I am currently experiencing a very interesting phenomenon on the Mud where I work. Players blatantly ignoring our rp-enforced status. My colleagues and I have gone to what I believe are great extremes to make our in-world role play consistently interesting and exciting for the players. We have an established and clear history for our world and an ever-changing, ever-evolving storyline, we have created and instituted a role play point and reward system, have created special immortal “gifts” for outstanding role play, we have created in-character jobs and political positions for the players, we run weekly in-game minirp quests and institute a major world event or quest every month or so.

Still, the players would seem to prefer to ignore our role play enforced status. We are a rom/godwars hybrid codebase, which means yes, we have levels (attainable through experience gathering OR roleplay), yes we have classes, yes we have clans, etc etc.. Currently we seem to be garnering the type of player who just cannot grasp the concept of logging on to a game and playing not themselves, but a role, a character. For the most part, a good amount of our players engage in the events the administrators throw for them, yet seem to lack the drive to do any in-game role play on their own.

So I ask.. What makes you role play? What motivates you the most?

ShadowLight Questmaster
Katrin.

Our mud does enforce roleplaying, to the point where we ban griefers or people that keep ignoring the RP rule. But beyond that, you might want to make sure your expectations are conveyed to your players, and that you give them resources to work with. Lead a player-staff meeting talking about how to roleplay, or start the discussion as a thread on your board, if you have one. Provide them with links to roleplaying resources, or start posting logs of what you think is good roleplaying.

Sorry I haven't responded to your email yet, Katrin, my juno account is being decidedly screwy again. I really enjoy the system that Armageddon has in place, and I will admit that my one experience logging on to Shadowlight was horribly marred by the immediate jokes on the gossip channel and someone "nicely" informing me what to kill to get to level 6.

I did, however, take the time to read some of your documentation via the help files and whatnot, and am looking forward to future communication with you.

In reality I think it comes down to extremes. From the sound of your post you are all trying your best to make sure the activities with and for the players are constant, you've gone through measures to ensure they have a history and something to relate to. Now the only thing that is left is a question you have to ask yourself...

What is more important, quantity or quality?

If the answer is quantity, then you bite the bullet and deal with those that simply cannot roleplay.

If the answer is quality, then you create some seriously sick mobs, keeping it IC, and ravage the area those fools are in, murdering them in ways obscene. Either that or just ban them/enslave them.

Why?

Simple. When it comes to rules/laws, there is no middle ground. A rule or a law is created for a reason.

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In the mud I play, the players themselves do most of the RP enforcing. For the most part our chars have created the flavor of the world they live in, so we have an interest in seeing it not only continue, but grow. If some poor newbie shows up and consistently refuses to RP, we kill him. We like our play to work a certain way and if they mess it up, they can make another char and try to figure out how to do it right. Sure we probably drive away players now and then but I think most of us would rather have an interesting gameworld than 500 players on at once, if 99% of those 500 were clueless and had no interest in getting clued in.

A lot of us are very protective of the environment we choose to waste large amounts of our time in. Most of the time creators don't even need to do anything because we enforce the rules to the best of our mortal abilities. This frees up their time for coding new stuff, fixing bugs, etc. We may not be that effective in the long run, but at least we try. Which is more loyalty than a lot of muds can probably boast about their players. But hey, it's worth it.

Onyx, fantastic post. Simply beautiful.

Players that take responsibilities into their own hands, and immortals that actually allow players to "live", just beautiful.

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