[prof1515]

I can't say for certain from what period each opinion about Moria was made but the comments I mentioned were expressed to me from its opening through 2010. One of the main complaints was that it was too combat-oriented which happens to be one of the biggest problems with RPIs right now. More and more they're emphasizing combat over non-combat aspects.

I checked out your webpage and found the information there severely lacking. Until there's sufficient information regarding the game world and other aspects, I could hardly be expected to give it a fair judgement as to its quality. Rather than prejudice my views by seeing an incomplete game, I chose to defer creating a character until you guys were up and running.

It all comes down to the willingness of the newbies to adapt to the game instead of insisting that the game adapt to them. The latter has been consistently a problem as the RPIs' playerbases grew and they gained more attention and interest from players of other types of games.

Not true. It favors players who are able to fit into the game world more thoroughly. While this may favor veterans over newbies, it also recognizes the contributions of both when they add to the substance of the role-play.

Again, not true. A good staff member shouldn't delegate everything to players. In fact, I'd say that a good admin will always keep a very tight handle on everything that's going on even as players don't realize that they do (I found that out in my first attempt ro run a RPT that I couldn't just let the players carry the RP because they quite often simply don't respond in a logical way). The problem I've seen is two-fold. First, you have lazy and incompetant admins who shouldn't be admins to begin with. Those are the ones who sometimes delegate responsibility for RP out to players when they should be participating, anticipating and reacting to everything that's going on in the game world. When you get admins who really aren't capable or interested in doing so, that's when you have problems. However, working closely with veteran players is valuable because, hopefully (more on this below), veteran players are more capable of moving the role-play along within the context of the game world.

The second problem is the one that I mentioned much earlier in this thread of new players coming in and not attempting to adapt to the game world is the outcome of staff lowering standards for new players. The apathy you mention is not the effect; it is the cause of this problem. The effect is that new players don't succeed or often times even attempt to fit their character into the game world which in turn frustrates veteran players who play the game with the expectation of such conformity with the setting.

To give an example, take Trobridge in Harshlands. You have players there who played it as a democracy and talked about "rights" and other modern concepts. They'd do things that were completely contrary to the game's setting and when veteran players reacted, they'd complain about the reaction they'd receive from those players' characters. Even though simply talking back to a nobleman could get one's tongue cut out, you'd have characters doing it all the time and thinking this was acceptable, then spouting off about how they had "freedom of speech". Not only was their behavior completely inappropriate, their mindset was because in the games' societies such concepts of "freedom of speech" not only have no meaning but have no historical context from which the idea could even be conceived much less acted upon as if it were some political theory.

Staff would often post "do not do this" topics on the forums or inform clan leaders that they were justified in taking action against such behavior but often times the situation simply necessitated staff action. At the heart of the problem though, you had people who rose up to leadship positions who had no business doing so just because they were good at emoting. Emoting is not the only part to role-play but often times the mechanics are all that are looked at. The incident that finally led to me quitting was partially caused by a clan leader who'd been playing the game for at least five years and hadn't realized that peasants were not equal to nobility. How in the name of hell can some one be promoted to clan leadship when they haven't grasped one of the fundamental aspects of the game world's societies? This isn't a case of favoring veterans leading to apathy. It's apathy and a willingness to overlook newbie mistakes leading to compounded incidents of ignorance over time to the point where you eventually have established players who know less than some newbies because they could get away with such ignorance.

Most of the veteran admins that I know ended up that way because they got sick of dealing with two recurring problems: twinks and ignorant players who made constant demands but never carried through on their responsibility to learn and conform to the game world and, secondly, disorganization on the staff side which resulted in numerous and totally avoidable conflicts as well as encouragement of the aforementioned twinks and ignorant players in the name of attracting a bigger playerbase.

The attitude that worries me is the belief that RPIs can or need to be more than a niche genre. When they were a small trio of games which mainly attracted players via word of mouth and the damned best RP that had ever been seen at the time they had less of this problem. Sure, they also had much smaller playerbases but that goes back to my earlier sentiment about one good player being worth more than dozens of poor ones. Unfortunately, the prevailing attitude in RPIs is "more players is better". They're all too willing to lower their standards (even more than they already have) to attract five new players even if it means losing one. They just look at the veteran who quits and says that they should just accept it. But the veteran that gets fed up and quits isn't the problem; their quitting is the symptom of the problem.

That point-of-view is the solution itself. RPIs need to reexamine what made them what they are and then do some soul-searching. They're victims of their own popularity. They've almost become fast food. Players used to complain on SoI if they had to wait ten hours for character approval. Hell, I used to have to wait days for approval of even simple characters when I started playing RPIs back in '99. For my last two characters I spent months designing them. For my last character, even once he was approved I still waited almost a week for the necessary elements for set-up to be finalized and even longer beyond that before fully stepping into the RP. While mine is an extreme example of what I'm talking about, it should be more of a goal for players than getting in as fast as they can. And players who stay in character and react accordingly to the game world should be the ones that staff encourage and emphasize whether veterans or newbies. Players who come in with a cavalier attitude of "I'll do what I want, the way I want, when I want" shouldn't be the norm; they should be the short-lived and ne'er seen again exception. That's how you keep veteran players in the game.