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[Kaleigh Doyle]

So there has been a bit of discussion about the immediate impact of captain's quarters on roleplay already. For example, the way the layout in the quarters requires people disembarking from their capsule to have to travel up some rickety metal stairs. That, and a lack of a bathroom makes some situations an immersion breaking element, but what is most telling to me is the player response to the new environments in-character.

For example, we have one Amarr who is disgusted that CONCORD has forced them to use Minmatar quarters. We have another where the individual mentions they have been walking around much more lately than they used to. And yet another here describes a terrible affliction with people walking into walls and other anonymous objects.

Now, I realize most of the links I've provided have been a bit tongue-in-cheek in nature, but I start to wonder how literal the world should be taken when we're only given a tiny segment to work with. For instance, is it realistic or immersible to suggest that, because of Incarna, the SCC and CONCORD is now forcing all capsuleers to use quarters with Minmatar design? As some have discussed here about how unrealistic it is to be un-docked in your pod each time you land in a station, is it realistic to assume that when you hit the undock button, it only takes you less than 10 seconds to disembark from a station? With the advent of incarna, are our characters actually walking more now, or is it just a subtle wink-wink between players saying, 'So how about that Incarna, eh guys?'.

It makes me wonder what is going to happen, specifically when the full station environment is introduced that allows players to interact. Regardless of whether they introduce 'emotions' to character expressions, will people try to 'literally' emulate to ticks and behavior of their physical avatar? For example, if they are standing in a somewhat static pose and the avatar is scratching or looking around, will people literally behave nervously or disinterested in the person they may be talking to?

Is it reasonable to take a literal gameplay function and port it directly into our roleplay environment?

[Raze Valadeus]

Excellent topic.

My personal stance is "no," it isn't. The reason is simple: CCP has already made it clear that CQ is just one step in the direction they're going, to try and take CQ literally in that light is just not logical.

Beyond that, the game would be absolutely not fun to play if I hit undock and then had to wait for my character to strip down to a flight suit, walk to the pod, wait for the ectoplasm to fill up in the pod, disembark from the station ramp, fly to the ship, attach to the ship, wait for all systems to be online and tied into the pod controls, await for docking clearance and finally undock. If I had to wait for three minutes (or more) every single time I wanted to undock, I'd quit this game.

Likewise, if when I docked into the station, my character went through the entire reverse of the situation, I would be annoyed at all the constant delays in doing what I was actually in the station to do.

The shortcuts are taken to keep the pace of the game fun. RP is, and always will be, about player imagination and immersion. I just RP that Raze takes a shower and dresses upon dock if he's going to be staying a while.

[Mizhara]

No, it can't be taken as is, which is my main grief with Incarna. It's seriously immersionbreaking that way, and I lose the enjoyment of the game when my RP and Immersion is facefucked every time I dock up. I've mentioned before (repeatedly, and ad nauseum) how Avatar based RP is a blight upon the world of RP, and will add nothing good.

At best it'll lead to a separation of RPers into two different camps. Avatar RPers and Channel RPers, along with those who mix and match to their own tastes. At worst, it'll kill off one of them.

I've tried RPing in a number of MMOs, and every time I've found that avatars are a hindrance far more than a help, exactly for the reasons mentioned in the first post. It forces us to go "Nope, what happens on screen is not real.", stick our fingers in our ears, close our eyes and hum loudly until it goes away. Immersion goes down the toilet, and by extension the RP will suffer.

[Victoria Stecker]

Docking, undocking, getting out of the ship, etc, had always been somewhat immersion-breaking and needs to be taken with a decent dose of handwavium. Previously, we could never leave our ship, but that didn't stop us. Now we always leave our ship (or stare at a rusty door because even with my badass machine, 3 instances of CQ makes my computer cry) and find ourselves in some rather crappy little quarters where we can't take a decent piss or leave to get food. Aparently basic functions like eating and taking a dump are now confined to happening in pod. 

So yeah, I generally ignore it. It's never going to be completely realistic no matter how hard they try, so I think we'll just keep ignoring the bits that screw with immersion.

Now, what will it be like when we move to full station environments and can actually see each other? I'm not sure. When you consider the slow-down involved in /emote based RP - a two minute discussion takes ten as we read and type rather than being able to see/hear and speak - I think it'll be very strange to see it happening with actual avatars. It'll also screw with the vital ability to scroll up and see what you missed if you have to look away from the screen for a minute. So... in the end, aside from being able to see what each character looks like (within the extremely limited range permitted by the character creator) I don't think Incarna is going to add much to RP even when it's finished.

[Lyn Farel]

+ Immersion in the universe.

- Realism.

[Casiella]

Seems to me like a textbook case of Gameplay and Story Segregation and probably Bellisario's Maxim, at least for my mileage.

[Katrina Oniseki]

Warning! The humble opinion of myself can be found below!

I haven't looked forward to Incarna because of how I could Avatar-RP. I can do that in a different not-to-be-named virtual world, and with far far far more customization to how I like it. Even if we could make our characters look exactly how we want them to look, they still are not us, and it would take an enormously complex system to give us the amount of minute control we have over our own bodies. Avatar RP just isn't viable to the same detail as text-RP is.

So what have I looked forward to? -Seeing- the world. I regard Incarna the same way I do a new Chronicle. The difference is that I'm looking at it, and wondering what that little thing is. What is that glowing touch panel for? what can I pretend it's about? Can I use it in my RP?

Incarna, when complete, will hopefully give me a more visual experience regarding PF. It allows me to form more vivid images in my mind, and lets me take what I see in the game and run away with it in my imagination. I realize that some of the veteran roleplayers must have their own visions built up in their own minds by now. Ideas of what anything from a Amarr temple would look like, to what Gallente lingerie looks like. Seeing it depicted in the game by the developers' efforts won't look the same, so some people would get upset.

I'm not sure if any of what I'm saying is making sense, but... I think to make it simple for you, I'm looking forward to eye candy, and I don't mean avatar butts. (Those are nice too though!)

[Half Cocked Jack]

In terms of individual role-playing, I'm sure how people digest Incarna will vary widely...just like all the other little things that we have to come to terms with on our own (warping through planets, docking and undocking a hundred times a day, the repetition of missions/complexes, and all that). But those things don't have much to do with the way we really role-play, and neither--I think--will Incarna.

I'm going to make a comparison here that you might shoot me for, but a few years ago my wife and I dabbled with Second Life. In SL, you could create any kind of environment you wanted, tailor it to specific groups or events, and do it damn well. But even if you offered up the most beautifully crafted and expansive castle, space station, tree village, or saloon town possible, people would still end up just standing around in the most convenient open space, filling up their viewers with chat and IM windows.¹

My belabored point is that people almost invariably default to the quickest and most convenient form of communication. This is why the vast majority of people text more than call, call more than visit, and send emails rather than calligraphic parchments through the post. Getting pod pilots to drop their business, congregate in a station, and sit around in a circle will be neither quick nor convenient compared to the alternative: staying where you are, continuing to grind your isk, and giving a portion of your attention to half a dozen different communication windows.

It is a philosophy of our age that content trumps form. And that is why I'd bet big isk that Incarna isn't even going to put a chink in our current way of doing things. There will assuredly be some stationside, vis-a-vis role-play events, but they'll be few and far between. And awkward. When your convo partner goes afk for five or ten, it isn't that big of a deal if it was something going on secondary to shooting rocks or red crosses on the other half of your screen. But when you are in a room with nothing else to do, just watching the inanimate avatars blink their eye-orbs and scratch themselves...yeah. 

¹This is of course why Second Life declined quicker than Motsu after the mission redistribution. People figured out they could do the exact same thing quicker, easier, better, and more reliably with any number of other tools...the only price being those castles that nobody was really looking at anyway.

[Yoshito Sanders]

I've tried RPing in a number of MMOs, and every time I've found that avatars are a hindrance far more than a help, exactly for the reasons mentioned in the first post. It forces us to go "Nope, what happens on screen is not real.", stick our fingers in our ears, close our eyes and hum loudly until it goes away. Immersion goes down the toilet, and by extension the RP will suffer.

But, uh, doesn't this already happen? I mean, I can't count the number of times I've been out mission running or killing rats and have simultaneously also been in a chat channel that is supposed to be a bar or something. At the time, I was definitely saying "Nope, what happens on screen is not real." And if someone emoted in a channel, hey, I didn't see it. I saw words describing it. Will that change now that instead of staring at a ship, I'm staring at the back of my own head? Nope.

[Matariki Rain]

Yoshito, that's why some of us use VR/AR/holo interfaces for bar socialising: it means you can be roaming or missioning or whatever and not have a disconnect between your timelines (particularly, for those of us who have significantly-different bodies, "which body was I in, since I got podded part-way through our interaction?").

My responses to the original post:

Yes, it's legitimate. What happens in the game really happens, even if I sometimes wish people would quietly ignore it until some clear problems are resolved. I'd question whether people are walking around "more" now, for instance, but I don't know what they were doing in their imagined worlds beforehand. I think the roll-out of Minmatar designs in Amarrians stations is immersion-jarring, as is pilots being confined to quarters (need more info about the station air problem which means we can't leave our rooms), but they're definitely there. Also, some people are simply docking and staying in pod with a camera drone aimed at a closed door, which helps with some of the worst of it.

No, I'm not especially happy about having to do imaginatory callisthenics to work around things that are broken for game reasons: either ignoring things that are patently there or coming up with the least implausible explanation for something that's broken and probably temporary. That goes in the balance of things to consider when deciding how well EVE works me.

[Saede Riordan]

No, it can't be taken as is, which is my main grief with Incarna. It's seriously immersionbreaking that way, and I lose the enjoyment of the game when my RP and Immersion is facefucked every time I dock up. I've mentioned before (repeatedly, and ad nauseum) how Avatar based RP is a blight upon the world of RP, and will add nothing good.

At best it'll lead to a separation of RPers into two different camps. Avatar RPers and Channel RPers, along with those who mix and match to their own tastes. At worst, it'll kill off one of them.

I've tried RPing in a number of MMOs, and every time I've found that avatars are a hindrance far more than a help, exactly for the reasons mentioned in the first post. It forces us to go "Nope, what happens on screen is not real.", stick our fingers in our ears, close our eyes and hum loudly until it goes away. Immersion goes down the toilet, and by extension the RP will suffer.

I think Miz sums up my opinions on this better then I could.

[Ciarente]

If those really are the quarters Cia's staying in when she docks, I hope the NeX store starts offering sheets and towels soon so she can bring her own linen ...

[Kemekk]

Now, I realize most of the links I've provided have been a bit tongue-in-cheek in nature, but I start to wonder how literal the world should be taken when we're only given a tiny segment to work with. For instance, is it realistic or immersible to suggest that, because of Incarna, the SCC and CONCORD is now forcing all capsuleers to use quarters with Minmatar design? As some have discussed here about how unrealistic it is to be un-docked in your pod each time you land in a station, is it realistic to assume that when you hit the undock button, it only takes you less than 10 seconds to disembark from a station? With the advent of incarna, are our characters actually walking more now, or is it just a subtle wink-wink between players saying, 'So how about that Incarna, eh guys?'.

It makes me wonder what is going to happen, specifically when the full station environment is introduced that allows players to interact. Regardless of whether they introduce 'emotions' to character expressions, will people try to 'literally' emulate to ticks and behavior of their physical avatar? For example, if they are standing in a somewhat static pose and the avatar is scratching or looking around, will people literally behave nervously or disinterested in the person they may be talking to?

Is it reasonable to take a literal gameplay function and port it directly into our roleplay environment?

I'm not a fan of the literal roleplayers. I've dealt with them before in other MMOs (for example in Age of Conan, where some players assumed it was perfectly normal to travel across the globe in a matter of seconds, things like saying "I was just there earlier today" when referring to a place hundreds of miles away.

I've taken the CQs as IC, but not as Minmatar because it's stupid to think that Amarrians of all people would force pilots to use quarters inspired by Minmatar culture. I don't think the idle animations should be taken literally either, as well as some of the other physical and logical impossibilities that EVE commits for gameplay's sake. No one would like to taxi for 10 minutes inside a station hangar before launching into space, for example.

Besides, Incarna has barely begun. Things will be different (and how they were intended) when the rest of the CQs and station interiors are released.

[Faraelle Brightman]

If I get in Eve at a point before the rest of the CQ designs are released, I am certainly not RPing as if they are new or that it's not Gallente.  Because I took the idea and ran with it long before, because no PF is attached to them that contradicts how I ran with it, and because to do otherwise defies suspension of disbelief.

Suspension of disbelief is the key thing. Just because the game does things that make no in-character sense doesn't mean I should do things that make no in-character sense. This is not always avoidable (broken FacWar stuff...) but one does the best they can.

Is it legitimate for others to do it?  At the risk of being accused of /sip-ing it depends on what it is and whether they're trying to push their interpretation onto you, since we all know that disolves into IC-veiled accusations of "your character is an idiot for not being able to see/you're doing it wrong, player".

[Rao Kappa]

I think it's cool. It's one of the reasons I've decided to try EvE again. I'm interested to see how it plays out, and what overall impact it has on the game world.

As for the CQ being Minmatar by design, I never realized that was the case. I figured it was a spartan design utilized to more accurately reflect living quarters on a space station.

How will it affect my RP? I figure it's just another asset in the RP toolbox that I can use to craft a story.