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[Wanoah]

The elephant in the room here is that after eight years, dozens of chronicles and short stories, novellas, and a couple of novels, we still only seem to know about a handful of cities on handful of planets.

Elite had stuff like this:

http://www.wischik.com/lu/travel/elite/elite.html?p=7

However limited Elite was, it still managed to achieve a sense of being a living place because of the little details like this. By comparison, 'show info' in Eve has always been worthless. The frustration is that it would probably have been trivially easy to populate the planetary data with some fluff, or to simply publish some of the raw data that content teams have instead of dropping in a tiny factoid into every 3,000 words of Abraxas' fiction.

In many ways, Eve has failed to live up to its influences, and I have always thought that it's a shame that opportunities to enrich in small ways have been missed in favour of adding a bunch more ships (using old models :/) to distract the whiny ADD crowd.

I think that the consequence of the direction that CCP have taken with Eve's setting is that it's actually quite hard for a newcomer to jump right in. It's hard to become immersed in the game. I think I'd feel daunted by it in a way that I wasn't in '04...and the learning curve then was almost vertical.

I know that many people view this sort of stuff as trivia for a tiny minority of RP weirdos, but I also think that, in reality, an awful lot of people that would never self-describe as RPers lap up the gameworld details if they are there to be discovered. Behind much of the fake Internet Hardman posturing there's a lot of people that pay attention to the details outside of min-maxing Internet Spaceships.

[Casiella]

I wonder if Mass Effect Online would continue their tradition of more or less "doinitrite" in this vein. Every single planet had at least some flavor text, and I really enjoyed exploration just to read the stuff.

[BloodBird]

Another thing to consider: MANY people tell me they are afraid to get creative with their back stories because of negative reactions from the bittervets.

Case in point. He knew from the start he would have many enemies but was met with such OOC negativity (which can be communicated IC, i.e. "you're a liar") that he felt it wasn't worthwhile to proceed, which I think is a damn shame. I would really like to see more diversity like this but apparently it harms some peoples' view of a wholesome New Eden.

This was not really the problem. The problem in this case was making a totally PF contradicting statement by claiming that the Federation would allow a whole planet filled with millions of slaves, to go on undisturbed in their own space. Granted, he did claim, iirc,  that the planet was independent of the Fed - that is, NOT an independent world with Federation membership - like all the other planets in their space...

People did not go 'your lying' because he wanted to say he was from planet XYZ in XYZ system, they freaked out over his extremely liberal and PF-breaking ideas about what this planet does.

Honestly I think if he simply described a more 'normalized' Federation world (any planet that is actually part of, and obey Federation laws in, their own space) people would not have issues with this at all.

[Morwen Lagann]

As was discussed briefly in-game, actually, most Achur come from Saisio, lots of Amarr from Amarr...

There is no accessible locales in EVE beyond the homeworlds. Listing off the top of my head we've got...Caille, Hueromont, Lenoika, Dam-Torsad...er...that's the only cities available.

Yeah, if I was completely new to EVE, I wouldn't dare make up my own place either.

As the one who instigated said discussion, I'll post now like I said I would:

I was just starting out with RP in EVE when I created Morwen at the release of Empyrean Age, and had been intending on having her be from Caldari Prime as an instigation for her to eventually join the FDU. That plan got scrapped when I decided I was having enough fun doing regular missions in highsec, and after spending some time looking at PF, I realized I couldn't really find a lot of stuff about life planetside on Caldari Prime, so I switched her birthplace to Gallente Prime before it ever became a conversation point and I had to stick with it.

As for going with Caille in particular, that was mostly out of the convenience of there being some PF to work from, as well as not being able to remember the existence of Hueromont when I got around to specifying where Morwen grew up (). I selected a district on the outskirts of Caille as an "it's a big cluster" and "yes, and..." measure. If there had been more PF about other planetside locations within the Federation at the time I was fleshing out some of these details, I'd probably have gone with something else.

As Seri said above, I pointed out that while a lot of Gallente RPers come from GP (or CP), and often Caille on top of that, it's the same with some of the other races (Amarrian RPers often come from Athra or Oris, many Khanid do Kihtaled/KP, a large number of Caldari RPers come from NCP or CP, and the majority of Achurans I've seen who make a point of noting their birthplace come from Saisio. I don't see it as often with Minmatar, but that may be attributable to the fact that Minmatar have a lot more "obvious" or PF-rich options available to them on top of the standard "born in the Republic" or "freed/escaped slave", including the Ammatar and to some extent, the Thukker.

I have a couple more things about Morwen's backstory that I'd like to flesh out at some point, but I've been a little too busy lately to get around to actually doing it.

EDIT: Also, kinda in retrospect, Caille being a cultural center for the Federation fits very well with Morwen's interest in fine/performing arts.

[Saede Riordan]

Another thing to consider: MANY people tell me they are afraid to get creative with their back stories because of negative reactions from the bittervets.

I actually have never had this issue. Its something that totally could be contested, but it really never has been.

[Esna Pitoojee]

I actually left Esna's homeworld unsaid for a long, long time for one simple reason: I wanted to be able to dictate Esna's direction in RP, and I was afraid the would suddenly get asploded in PF, or even worse I'd have to get into an arguement with sa player who had gone "nya, nya, I just bombed/enslaved/messily killed everyone in your home planet/city/station, all your family is dead/my slave/a mutated freak now!" I felt like either of these situations, should they have occured, would demand Esna respond by throwing himself at the person/cause/whatever, and I didn't want to have to drop a storyline I was interested in to pursue a random vendetta.

So, anyway, it got left unstated for the first couple years of my play, and only recently did I commit to a system (though Esna's only told a handful of people he trusts closely). Covered my back a bit by having his family not be there anymore; he moved them on as soon as he got wealthy enough as a capsuleer.

[lallara zhuul]

Personally I feel that no capsuleer has any need to give out any background details at any point of their career to anyone.

Even descriptions beyond of what is seen in the neocomm is pushing it, in my book.

What I find curious is that for some reason some roleplayers subscribe to this strange social contract where they create insane amounts of background information that is connected to their characters and for some reason they believe that for a fulfilling roleplaying experience you need to read half a novel of minute details of someones hairdo.

I don't.

It's the interactions in-game that dictate how my character responds to other characters.

[Akrasjel Lanate]

Oh noes im not from one of those /o\
Carirgnottin VII  <-- 

[GoGo Yubari]

Personally I feel that no capsuleer has any need to give out any background details at any point of their career to anyone.

Even descriptions beyond of what is seen in the neocomm is pushing it, in my book.

What I find curious is that for some reason some roleplayers subscribe to this strange social contract where they create insane amounts of background information that is connected to their characters and for some reason they believe that for a fulfilling roleplaying experience you need to read half a novel of minute details of someones hairdo.

I don't.

It's the interactions in-game that dictate how my character responds to other characters.

THIS +1

Not saying it's ur doing it wrong to do it that way, but it is something to consider especially given CCP's handling of the setting.

Also, sometimes I wonder why people role-play in Eve. Is it to meaningfully interact with other players (ie. MMORPG)?

If it is to come up with pages of text on imaginary locations and facts in the Eve universe, I question whether it would be better for them to write their own setting, book or whatever. CCP inserts the setting details here and we play within their framework. That's not to say never come up with anything, which is absurd, but there is a difference between filling in the necessary details and being a rogue co-creator of the setting (also there's a way to create on top of CCP's pile rather than over it).

Why is this important? In a different setting (for example table-top) I would heartily advocate such collaborative creation, but this is an MMO where we should cleave to established canon to avoid conflicts and discrepancies which will cause problems. It could be two (groups of) players disagreeing on interpretation or it could CCP running roughshod over your creation... and in both instances, it really is your own fault for getting into.

[Saede Riordan]

When I first started Nikita, I leaned heavily on her backstory for characterisation, until I got my feet wet in the RP as it were. Since then, her backstory has backed off in importance more and more to get me to where she is now, which is largely based on interactions with others. However, I can understand how difficult it is for some to stop leaning on that crutch of their character history. It took me a solid year of roleplay to get there.

[Seriphyn]

Leaning on a crutch to explain character flaws and deficiences is, for some reason, frowned upon. A character that behaves neurotically or aggressively that, in his backstory, says that his parents had the usual thing of being killed by pirates, or he was raped 50 bajillion times by ebil, ebil Amarrians (a common one), then for some reason people react negatively or reject such an explanation. For example, Seriphyn has had a poor upbringing with oft-absent parents in a working class environment with some alcoholic (also oft-absent) uncle. He got dragged into the Marines at 16, has made some otherwise terribly poor life decisions and so on. But relying on this backstory to explain his behaviour, people don't like...I guess we should all play mentally-balanced versions of ourselves?

Anyway, then CCP came along, and canonized his fiancee and baby being Sanshafied, and suddenly, all of Seriphyn's emotionally imbalanced behaviour became justified.

:unsurprisedface:

[Victoria Stecker]

I handled the backstory very differently, I think. In the case of most, if not all, of my characters, the backstory really never mattered. I played the character I wanted to play, and only started coming up with explanations for why they are the way they are as needed.

On top of that, none of them (even now that they have very thoroughly fleshed out stories) are in any hurry to talk about them, either because they'd rather forget, or because they are highly distrustful, or some such.

Admittedly, none of my characters garner quite the same reactions that Seri does, and therefore are rarely required to justify their behavior.

But yeah, I never really wrote out backstories for any of the characters until the characters had already developed on their own and I found myself wondering how they might have ended up the way they did.

[Casiella]

As much fun as I have sometimes designing characters, I end up enjoying them much more when I take Victoria's approach (more or less).

[Ciarente]

I played the character I wanted to play, and only started coming up with explanations for why they are the way they are as needed.

I did that with Cia. I wanted to be able to talk to as wide as possible a range of characters when I first started Eve, so I made her very naive and trusting and not very assertive, which then necessitated family dynamics to explain that; I gave her a basic backstory of a missing father which was intended to be the never-solved white whale but which, due to the efforts of other players' characters, rapidly became an actual arc.

Some of the other characters emerged from their presence in her life - Camille and Fisk are two examples - and then took on a life of their own. Others I've designed, although with the exception of my rarely-played Blooder alt, they've all changed somewhat through their interactions with other player's characters and the events that have occurred.

[Lyn Farel]

I place extreme attention to my characters backgrounds, always. A good structured and rich background is what makes a character be... a character. You can't interact with anyone if your character has no past, because its his/her memories that make what he/she is, and how he/she behaves, imo.

That said, even if I did a wiki like page for mine on the evelopedia, I would never, never put something that is part of her private life, or unknown to the public eyes on it, it would be absurd.