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A Direction For Roleplay


Telanir
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32 minutes ago, Harrison said:

Glad you guys actually are focussing on role-play after the longest time, on a role-play server, so it’s a pleasant thing to see on the forums.
 

Few things:

  • Roleplay that takes from a player has to contribute character development/story building – I don’t think this very well written or a fair expectation. Whilst I very, very much agree that role-play that aims to take from another person (whether it be the experience playing or a physical item(s) on them) I think that the requisite of ‘character development and story building’ is very vague and a bit much to be expected every single instance. On top of that, a story can only be built and a character developed with the co-operation of both parties, and people don’t take too kindly to being put into a losing position. Over all: glad you’re focussing on low effort ‘me kill u’ rp, just don’t over police it because it’s still a two way street.
  • Moderators won’t ban for it unless it’s reported – What exactly do you mean? Do you mean it won’t be acted on unless a report of an action is actively disrupting the player reporting it? I’m just forseeing possible worst case abuse of this in the future, so would like a clarification before we dive down the rabbit hole.
  • You’re offering a grace period to avoid bans right now – what exactly are you getting at here? Are the bans for this going to be lengthy, serious offences? Whilst I don’t think you should treat purposefully poor roleplay lightly, I also don’t think you should be banning people any more than a week for it, and that’s for repeat offenders. I hope you utilise things like 1 – 3 day bans. Shorter bans inconvenience people rather than dishearten them, and actually convince them to improve in their lacking field.
  • 72 hour response time – actually stick to a time for once, please, especially with your whole ‘new leaf’ thing. Roleplay reports spiral out of control the longer they are left and become more and more troublesome to solve, especially with how lazy moderators have proven to be when it comes to checking logs.

 

Overall – very happy you are trying to promote better roleplay! Just don’t want it to turn into ‘conflict bad !!’.

  1. The moderation team will continue as we always have! Just that unless something is reported, we might decide not to act on it. 
  2. The Grace-period is something where everyone can begin to learn and get adjusted. After this, we will take a stricter hand when it comes to enforcing the rules, guiding the players. 
  3. The 72- hour response time is fairly little to be fair. Moderators have a life outside of LotC as well that takes time off their hands. 
    1. Going through all the evidence that has been provided by both parties takes a lot of time. Not to mention listening to the stories from both sides.
    2. When a moderator goes through a substantial amount of evidence, it takes time for a fair verdict to be made.
    3. Once all set, a verdict must be reached; hours of pondering. 
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27 minutes ago, Xarkly said:

It’s pretty fine all-in-all.

 

I don’t think this was a needed update but it’s not necessarily a bad addition. One thing I would note is what you define as best practice.

 

More and fancier words doesn’t necessarily equate to a better emote. 

 

1 minute ago, Telanir said:

 

  1. I agree, it over-policing it will just make people sour and uninterested in cooperating. It’s a losing battle.
  2. Worst case scenario I think is when staff get too involved and start making judgements on your behalf. What we’re trying instead is a method where there is far more certainty when players would like us to take action versus when they’re not really bothered by the situation.
  3. Two weeks to read and understand the standards that’s it really. After that then yes we’ve made it part of policy w/ these changes to apply short bans. (and obviously it escalates on repeat offences).

Thanks for the questions.

 

 

Yeah, I agree. I’m also personally a big fan of shorter more packed emotes which is why I included this part (last sentence).

 

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But I’m curious that you felt it wasn’t needed. I got a different feeling from players & staff—there was some urgency for a set of standards.

 

dragging xarkly in cos hes a nice guy

 

I also agree that this was not a very necessary thing to make – whilst it’s nice to update things like standards every once in a while, what I think a post that would have made all of our days better was one that went something along the lines of ‘GMs will Moderate RP once more’. One of the major reasons that PvP has overtaken RP combat has been because the Moderator team (I know you’re gonna get up in arms about this) do not Moderate role-play, ever. I can not think of the last time I actually saw a Moderator be called over to judge whether someone’s emote is powergaming and suggest to them what a more suitable emote would be (anything along these lines). With people just powergaming like anime characters becoming the norm, and Moderator tickets going up to hours at a time, as well as the lack of actual Moderation that comes to those rare few who answer tickets quickly, mechanical combat with a clear ‘who is better’ way of life became the norm.

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3 minutes ago, Harrison said:

the Moderator team (I know you’re gonna get up in arms about this) do not Moderate role-play, ever. I can not think of the last time I actually saw a Moderator be called over to judge whether someone’s emote is powergaming and suggest to them what a more suitable emote would be (anything along these lines). With people just powergaming like anime characters becoming the norm, and Moderator tickets going up to hours at a time, as well as the lack of actual Moderation that comes to those rare few who answer tickets quickly, mechanical combat with a clear ‘who is better’ way of life became the norm.

This is an issue that will be tackled!

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While a good change in theory, I fear some of these things being put into practice. When you have vague guidelines set for ‘giving’ and ‘taking’ in rp, I fear it might be used as a tool to target ban your opponents in a war when they do something typically warlike to you, such as capture and execute important officials, or bandit the roads. 

Things like “Driving players away” is subjective. I’d also like to point out that I hope that ‘If there’s no report, there’s no problem’ also includes reporting things via a modreq, instead of the BR system, which often takes far too long. 

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6 minutes ago, FlemishSupremacy said:

While a good change in theory, I fear some of these things being put into practice. When you have vague guidelines set for ‘giving’ and ‘taking’ in rp, I fear it might be used as a tool to target ban your opponents in a war when they do something typically warlike to you, such as capture and execute important officials, or bandit the roads. 

Things like “Driving players away” is subjective. I’d also like to point out that I hope that ‘If there’s no report, there’s no problem’ also includes reporting things via a modreq, instead of the BR system, which often takes far too long. 

It is always up to the moderators discretion to decide possible punishments! Moderators are there to ensure these rules will be fairly applied and enforced! When it comes to “driving new players away”, like you said, it is subjective. Yet I am sure we all agree with being a tad lenient towards new players! Rather than throwing them under the bus we should safely take them across the road.

 

And lastly, reporting anything to the moderators; a simple In-game /msg can be considered a report. 

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All of the standards and stuff seem like common sense, nothing to complain about.

 

If we’re going to raise the standards for role-play though we should start with our applications. We don’t really expect new players to create a character. We don’t challenge them to flesh out their persona, to give them values, desires, fears, things that make them engaging and dynamic. The CT doesn’t have to judge whether a new player is a good writer, but whether they put actual thought into the character they’re playing, something that is essential for role-play.

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This is generally common sense stuff but I’d like to raise a few points and some concerns:

- “The frequent example that we run into is if your character stops and frisks someone on the road—then following up by killing them would murder any chance for genuine character development. You will have to be creative in the way you promote the story if you don’t let their character go. Otherwise you are simply taking the easy and uncreative way out of the situation.This seems to suggest that the give has to be directly to who you are taking from whereas this indicates otherwiseFor example: take thievery and stealing property. You can leave behind some mud tracks and maybe a personal handkerchief with an emblem. Maybe a sign detailing broken glass? The point is, there is always the option to create a rich story. Perhaps your character is the handkerchief-thief who always leaves one behind? Maybe your character always carries one such handkerchief hanging off their breast pocket… and one day they are recognized?!Perhaps some clarification about who the give needs to be directed towards would help to clarify this.

 

- “This is primarily because they feel that there is a disconnect between Roleplay and PvP. While this can be the case, it doesn’t have to!You’re out of your mind if you are trying to say that there isn’t a total schism between what makes sense in roleplay and the results of PVP. If DPM plays a 4 year old halfling who is crippled and blind he could come out on top of the conflict against even the Rex of Krugmar, when PVP happens it places the fate of the played character into the abilities of the player rather than having such be reserved for the character to defend. So unless your point is that the Rex, in the previous example, should just be entirely willing to make a joke of his character in order to abide by the results of PVP and have it translate into RP then your logic isn’t consistent. 

 

- “Something that happens in many PvP fights is that one side gets bored waiting for another to push out of their castle, or simply just want to taunt their enemies. Groups turn to shouting or emoting trolly things just to get the other groups goat. This has taken the form of people mass-emoting ‘*just vibes.’ or shouting thinly-veiled OOC memes or insults “IRPly”. This type of behavior is unacceptable, and will earn you a timeout ban or worse. A good policy to adopt is that once the PvP starts, keep the RP to a minimum or stop it completely until the battle is over.So now, going off of my previous point, you’re having the player assume the combat role in place of the character and the player is likely just waiting outside of a gate or hiding behind a tree. This is boring, people want to goad their enemies and as previously established it is the player that is in control of the moment rather than the character; this is the reason why you see this behavior and the kind of change you’ll be creating won’t eliminate the toxicity. Rather all you will see is the distasteful flaming and toxicity be translated into the character’s speech or patterns of behavior, likely this will actually lead to such toxic behavior outside of these conflict scenarios. You will have made the character to be just as toxic as the player was in that moment.

 

- Finally I’d just like to see some kind of way to avoid Mod abuse in these situations or at least some given way to stave off the bias of some staff who may be dealing with these reports. There’s a lot of discretion left for the mods to determine what RP is acceptable and I can absolutely foresee abuse that could easily be curtailed. 

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Thank god. Luckily, I haven’t not ran into much troll or low quality rp, most people have been wonderful but I’ve had some certain encounters recently that just kill RP. 

 

?

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5 hours ago, FlemishSupremacy said:

While a good change in theory, I fear some of these things being put into practice. When you have vague guidelines set for ‘giving’ and ‘taking’ in rp, I fear it might be used as a tool to target ban your opponents in a war when they do something typically warlike to you, such as capture and execute important officials, or bandit the roads. 

Things like “Driving players away” is subjective. I’d also like to point out that I hope that ‘If there’s no report, there’s no problem’ also includes reporting things via a modreq, instead of the BR system, which often takes far too long. 

 

I have your concerns too. Sometimes, characters just need to be killed. Which is why Give and Take will probably be pretty situational. Just the other day, I was involved in a troll rp which was not fun for anyone involved other than the trolls. I did not have this standard post to turn to. All they had to give was a sort of proper reason for the rp taking place and boom, can’t really reject it.

 

Now, in such cases, where characters for the sake of example are saying “That’s not very cash money of you” which happened in my case, I trust a mod with the standards set, to argue in my favor against such rp. In that troll rp, there was no give from the trolls, at all. It was clearly all take and had there been a “give”, it would have ended much better. 

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I have a feeling that this will drop most the banditry rp off the roads, which is (in my opinion) not good, because y’know, do bandits need a reason? I dont think so, they earn their pay that way because they know how to do THAT and not something else, or perhaps earn more by banditing than doing farmwork? It is ofcourse good for banditry to drop but I think the drop needs to be influenced by the armies of nations and them protecting the roads, not some rules. Yes I know some banditry roleplay such as ‘minas or die’ is pretty bad and boring and doesnt contribute to character development, but to be honest, it would be too hard for bandits to find a way to effect ones character developement (or atleast I can think of a way that they can). Just my opinion tho, idk if anyone would care ?

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If you guys just wanted to say, "We'll be punishing people for trolling", then you could've just said. Not everything needs to be a thousand word initiative. 

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