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[Synthia]

Over the past few months, CTCS used some ingame objects, to see what, if any, RP occurred as a result of using those objects, as a means of disseminating information, without the use of OOC forums, such as this one.

These objects included mobile depots, bookmarks with notes on them in ship cargoholds, POS towers, and other items.

One of CTCS ships was carrying a bookmark, to the location of a mobile depot. That ship was shot down, by player A, who, gave the bookmark to player B, which generated some RP between A and B. Then B went to the bookmark and interacted with the depot, generating more RP between B and CTCS.

That was a successful use of the bookmarks and depots, without the use of OOC methods to inform player B about things.

A different deployment was less successful. In that instance no RP was generated.

That was a disappointing outcome.


Meanwhile, other objects, which were not mentioned IC or OOC by CTCS, were not discovered by RPers, and no RP was generated at all.


This leads myself, and others, to the conclusion that these objects are not very useful at generating RP by themselves, as RPers are seemingly too few in numbers to happen across the objects by chance. It also would appear that it is very difficult to involve other players in your RP activities, without being a colossal self-publicist either IC or OOC.


So, it would appear that doing questionable things IC, cannot really be done in a competent fashion, with proper levels of operational security. This is detrimental to immersion.

Contrast : Nauplius announcing the construction and location of his POS towers and mobile depots, in a somewhat Bond Villain moustache twirling fashion. If he didn't want them to be blown up, he wouldn't have publicised them, right ?

So, what are your thoughts on the use of objects to stimulate RP ?

[Ché Biko]

You know what can happen if you can seemingly go about your evil business without anyone noticing? You could get overconfident...become sloppy.

Your example of succesfully using an ingame item to generate RP is all the motivation I need to try that myself. The chances of it hooking someone may be slim, but it's little effort.

[Vizage]

There are very easy solutions to problems like these tbh. Every Rp "villian" has this issue at one point or another. You either become a moustache twirling megalomaniac a la Snidley Whiplash, or go about completely unnoticed.

What I've seen done to solve this problem in other games is a gentle application of NPC and OOC usage.

Let use the Nappy example since you brought it up. Your right about his post in IGS about his tower being very "bond-villian" it had that "come and get me"  feel from that start which I at least saw as very contradictory to Nauppy himself, who was very concerned with succeeded in for the sake of God's will, etc, etc.

What Nauppy could have done instead for example is sent out a mass eve-mail. To people he knew might be interest.  In the email could have contained a small foreword indicating the follow was not from IC Nauppy, but for example an escaped minmatar baseline (this also gives you the freedom to really have fun with a character that for all intensive purposes disappears, go nuts.) From there the process is simple, either allude to Nauppy's tower outright (link the system,) or request capsuleer assistance. Should you request assistance you can now expect replies from interested parties with whom you can now chase down the rabbit hole. You claim rumours of a hooded zealot scooping up Matar slaves wherever he can find them, bathing in their blood (or whatever, stories can be exaggerated, again go nuts.)

From this point you can chain events anyway you want. Leaving a trail of breadcrumbs (bookmarks) and even a early face down with the villain himself (as he scurries away with more slaves, twirling his moustache.)

This avoids the IC "grandstanding" and the risk of going unnoticed entirely. Anyway, just my 2 cents.

[Morwen Lagann]

My point from the previous version of this thread still stands: the reason no RP was generated in the second instance was entirely due to a complete lack of attempts at RP being made by you or yours after the depot was destroyed. The only places I saw any comment about it (whether by CTCS or anyone else) were in OOC channels: to me, this meant you desired no further interaction out of it, because as far as I was concerned, attacking the depot was IC (because space) and was therefore an RP interaction in and of itself, so no further action on my part was needed or warranted until it was responded to. So in that instance you have only yourself to blame, because the ball was in your court - not mine - and was subsequently dropped, on that side, by you. Yes, the outcome was disappointing. But not for the reasons you seem to want to imply.

More generally speaking, regarding in-space assets: unless people know there might be something to look for, the odds of them spotting anything are low, roleplayer or not, and the odds of them doing something about it are generally even lower.

As I said elsewhere, I had seen the post in the gossip thread, but didn't do anything about it until I happened to see something else ingame that made me remember the post. I likely would not have paid much mind to the name of the depot if I had not read that post and it had not been something in the rangs of things that Morwen would have taken note of - considering you can name them whatever the hell you like, "Propaganda Transmitter" isn't really going to set off many alarms without any prior indication that it Might Be Important. It was also literally a target of opportunity - there was a desire to do something IC but not enough of one to wander around wasting time scanning for deliberately, so I did nothing until I chanced upon it and removed the majority of the amount of time and effort I was going to have to put in. Likewise, Morwen wasn't about to go running around on a wild goose chase, so until she saw something that substantiated the report, she did nothing.

If there's no reason to look, most people won't bother, period. Except the weird types who make it their job to scan down and scout that kind of crap.

The POS you mention, for example - I've already done moon-scouting before, it's boring, time-consuming and hilariously not fun. I don't have any way of knowing that it's out there IC, so I'm not about to go looking. I don't have any reason to muck about with locator agents either; it's a waste of ISK. If I flew past it and happened to see it on dscan and thought it worth a second look? Then something might happen. But there are a lot of systems in EVE, and a lot of moons in each of those. That's an incredible amount of work to put in just to find a tower.

Edit: This issue isn't limited just to doing stuff with ingame assets, whether in space or not. Dropping hooks of any sort is no guarantee of a bite by anyone. I dropped plenty of hooks for my own stuff, but only three people actually bit those hooks, and only one or two other people got involved besides them. And that still left a fairly large number of people who, in theory, should have bit those hooks because stuff was supposedly relevant to their interests. But they never did. Which was taken into account as time went on.

Everyone does an opportunity cost check when they decide whether to do something or not. Is their time better spent by doing something else, if yes, do that other thing. There needs to be a sufficient motivator to offset the time and effort going in. I calculated correctly for some people, and not for others. You did the same, as does pretty much everyone who tries similar things.

[Saede Riordan]

I'll echo Sila's thoughts from another thread:

For this sort of 'trail of breadcrumbs' things have to be either

1) interesting enough for different RPers to participate
2) some OOC broad outlines among participants or
3) breadcrumbs so obvious as to defeat the purpose

Without knowing that the depots exist, there's little chance to generate RP from them, and if you're blatant about their existence you run into your second scenario.

I understand the desire to use physical items and such for RP, and I definitely applaud the effort, but the implementation tends to be very difficult. I know offhand of an attempt by TS-F to do something similar, but no one actually took the hints they dropped and thus the RP fizzled with a lot of work from Ghost down the drain.

The cluster is just too big and RPers too few and far between, to hope to find something another RPer left as a breadcrumb unless you like, go and specifically set it on a path you know another RPer will travel upon, and then if you do that, then there are the inevitable claims that your character put the Thingie there for the specific character to find as part of...some...plot...thingie.

There may still be ways around this however. If you put the thingie in space in very heavily trafficked areas, or areas that see a disproportionately high RPer presence (Eram comes to mind) it might work, but its still somewhat akin to casting out a lure and hoping someone bites.

Your use of the bookmarks in destroyed ships thing was pretty clever I will admit. That might work if you are in frequent in space conflict with other RPers and are losing ships, but otherwise it might look like you set your ship up to be destroyed on purpose so that the bookmark was found on purpose. That probably sounds like a stupid accusation to make but I've been on the downwind side of it and it does happen.

There probably is some way to make this work, but I haven't yet found one.

[Reinheart Novan]

To carry on the analogy, I'd suggest some consideration of the bait being used on the hooks.

I did come across one of the propaganda units, I can't recall where, but looked and moved. I could see it as a hook but for Rein, there was no reason to act. Now something marked as "listening post" near a corp POS is a different situation. If I had reacted it was likely to destroy the unit and some gloating evemails but it didn't seem to indicate a bigger story to that or that maybe I'd be stuffing up an arc between others. Maybe I missed something there but that was the indication I had. A more provocative title may have caused me to at least do something with it but the hook wasn't baited with my kind of fish.

The BM is a good one, if the notes indicated something of interest such as a temple or lair (complete with fedos with laser beams on their heads). But, as noted, it's  being prepared that it may take some time to provoke the desired reaction. Or require spreading some burley to bring folks in.

Sorry to beat that analogy to death with a gaff BTW

[Letos]

If you want a hook with a bait, it should propably be something that gets you directly and personally involved, with some greater reference or some kind of reward.

I can imagine two rival corporations which agree (ooc) to partly stage a conflict between them. They could consequently drop important items, notes, locations, or secret channel names which reflect, leak and support some ongoing greater plots and events. This could possibly draw some random characters into the plot. The basic idea is, that the objects are used as a plot device in a conflict scenario. Someone or several player take the role as active DMs in that case, and decide what item and information to drop. As a result, following the baits would directly lead to some ongoing story with greater potential for lasting interaction.

This would leave the track of pure ingame driven PvP of course. In return, following the baits could be more rewarding for everyone who stumbles across it by accident. I'm pretty new to EVE, though. Maybe I got a completely wrong perception of it. 

[Jace]

Everyone does an opportunity cost check when they decide whether to do something or not. Is their time better spent by doing something else, if yes, do that other thing. There needs to be a sufficient motivator to offset the time and effort going in. I calculated correctly for some people, and not for others. You did the same, as does pretty much everyone who tries similar things.

This about sums it up. This is also the case for the roleplayers that hugely self-promote. The opportunity cost is still there, just of a different sort - do I want to deal with the drama? Will this devolve into absurdity? Etc.

That opportunity cost check is always there.

P.S., I may be semi-necroing a bunch of threads as I get caught up on the forums. I am almost sorry to anyone it annoys.

[Mitara Newelle]

I have no exposure to any of the outcomes of this, but I would just encourage you to keep experimenting.  If the outcome is more RP we all win even if we don't know about it, and a 50/50 outcome while not great isn't horrible either

My $0.02

[Karmilla Strife]

Space is big and overview settings can very easily cause even your intended audience to overlook the items placed. At least once you got the desired result. That's pretty decent if you ask me. I've long struggled with the competing desire to leave a trail of plot cookie crumbs for people to follow and a characters IC desire to leave no such traces. Bookmarks or tags in cargohold were one idea I had, but the odds of me losing a specific ship to another RPer are pretty low unless I deliberately go out looking to lose a fight.