More on OOC Issues

[Tybalt]

What I wanted to say with it is :
Drawing a sword against someone who throws a bottle at you isn't as in-understandable as the ones the swords were drawn against say it is.

Altho, a simple bar fight using fist could have been more suitable for the offense~

 

[Michcat]

Altho, a simple bar fight using fist could have been more suitable for the offense~

Hey, it seems that you are very interested in persueing this issue. Could you kindly take it somewhere else and re-rail this thread back to a topic of discussion on potential changes to help alleviate the OOC-drama situation?

Heres the quote I hope you saw earlier, I highlighted it under yours.

Can we rerail to the issue at hand instead of the Senatoor vs Marr situation? Specific incidents are less important than the whole shebang.

Personally, I feel that just educating players on more proper rp and how they'd realistically handle trauma would go a long way. I can have a thread up about this in a few hours when I get off work, but one thread won't go as far as everyone mutually cooperating on this stuff. If people were given constructive criticism when others do something dumb which escalates a situation instead of the rp erupting into a flame war this problem would be dead and gone inside of two weeks.

And there is a difference between constructive criticism and being an ass, guys. Keep it friendly OOC and the rest will follow. You're all playing the same game together.

If you're trying to speak on the issue of Violent Overreactions in RP, could you expand more on your point and make it less a personal debate with DraconDarknight?

Many thanks to everyone for their contributions

 

[DraconDarknight]

To make a rerail post then.

I still think it might be good to part moderate the regions a bit by giving them a Staff-Peaceful tag until things have calmed down.
Violence between them can't happen then anymore at all and if they bring it to other regions they are subjected to the moderation from the region owner as per the new rules regarding tags.

 

[DraconDarknight]

Oh another thing:

In old PS the guards used to have a strength advantage given to them - this could be extended to any city guard all over altera so guards can effectively break up fights in their territory even if only a small number of them is online; that might also help reducing violence.

 

[Somnastra]

I know I'm not really that big on IC issues atm, but surely posting this sort of thing publicly is only going to make things worse?

It has been something that has been getting steadily worse for months. Not just with the prevailing topic of discussion, but before those individuals had even started a house of any note. It's made things quite frustrating in-game, as both a player and staff, and has been bleeding into the forums already. Posting this instead of hopping straight to bans will hopefully see some productivity regarding a solution.

Most of these issues are more symptoms than the problem itself... But hey, that's my opinion

Well, yes, but that doesn't mean they don't need to be solved~

Another thing that should be mentioned is that the entire south vs Senator drama started with the incident in Lydel and was partly justified with the region tag(that was at that time not even enforced)

As has come up before, Lydel has no tag. I have said before that the default is moderate, but if town owners want their towns to be a certain classification other than moderate, they have to do two things: declare it as such, and get it approved (in the case of peaceful).

I'm not going to get into the reasons the arguments are happening but no it's not that they're trying to be "good guys" and then we're just putting them down. It's happening because of recent things that we're just not happy about.

Perhaps if you did, it might help get us somewhere?

TL;DR: Policing characters OOCly (unless they break inappropriate conduct rules) is very bad.

Yeah, I was rather hoping to avoid doing that. ^.^ I suppose we'll see, though, eh?

stuff

I think you're getting a bit away from constructive, don't you think? Let's get back to that.

Assuming I think anything should be changed at all. Things are fine the way they are, the peaceful regions allow for uninterrupted, peaceful RP for those who want it. People are just taking this way out of hand.

Only that's not really working. That's why I made this thread in the first place.

Ced we have been, and then the Senatoors come down to Azerport and pull swords on people throwing bottles.

Yeah, this sort of thing adds zero to the conversation. It essentially amounts to "We're fine, but these other people." I'm not trying, nor am really interested in blaming anyone right now. I simply want the community to be involved in finding a solution, since Edicts from Heaven Staff have been met with just about no cooperation. >.>

Let's everyone move away from specific instances that have really gotten your goat, and start talking about solutions. Or consequences. Up to you~

Any further posts I see mentioning a bottle are going to get deleted immediately. Thank you!

We don't need a main governing power, this will just cause even more IC and probably OOC issues. If each house has it's own land, which it does, it should enforce the law in their own land. If a house becomes tyrannical, then the other houses should find a way to sort them out. Y'know, add some politics. Clearly most of these crimes are happening in towns and cities, so why aren't the laws of these areas being enforced?

I feel as if I have to clarify: I am speaking of the OOC issues, not the IC ones.

 

[pyrocide]

I won't go into the same detail as I used to, mostly because 1, it's kind of a waste of time and more importantly 2, I have a feeling at least some of my thoughts will be said in Legion's uber-post, so it's best not to snipe him, or worse write something and then immediately have it written much better after actually putting a great deal of time into it.

This comes down to one major thing, one overarching and pervasive thing that in all my years of roleplaying various freeform mediums I have yet to see actually ever get fixed.

People want to win.

To most people, this is not a collaborate storytelling experience. It's a game, with winners and losers. Because they see it as a game, they are their characters. Because if their character beats someone else, they win and the other guy loses. Because they are their characters, when they lose, they get upset. This obviously then spills out into OOC, because for them there is very little distinction between OOC and IC. Again, all because the mindset is "I'm playing a game, therefor I must win."

Powergaming, Mary-Sueing, Godmoding, Having to have the most unique and best character that's better than everyone else, Metagaming, OOC drama - All of these issues, and more, come from the fact that people don't understand that freeform roleplaying is not a game. There are no winners and losers. At the end of the day we are all making up stories for each other to enjoy. I'm going to immediately get rebuttal about how "part of me goes into making a character, so of course I get mad OOC when my character suffers IC." To which all I can say is you're doing it wrong. Some of the greatest stories of all time end (or even begin - GoT) with a character you love falling in some way. If you see your character die, lose, or what have you, and you feel anger instead of excitement over a great twist in your character's story, you are playing to win.

How do you fix such a problem? Honestly I have no clue.

You can limit it, you can try and promote better roleplay etiquette (gods know I've tried in the past), but in the end the core issue is one of changing the mindset of how people understand what freeform roleplaying is. Not to mention this is topped off with the fact you're facing an uphill battle, as this freeform medium is being played on a game, which inherently makes people want to cross that idea over to the roleplay side of it. Things like mcmmo also promote this issue, as bigger stats transfer to winning more than other people.

So, basically, as far as this one facet of the larger problem goes, stricter punishment of those who openly drag IC issues into OOC. This in no way will stop the problem, but at least on the very surface of things it will look like things are better, which I suppose is a small victory in itself.

As for the crown, yes, it would limit some of the current issues. In fact, I do believe some of the "stifling" issues that the community apparently had with such as system came from either 1, not being able to kill who they wanted without repercussion, or 2, not being able to be king/queen. Note how both of these translate to "I'm not able to win at this, so I want it gone." I am certain that for the brief shining moment where there was a functioning guard team in place, and the houses all were at least apprehensive about the possibility of the crown sending an army to wreck them should they get really out of line, we had a great deal of both peace, and political roleplay. Without such, we seem to have had a dramatic decrease in both. Though this crown discussion is all a bit of a tangent to begin with.

Anyway, I've rambled far longer than I intended, so I'll leave it at that. TL;DR: Figure out how to make people realize they don't need to win and this isn't a game but a cooperative storytelling experience, and you're golden. Short of that, strict punishment for dragging IC drama into OOC is probably about all that can be done.

 

[DraconDarknight]

As has come up before, Lydel has no tag. I have said before that the default is moderate, but if town owners want their towns to be a certain classification other than moderate, they have to do two things: declare it as such, and get it approved (in the case of peaceful)..

I know, that is just how it was justified by the parties back then from my observations of the forums.
At that time that happened there was also no need for making tags at all, or having them approved. The approving appeared to me as being the fallout of that, if I got my time table right that is.

 

[Somnastra]

I know, that is just how it was justified by the parties back then from my observations of the forums.
At that time that happened there was also no need for making tags at all, or having them approved. The approving appeared to me as being the fallout of that, if I got my time table right that is.

More or less! You'll notice that under the "Moderate" rules (again, the default), anything that results in character death still needs to be discussed beforehand. I know that this might interrupt the flow of RP sometimes, but it's one of those things we've tried to do in order to reduce the amount of OOC frustration we were seeing.

 

[DraconDarknight]

More or less! You'll notice that under the "Moderate" rules (again, the default), anything that results in character death still needs to be discussed beforehand. I know that this might interrupt the flow of RP sometimes, but it's one of those things we've tried to do in order to reduce the amount of OOC frustration we were seeing.

Yeah, and I know the solutions I suggested above are drastic, but it would certainly give people time to cool their heads off a bit.
Another thing I'd like to suggest is renaming the {Violent} tag to {Realistic}.

Reasons: The tag name itself already suggests that violence will happen there and kinda promotes it. De facto it doesn't have to though (for example there was plenty of peaceful Rp in PS too)

 

[SallyPirate]

Oh oh- I noticed something said some way back-

But if a character does something bad (Attack someone, kill them, provoke them blah blah-) They can't hide out in a peaceful region to skip out on repercussions. It's right here in this thread: http://hollowworld.co.uk/threads/region-rp-classifications.27048/

 

[Legion]

The issue I believe is one of a subtle but rampant misconception on what is actually expected from players of an RP game. Too large a portion of the community are playing this game as if it were an RPG, like Skyrim or Mass Effect, when really this is supposed to be played like a tabletop game like DnD. Secondly, too large a portion of the community do not actually know all the rules and expectations of proper roleplay.

I will start first with the RPG vs RP problem.
All the time I see new players and veterans alike playing the game to win. They attempt to have their succeed in every altercation, every conflict, every adventure. These people are playing the game like they might play Skyrim. There is the role of "Dragonborn" and you get to play it and so you do absolutely everything you can to win and be the best at as many things as possible. After all there was never a time when the dragonborn lost was there? The problem here is two fold. 1, there is the problem of "Main Character" syndrome, and 2, there is the Always-Win Bias.

On main character syndrome: Everyone knows what this is and everyone knows they are not supposed to do it. Its an easy thing to do, but the first thing everyone needs to endeavor towards is avoiding main-character syndrome. You are used to fighting hordes of draugr and reapers as a single person and through your skill defeating them all. But that is because they are npcs! You cannot expect the same to be anywhere close to accomplishable against other player characters. Furthermore, as they are not npcs, you have no idea how they are going to react or what they are capable of, and so you can not dictate their actions.

On Always-Win Bias.
This right here is a poison that is perhaps the largest cause of bad roleplay. Many individuals are trying to beat the game like they would any other game. But you do not get to do that here. Roleplaying on Altera is about having the chance to create a story and simulate living a life you would otherwise never get the chance to live. But its more like a good TV show or movie than a videogame. Having the characters in a movie or show lose or get injured or even die makes things tense, interesting, excited and sometimes sad. Watching characters overcome challenges and recover from losses is what makes the show watchable at all. How utterly boring would it be to watch a TV show in which the main character won all the time. There's no point in watching it, its silly.
You have got to remember to apply this to your characters people! Losing is not the worst thing in the world and it very often makes things that much more interesting. But more than that its simply realistic to expect to lose things from time to time. And I'm not just talking about fights, though that is a major one. Think about the things that challenge people in real life. Shortcomings, failings, flaws. Emotional baggage, physical illness or infirmity. Not some token fault your character has so that you can justify their skills, but a character flaw which adds to the rp experience. When you are playing a videogame, flaws and weaknesses make things worse for you. But when you are a writer, flaws and weaknesses are just as interesting (if not more) than strengths and talents.
The dangers of this are obvious. When you are always playing to beat the game, or playing to win, you are no longer writing an interesting story. The rps you do aren't as fun, for you or for others. More importantly, it leads to people god-moding or being overpowered, as they won't accept that their character can or needs to lose. And of course when you are playing the game to win and someone better comes a long and beats you, you get upset. Whenever you lose, or even whenever you just don't win the most you get upset. Or when you are upset that someone older than you has the advantage because now you can't win. Really, its just that you are playing the game incorrectly.
The way to fix this is to remember at all times that your character is just like one in a book, and has problems and loses just like real people. Really its something that you just have to convince yourself to go try, it almost always ends up being fun or interesting, so once you've done it a few times it won't seem scary to allow every now and again.

Thirdly, I want to address another interesting thing I have seen, and that is some people play characters which... for lack of a better phrase, "Do not exist." What I mean here is that many of you will fill out a template with a name, race, and appearance, call it a character, but then play as yourself. With your morals, your values, your qualities. Playing the game as if you, the person on the other side of the screen, were the one actually in the game. Its sort of the default thing to do but it is incredibly dangerous, and the best Rping is not done like this. Unfortunately, You, the person, do not get to be in Altera, Altera is not for you, you do not fit there. You get to be the writer, interactively determining the life of someone who does get to be in Altera, who does fit there. That is, when you create and play a character, their personality is NOT yours. The dangers in playing like this are manyfold. 1, it becomes incredibly easy to be upset at losing or to be upset at people who do not like your character, because your character is, well, you. And you don't want to lose in real life, and you don't like it when people insult you in real life, so when your character is too similar to yourself and these things happen, it is so much easier to get upset and so much harder to remember that you are writing a story in a book. Second, your morals and your values and your viewpoints and knowledge and behavior often do not make sense in Altera. Our personalities and behavior are a product of the environment we grew up in and if you are trying to force a personality created in a modernized no-magic society into a primitive fantasy-based one, there's going to be times where it makes no sense. See: Altera is highly tolerant of people of different race, religion, gender, species, viewpoint, etc. There is almost no systemic bigotry in Altera because all of you are people who live in a society where we understand bigotry is bad. But we also all know that, back then, it wasn't so. I'm not saying we need to bring bigotry into Altera (though the rps I've had with characters who were were some of the most interesting I've had) but I am pointing out what I mean by sometimes playing as ourselves in Altera in a medieval fantasy setting doesn't quite make sense.

There are several ways to solve this, but I find that the easiest for people who are new to the issue is to imagine that the character you are playing is a good friend of yours in real life and you are pretending to be them and so you have to figure out what they would most likely do in each situation. After long enough it becomes second nature, where you do things that your character would do even if to you it makes no sense. People who can do this, by the way, are also almost impervious to accidentally metagaming.

Lastly and less maliciously, a lot of you just do not know how to give others a fair chance when you are rping, or don't know what you are expected to do to allow others the chance to interact. I've seen a lot of people rp something along the lines of "Fires an arrow into his chest" without giving the other a chance to respond simply because they didn't actually know they were supposed to, or if they did, just didn't actually thing that they had to. To this end, in the near future I will be releasing a very large and in-depth and comprehensive guide on combat rp.

So then the analysis is that the results we are seeing are the effect of widely held bad-roleplay practices. Now I know we cannot expect everyone to know these and be good rpers. Newcomers to the server often have had no rp experience and need to rp some and make mistakes to learn from them. When I started, I didn't know crap about rping. But our veterans must know these things. The newcomers take their cue on how to play from them, but our veteran player population has these tendencies entrenched in several iterations of players. If they can be taught, then our newcomers will take their cue from them and eventually learn as well.
But as to policies or rules the staff can enact to handle it from our side? I have no clue. I can think of two things we can and should do.
1, publish well written and comprehensive guides on these issues. Have it written repeatedly in the rp section, the lore section, the events section, the character creation section, and in the guides for new applicants, what is expected of them in this free-form rp style, and that they cannot play like this like an RPG.
2, crack down on cases of people breaking these.
But past that, the ball is in the player's court. Learn these things, and teach them to others when you have them figured out. Settle disputes among yourselves, preferably through rp, and if you can't, just don't rp with the other person anymore.

Hey whaddya know not nearly as long as I had feared it might be.

 

[Somnastra]

Yeah, and I know the solutions I suggested above are drastic, but it would certainly give people time to cool their heads off a bit.
Another thing I'd like to suggest is renaming the {Violent} tag to {Realistic}.

Reasons: The tag name itself already suggests that violence will happen there and kinda promotes it. De facto it doesn't have to though (for example there was plenty of peaceful Rp in PS too)

I think if we change the tag, it'll be to something like "Unrestricted," although that would have certain... other issues... with it. I don't want to influence the choice of region owners with the connotation of certain words, although I take your point in that it seems that's what we've got.

 

[Legion]

, I have a feeling at least some of my thoughts will be said in Legion's uber-post,.

Quite~

 

[Sos]

Well, yes, but that doesn't mean they don't need to be solved~

I do apologize for not being clear... what i was referring to was in fact Human nature. but that has been said by more people and im not arrogant nor smart enough to even begin to unravel the mysteries on offer here... I'll stick to spawns of damnation from the Immaterium thank you.

Two real notes

1. The idea that This is a co-operative experience is batted around a fair bit and -mostly- into our faces. This term 'co-operative' doesn't sit right when i thing of role playing... I joined a year ago- hold on, *puts on nostalgia goggles*- back when the naught was but a peaceful place -and it was... relatively- i remember when war was a far off thing and people were role playing for the fun of it... the FUN. that is why i Joined, that is why i role played, and that ladies and gentlemen is why im still here after all the BS all you lovely folks have dragged me though.. Fun, yes we laughed at stupidity and drank -IRL and IC i have little doubt hope not *shifty eyes*- the first time i met the corruption and and got thrown out. Fun. the first time i sang. Fun. The first time i awkwardly walked in on a IC argument. Fun.

But alas (still on the same point) that fun has slowly become Game of Thrones meets EVE.. and i could play both of them if i so desired . the factions are either carving up territories or making more deals... *Looks at legions wall of text that appeared int he middle of me writing this* before more wall of texts appear... I will ask some of the newer people what they think and possibly look into a peaceful event for us mere Bards. *takes off nostalgia goggles*

2. A Centralized government is not the worst idea in the world.... what were doing now is... Order is what we need, and from it more shenanigans and thus... More FUN. As i write this Voltair is being a bit morbid and playing 'this ship's going down' but i speak for all of us and simply say that i don't want that...


I'm going to officially suggest this and it will be shot down as soon as its read... An exodus should be an option. New world, New government, with the new players, New people. The definition of a blank slate need to be considered... the tools are still here.. that's all i will say as i Do Not Propose work on a already Stressed staff lightly.

At the end of the day... Role play is starting to become less and less fun, and now is at the point of more Players being AFK... yeah.. that's my point and i should have said this earlier..

 

[DraconDarknight]

2. A Centralized government is not the worst idea in the world.... what were doing now is... Order is what we need, and from it more shenanigans and thus... More FUN. As i write this Voltair is being a bit morbid and playing 'this ship's going down' but i speak for all of us and simply say that i don't want that...


I'm going to officially suggest this and it will be shot down as soon as its read... An exodus should be an option. New world, New government, with the new players, New people. The definition of a blank slate need to be considered... the tools are still here.. that's all i will say as i Do Not Propose work on a already Stressed staff lightly.

At the end of the day... Role play is starting to become less and less fun, and now is at the point of more Players being AFK... yeah.. that's my point and i should have said this earlier..

No - no centralized government; We had that and it was abandoned due to people not listening to it at all; We are at the point where people who aren't even involved into this mess put effort into making their own governments and it isn't fair to punish them because a select number can't behave.

 

[Valonyx]

...As a small point i'de like to raise, as I was Commander of the Order at that moment (Senatoor-aellyrdale-engem events) and by extension a main political figure, I have steered clear from any kind of OOC ragefest, as I have lived the exact same thing as the Golden Crusade years back, and have tried to control my members into doing the same thing. However, ya gotta understand that often, especially in RP minecraft servers like this, authority is badly respected and maintained, and most people just go on and do as they want. I say that because i would love if everyone could stop blaming entire organisations for the misfits of some individuals. I know Robert (ACU) for a long time, and I also know from sources that it is not all senatoors that behave wrongly, merely a few selects. This goes the same with my group and the Engems. I would also like to make yall note that there is more to it then just what meets the eye. It annoys me to see you go around talking as if the Senatoors were innocent victims and their opponents ''bloodthirsty agressors'' and whatnot. I am not a particularily agressive person, especially RP-wise, and, while I am not extremely active RP-wise due to having to build entire cities almost alone, i know that there are /some/ degree of reasons behind the events that happened.

 

[SobekRa]

​

 

[MaelstromPuddle]

There has been, before the staff rework, a potential plan for the Sisterhood to no longer revive murderers. We've been on the fence about it for a long time due to technicalities.

Moving on to Page Two...

If you plan to not revive murderers, you take away the (totally neutral attitude and make it very hard to for people to play evil chars

(too many peripherals for it to ever work properly)

 

[Michcat]

If you plan to not revive murderers, you take away the (totally neutral attitude and make it very hard to for people to play evil chars

(too many peripherals for it to ever work properly)

Hence the technicalities..

 

[DraconDarknight]

Hence the technicalities..

Yeah the problem I thought it was :/.
How about people that attack priests of Shalherana/ Sisterhood NPCs though? (The latter already happened; Or the ykilled people on the sisterhoods doorstep something like that.)