And this is why we can't have nice things. Or moreso, RP doesn't occur at the scales you see in other games, and also why you don't see a lot of variation/new blood in RP here. Those claim of the older days typically reference a time I think when the community was more inviting or accommodating. However present day I think people would rather go to other games for trying to orchestrate any public story arc or live effect to fight a common foe.
Sure the RP might be fitting to the game but it is still shitty RP.
As for those saying, "just go elsewhere" -that's cool, I will make presence elsewhere if folks want to see me there. But I'm not going to stop rubbing it in on official forums. For coming from someone who doesn't believe the golden days of EVE RP are over, someone who's been playing since 2004, I think our community can be better than the nature of the game.
And in light of how CCP is treating the lore recently, that is my only hope.
The IGS has always been said to be a cesspool. If you are looking for good RP in there, you might as well take a bath in a pond of mud, the end result would still be cleaner...
The good RP lies elsewhere, either on some channels, or in space.
I don't think it's the RP community that contributes to the atmosphere, but rather the game and the general community.
I don't normally agree with Lyn on a lot of things, but this more or less sums up what I was trying to say earlier, and possibly in a better way.
The IGS is a terrible place to RP for the most part.
If you're looking to be a snarky twat or score cheap points over grammar and spelling, it's great. If you're looking to have a civil discussion where the meaning of a post is what's discussed, not the player's typing ability, it's a shitheap. A channel or small private conversation would be better.
If you're looking to shit up people's attempts at serious IC discussions about interesting subjects, it's great. If you're looking for a place where you can have those serious IC discussions without the brain-damaged peanut gallery trolls interfering, it's a terrible place. A channel or small private conversation that can by its very nature exclude the peanut gallery would be better.
If you're looking for a place where you can post an announcement for an event or something like that, it's okay - except that you have to deal with the people looking to shit anything and everything up. Channels aren't great for that unless you're making good use of MOTDs, because they depend on people being there when you make the announcement - a forum doesn't have that problem.
I think the issue is that at the end of the day, whether the IGS is IC or not is irrelevant - it is still a forum, and it will be treated as such regardless. Forums encourage that kind of behavior.
Reaction time is often rewarded in ingame channels, and the inability to think quickly is often punished. It's frequently the other way around on forums. It's a lot harder to play the "score cheapshots" game in a channel where people are responding in realtime, because if it takes you a while to come up with that oh-so-witty retort people will easily notice you just wasted so much time on it and you're more likely to look like an idiot. On a forum, a lot of people ignore the timestamps of the posts because they're not right there in your face with everything you say compared to channels in the game client, so that delay is often overlooked.
I'm sure someone's going to point out that I'm often a snarky bitch on the IGS with Morwen. Yeah, so what? Guilty as charged - the forum's useless for anything but that and making announcements for the most part, so that's exactly what I (and lots of others) am going to use it for.