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Old 09-27-2010, 09:35 AM   #131
prof1515
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Re: Veterans of Roleplay Intensive MUDs

Everything mentioned above is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that the quality of RP in the RPIs isn't what it used to be. More and more I saw players who didn't learn the game's cultures and didn't role-play according to the setting so much as according to what they wanted. Breaking in-game cultural laws and then claiming "rights" in games where the concept of democratic rights is alien to the cultures depicted would be one example. Excessively worrying about personal gains and concentrating on skills and abilities, leading to spam-crafting or mob-bashing, rather than more naturally role-playing their character would be another.

Likewise, more and more I found admins willing to look the other way at this behavior and in some cases even facilitating it. When I was on SoI's staff, I was often told "Playability, Falco" in response to my complaints that such admin behavior was enabling twinking and non-RP behavior. Playability has its place but it should be done with respect to the players who role-play rather than with concern of appeasing or attracting players for whom RP isn't the primary consideration. To give an example, one veteran on another of the RPIs used to play a guilded and licensed caravan trader. He'd spend months RPing the necessary preparations for the trip, hiring on help, making the huge investment of buying his goods for transport and then making the journey where he'd acquire rare goods in exchange. His profits were fairly low, keeping him within the realm of the economic setting (for the sake of this example, we'll say he bought 4000 worth of goods and traded them for goods he could sell back home for 6000 making himself an annual profit of 2000). The problem was that players who weren't guilded and who didn't want to go through all the above process would band together and just make the trip, selling off hides or goods looted from corpses to make money, then buying the rare goods and returning to sell them for profits far exceeding reasonable (they'd make 6000 but spent almost nothing). This was illegal according to the laws of the country because they weren't licensed by the guilds to engage in such commerce but staff didn't enforce such laws in order to not upset these players. Instead, they even allowed non-guilded players to obtain licenses to engage in such activities despite their lack of guild credentials. This had the effect of undercutting the guilds and upsetting those players with guild characters who went through all the RP and legitimate procedures. The character of the player who was RPing within the setting ended up at a disadvantage to those whose charactears should have been at best scraping by and at worst in jail for blatantly violating guild laws.

Additionally, I found the quality of the stories being told relying more upon combat and less upon rational justification or cause and effect. As an admin, I'm a strong believer in planning RP and accepting the consequences so long as they fall within the realm of plausible. However, I noticed a lot of admin-run plots which were lazy, poorly-conceived and poorly-executed. Sometimes they required ignoring or even contradicting established in-game history and culture to implement leading those players who were aware and respectful of continuity and in-character reaction to question how to role-play the results. When A has always led to B and all logical reasoning shows that A leads to B, how does a player deal with A leading to C just because an admin wants the result of C but is too incompetant to create a plot that gives them the result they want? Worse, when the player reacts and manage to find a legitimately-RPed way of changing the outcome back to B, what do they do when staff just make it C again because that's what they want even if doesn't make sense and can't be achieved in any way? As if that weren't bad enough, what does a player do when it's obvious that the admin wants the result of C because it's preferential to another player to whom they show favor?

I've witnessed all of these things more and more over the years which led me to playing less and less (as well as partially being responsible for me resigning from the staff of SoI). These are all examples of poor quality in role-play as well as destructive administrative duties which result in sub-standard role-play.

I'd write more but I'm not feeling well and need to get back to bed so please excuse me if I didn't address any further points. I'll try to review the rest of the posts and respond accordingly when I've had some rest.

Later,

Jason aka Falco
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