit EVE-suicide like that?
If there was a real history of being unable to find allies in EVE, for anyone, especially anyone in the roleplay scene, this'd be a valid point. But there's simply too many people looking for a good fight to put on your own side if you have even a bone worth of charm in your body that frankly, the concerns of such groups are a bit of a joke unless they're just plain unlikable. And in that case, the school of hard knocks may be required.
Do you know how far off the deep end my primary corporation was? I was as far from the mainstream corporations in my faction as I could possibly be, and I still got support. I once invited a bunch of corporations to an event while being ostracized. They came; I was given the chance to command a fleet of mixed forces made up of corp members. These people represented political enemies; they were from all points on the continuum of Amarr politics, eclipsing the bloc. They still came; they still flew where asked. I still got to trade with loyalist corps; I still got assistance in wartime.
Frankly, the elephant in this part of the room is Star Fraction, but the truth is if you fight them and don't act the asshole, they'll treat you alright.
Given all that, anyone going for alternative Amarr RP is facing a lonely road that is going to be mostly based in fiction writing, not events. That's fine for some people. But not for others, and especially not for those people — the noobs — who still have the energy to do some stuff.
I can't stress this enough, but.
In the absence of developer and storyline events, player events have only GAINED legitimacy and clout in the eyes of the remaining roleplayers in the game.Took me a while to wrap my head around that one myself, mind.
But even those in the mainline of Amarr RP face some of the same problems. While CCP continues to produce Amarr PF, most of it is essentially unusable in space, at least for today's cynical no-in-game-event-having generation of EVE player. The one exception was FW, but even there CCP's writers seem to have slacked off production. And we all know the problems with FW in general. (Perhaps because I've played many other MMOs I can recognize how strangely useless CCPs lore is. It is just out there, with little to no connection to what players actually do.)
Look, a sandbox is a sandbox. In the end, if you don't seek to build yourself that sandcastle, you simply won't get one to play with.
I've played plenty of other MMOs. Most of them have never even had events teams, which means generating a store of useful precedents to draw upon is entirely dependent on conflicting player lore which must be judged on a level field and the extremely occasional fiction update.
The one real contender for the degree of input EVE has is probably Asheron's Call, or whichever early MMO it was that had monthly content updates, on the dot, every month.
In the end, if you're just not comfortable with treating your own stories as legitimate for more than your own character despite the degree to which your actions might affect the experience of a significant number of other players, which includes writing quality fiction if you're shit at doing it mechanically...that's your trouble. I can find newer people that aren't in the grip of that particular mindset, I can train them, give them the skinny on IC information, and send them forth. I can create a feeling quite similar to any event.
So can you.
And thus it is the unifying principle for Amarr RP has long been nothing to do with CCP's PF at all, but instead commitment to a certain style of NRDS, anti-pirate rules of engagement. And that's something that certainly can be fought in space. These brought Amarr RP a certain power and fame way, way out of proportion to its size. But it came at a cost: cut loose from lore and any kind of character-player separation, what you have are real people arguing about real life !@#$. And they came to hate each other. Really hate each other; not their characters — they themselves. Take a look at IGS and just try to step back; why the !@#$ would anyone want to be part of that?
Community conflict isn't really my concern unless I can halt or end it. Certainly, I take preventative measures. But.
If you thought the community was EVER free from drama, go read the archives until you hit the GNW era.
Then come tell us what you find.
I don't know what the way out is. I know two things I like to see, though, although neither is particularly realistic:
— On the small corporation scale, maybe it would be possible to start doing something semi-cooperative or semi-arranged with some people on the "other side", using what few "props" we have available to us to get at some normally inaccessible lore. Of course, events of this sort are anathema to tons of people and there's game/metagame mechanics that make it hard, but....
Why do I detect an undercurrent in your words that such things are to be settled for? Why do you strike me as feeling that it's second rate to stake your own money and ships, instead of asking the devs to stake some for you through volunteering the time and energy of an AURORA member?
Recently, Hav ran an event where he asked for a million units of slaves to be delivered in exchange for a thousand elite slaves.
The elite slaves were Amarrian hostages; the slaves were traded to them at the rate of at least a thousand a day, consecutively, to secure the release of an Amarrian hostage. One per day. Or they'd be killed. No exceptions.
There was a nice IGS post about it. Then the thread was filled with counter-threats and chest beating.
Now, what happened in-game was, someone bit.
Someone spent in the neighborhood of a billion/multiple billions, anonymously, or however much that kind of slave item type went for. And gave it to a loyalist, and biomassed the character they used to deliver the damn things. The logistics of delivery of this cargo were left up to the loyalist; so was the choice to act on their options.
You might have read about the results of the arc, but you likely did not learn about the behind-the-scenes operations. Loyalists petitioned Hav's character for all kinds of things, from more time to the opportunity to get the slaves back in the Empire and publicly demonstrate a willingness to negotiate for the safe transfer of hostages for the sheer sake of strengthening the standing of Imperial liberals.
It was epic; everyone involved was struck by it. It didn't even need to get in the news to become significant, though if we had a better player news organization, we'd be putting it in there. In every other way, EVERY other way except the involvement of volunteers with CCP's backing, this event was just like one undertaken by AURORA.
Especially in terms of the number of people involved. Fuckin' AURORA events were almost always fleeting affairs. Made me raeg, hard.
— I wanna see some ex-Prov corp, somewhere, go north, join the NC, go NBSI, AND still retain some Amarr RP identity, however "light". I don't know that there are any candidates for this, but it would be cool.
All I can do is repeat my refrain - look up Oberon. They were semi-faction-aligned until perhaps a few years to a good few months ago ago; they were in Esoteria; they fought BoB and lost, and went to Morsus Mihi in the north.
Ex-Provi corps have done that some, too, but I'm not sure what the result is.
Anyway, look. I don't know you; I don't know how deeply these sorts of notions grip you. All I can say is, if you want to get involved with some of my stuff, or some of anyone else's stuff, just say the word OOC or IC and we'll do what we can.
If you want to assure a way in and leave the results up to character interaction, ask about precisely that OOC, though. I reserve the right to have my character decide whether to involve you or not when approached in-character.
(And no, it doesn't goddamn cheapen the roleplay to arrange a couple of hooks.
[mod]Discussion of moderation moved to appropriate board[/mod]
That idea is idiotic. Now, practicing the idea does not render the practitioner idiotic, but fuck, that idea's bad.
Plot hooks are ROUTINELY handed out by people in author roles, in game management roles, in roles of leadership. They come in things as big as the ol' Living Greyhawk campaigns; they come in things as small as short stories. If you accept them enough in fiction to consume the rest of an arc, why must they be given the legitimacy of being developer plot hooks ingame?)
/END SPEW OF POTENTIALLY OVERBEARING BULLSHIT
/LOWER LEVEL OF OPTIMISM BACK DOWN TO 'BITTER VET'
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Topic: Amarr Bloc Discussion (Read 19803 times)