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[Completed]No Place on LOTC - A Critique on the Current State of Villainy


CrocsGuy
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Greetings LOTC. I hope to keep this short and sweet. My goal here is to provide a critique on the current state of villainy on LOTC. As someone who has played a villain for an extended period of time, I have gotten a sense of what both myself as well as fellow players find insufferable with roleplaying as a villain. I have included a TL;DR at the bottom for those who don’t feel like reading through all of my points. Finally, please note that I do not support the generic “minas or die” roleplay, but you’ll understand where this stems from in my post.

 

The Glass Ceiling on Villainy RP

Perhaps this was intended, but villainy RP in general has a glass ceiling in place against it. The only feasible things you can do while roleplaying as a villain are banditry or kidnapping/ransoming. Personally, I came up with the idea to create a “mafia” with some of my friends. That idea fell flat very quickly, due to the aforementioned glass ceiling. Who wants to spend hours wandering roads for the hope of finding someone to steal 100 minas from, or perhaps to kidnap and contain for 2 hours, in exchange for a subpar ransom? Any other “mafia-esque” RP is basically impossible, since the rules themselves are written to prevent such a thing.

Something that came to mind while formulating my idea were things such as selling narcotics, terrorism, racketerring, and assassination. Each of those have their own issues. Only a small portion of the community roleplays drug use, and most of them decide to omit the fact that drugs are addictive, meaning there is zero market for such a thing. Terrorism is simply impossible. When consulting the possibilities with the moderation team, I was informed that any IRP damage to a region requires PRO permission. Who in their right mind would agree if I approached them and asked if I can set their settlement on fire IRP (not to mention a lack of explosives, but that's another issue)?
Racketeering cannot be done, also due to the glass ceiling. When you enter a settlement with malicious intent, it is considered a raid. Unfortunately, approaching a nation leader and demanding “protection” money is considered malicious intent. Why do I require a raiding party, likely a large PvP fight, and multiple hours of gameplay in order to passive-aggressively extort money from someone? Assassinations also have no place on LOTC, mainly because you cannot force a character to PK (which I am fully comfortable with, don’t get me wrong), therefore your efforts of planning and execution are fruitless, at most causing a scene and making the victim forget 30 minutes of roleplay.  

 

OOC Hatred of Villainy RPers

On most, if not all, of the administrator posts, it is explained that LOTC is meant to be an environment free of toxicity, as well as the notion that players must keep their OOC and IRP emotions separate.  Well, my villainy had about a 70% success rate. During the remaining 30%, confrontations arose. There is only one time I can remember where I was not berated in OOC chat for my actions on my character during such a confrontation (shoutout to the halfings). The remainder of the confrontations usually resulted in either death or successful escape. Well, according to many players, death is too easy of a way out for someone who roleplays as a villain. Much of the time, I would be berated for simply playing a villain, attempting to kidnap someone and failing, or simply attempting to run. Oftentimes, I was insulted for not providing proper roleplay.

Perhaps I was personally at fault, although I try my best to avoid unjustified and generic villainy roleplay. Usually, it came down to “we are right, and you are wrong”. For those of you who find that this is a select group of players, you’d be surprised to hear that some staff, who will not be mentioned, engaged in the OOC conflicts as the opposing party. The main point being, when you play as a villain, you are forced to deal with OOC hatred simply for the fact that you are a villain IRPly. However, this is an issue of mentality, and I doubt this can be changed.

 

Events & Villainy
In my year and a half on LOTC, I have seen many organized events happen, most recently Athera. Though I have not personally participated, all of them share a common theme; the players are forced to play as protagonists, with no place for villainy roleplay during events. This is more of a suggestion than a point, however, it would be nice to see events having more diversity, perhaps some choice as to whether you wish to roleplay as a villain (antagonist) or a protagonist, or events that add some substance to villainy roleplay. 

 

TL;DR

  1. There is a heavy restriction on how far one can get via villainy RP. Many illicit activities are restricted or simply impossible due to the way the rules are structured.

  2. Playing as a villain oftentimes results in OOC conflict, simply because you are playing as a villain.

  3. Events have no place for villainy RP, and force the player to act as the “protagonist” with no flexibility in that regard.

 

That will be all. Thank you for taking the time to read my post. Feel free to leave any comments, questions, or concerns. Constructive criticism is appreciated. Hopefully we see some changes to villainy in the future. 

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@FlemishSupremacy you probably got a lot to say on this

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You’re right that raids kill villainy. It’s no coincidence that proper villains stopped existing when raid rules first became a thing. a couple guys start an RPless raid and then suddenly it’s pretty much a bannable offence to break the law in that city in a group of 2+ for the rest of the week(because like you said, a raid is no longer just raids, raids are now doing anything malicious in a town – guys even got banned once for “stealing” from a free food chest). and now raids are banned entirely so it’s literally bannable to do any villainous activity with over 3 people

 

assassinations are sort of a symptom of pvp default, not pvp default itself but how the attitude around it has developed. you should not be able to call pvp default after someone has emoted stabbing you in the back. that’s powergaming. you’d have never gotten away with that when pvp default was the unwritten law of the land, but when it came back as a real rule then suddenly you can abuse it however you like. it’s the same with raids. before raid rules were a thing, raids were treated like any other RP, and if you came into a town and just did 1 emote and called pvp(”calling” pvp is another dumb innovation but ill leave that rant out for brevity) as both sides rallied up, you’d get banned for no RP.

 

not sure what an easy solution would be, but one option i’ve often thought about is giving PROs the option to turn pvp off in their settlement in return for vastly relaxed raid rules. not sure on specifics there, or if any town should be allowed to do it or only capitals, but it’s an idea to think about

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Totally agree with you bud. I don't have much to say of my own experience because I don't often do villainy RP, but having witnessed it and additionally heard experiences of people playing villains, I can see where your opinions stem. However, ooc harrassment often goes both ways and is a problem everywhere. Do something to a character and you will get it, 9/10 times. 

 

One thing I will say is that raid rules need a realistic reworked approach. It kills villainy. 

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good villains require good victims and both simply dont exist on LotC currently.

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Staff needs to make it easier to be a villain, villains create long term rp better than ET/ST and are a great boon to character development for all players.

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32 minutes ago, CrocsGuy said:

 

Oftentimes, I was insulted for not providing proper roleplay.

Perhaps I was personally at fault, although I try my best to avoid unjustified and generic villainy roleplay.

As far as I can recall, I’ve never witnessed your villain rp, so I obviously can’t comment on its quality or whether you were at fault, but I can say this. While there are certainly more than enough poor villain rp’ers on lotc, for most people, the quality of any specific villain’s rp is irrelevant. If Tolkien himself could rise from the grave, join lotc, and play a villain with the full eloquence and richness of his writing, there would still be someone accusing him of poor villain rp. There are people who’ll say that no matter how good your rp is, because it’s not really about the rp to some people. It’s about getting their own way in every rp scenario. I don’t do much villainy rp these days myself, but that’s mostly because I don’t have the energy to deal with people who throw tantrums whenever something bad happens to their characters. Don’t get me wrong. Obviously, sometimes a villain’s rp is just bad, and everyone from time to time has a bad attitude about rp not going their way; but it seems to me like it’s very commonly just a line people try to hide behind in hopes that they can escape consequences or negative experiences for their characters. Anyway +1

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8 minutes ago, ScreamingDingo said:

good villains require good victims and both simply dont exist on LotC currently.

Never in the same place at the same time, at least lol

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23 minutes ago, argonian said:

(”calling” pvp is another dumb innovation but ill leave that rant out for brevity)

actually i will expand on this a bit because it is a major reason why no one bothers with villainy rp

 

so you and your buddy mug a guy, you draw your weapons and ask him to hand over his cash. it should be simple, it used to be simple. if he says no, you ******* stab him. simple as. but nowadays, you have to call pvp default and wait till both sides are ready before you start your countdown. sounds reasonable, you can see why this was introduced vs just being clicked at all of a sudden like before. but the problem is, there’s nothing stopping people stalling for as long as they like. and for whatever reason, they always will. you have to deal with them insisting they’re not ready, even as they stand there armoured up and hopping around. then their friends try to join and you have to screenshot who was there when you yelled “PVP lock!”, and maybe even call a GM to enforce it. and then after 10 minutes of this back and forth OOC bullshit, the fight finally starts and lasts 10 seconds. 

 

if you’re lucky, you take his loot and run out of there glad that you at least got 10 seconds of fun for 10 minutes of that horror. but you won’t be lucky. in the 10 minutes of OOC back and forth bullshit, the entire town came to spectate. and while, at the GM’s intervention, they didn’t intervene during the fight, now that it’s over they’re free to. so you’re dead, buddy bingo.

 

and that’s why no one will ever bother with that kind of villainy. it doesn’t even have to be directly violent villainy either. even a pick-pocketing or whatever can turn into a fight and then you have to deal with that. and non-violent villainy is actually worse, because if you aren’t the one initiating the fight, then you don’t get to decide when PVP lock happens – allowing them to meta rally with impunity. 

 

Easy solution to this is to just stop allowing players to say they aren’t ready for no reason. If one side calls PVP and the other side wants to stop an immediate /cooldown, they should have to give a real reason why they aren’t ready(e.g need to change settings, etc.) and then they can take one minute(no more, it shouldn’t take any more) to get ready. and then /cooldown instantly starts. no more of this “i’m not ready because idk just not feeling it yet” bullshit. 

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FAT +1

 

This server thrives on conflict, as conflict is one of the big ways to keep rp going, and currently, players seeking to start conflict are incredibly restricted. People cite “bad villainy” as reasons why there shouldn’t be raids allowed, but that doesn’t fix the problem. If you just crack down on bad raids, then why can’t we have bigger raids? We have the roleplay standard rules now, we might aswell give the players more freedom as long as they maintain themselves within roleplay standard rules. Obviously, going into a settlement for no reason, attacking people and calling pvp doens’t fit in the “give and take” part of those rules.

Raiding has been restricted a lot since the new war rules. Considering how you can cover an entire tile in a region, you can make any villainy off the road on your tile a raid (which is how i got banned ?). Right now, there are so many safeguards in place to ensure that players could go an entire year on lotc without ever falling victim to succesful villainy. 

Nations are perfectly capable of making themselves immune to 10 man raids through a half decent set of walls and a dilligent guard that does gate duty. If we can’t even expect that of groups with nation status, then really, you don’t have to do much at all to protect yourself.

 

Onto raids, I feel like the general “let’s just charge into a settlement and kill everyone because we’re bandits” shouldn’t return, however, with a decent justification, you should be able to bring more people into a settlement to attack, wether or not this is a slight or wronging given to your character or group by the people of the settlement, a rescue raid or a legitimate, well rped criminal enterprise such as a “maffia”

PLEASE; stop restricting conflict rp. Crack down on bad villainy all you want, i’d be all for that, but stop putting rules implace that impact ALL villainy, regardless of quality and effort put into it, because you’re making the server worse for it.

10 minutes ago, ScreamingDingo said:

good villains require good victims and both simply dont exist on LotC currently.

You never fail to suprise me with just how much you hate this community.

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1 minute ago, FlemishSupremacy said:

You never fail to suprise me with just how much you hate this community.

 

Because it’s really easy to change these small things with just a shift in the community mindset but every time those sort of changes happens they’re pushed back into rule-lawyering or otherwise invalidating RP that can happen through ways to ensure they win.

 

I’m just more annoyed. Good **** can happen if people want it to happen, bad **** will happen if people don’t. Posts like these just make me sad because they really point out how the state of the server continually changes for the worse on a community level. If anything, people asking for more staff intervention are just encouraging more rule-lawyering and avoidance of consequence.  I just want new players to enjoy the server, which constantly seems to be a trend that cannot happen

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31 minutes ago, argonian said:

you should not be able to call pvp default after someone has emoted stabbing you in the back. that’s powergaming. you’d have never gotten away with that when pvp default was the unwritten law of the land, but when it came back as a real rule then suddenly you can abuse it however you like. i

 

100x this. You should have to respond to RP and resolve the emote before you call PvP default, otherwise there’s literally no ******* point attacking anyone for any reason (they can, and will, call pvp and then stall you until their friends arrive)

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6 minutes ago, howard said:

 

100x this. You should have to respond to RP and resolve the emote before you call PvP default, otherwise there’s literally no ******* point attacking anyone for any reason (they can, and will, call pvp and then stall you until their friends arrive)

Agreed. It’d be such a simple, easy rule change too yet it’d cause a massive improvement in RP. How it currently is, the emote is literally just voided entirely for all intents and purposes. I went from shanking you in the back with you not even knowing I’m there, to both of us fully armoured facing off from 10 feet away. How the **** did this happen, we should be asking. But we don’t, because nowadays we accept PVP being completely OOC and divorced from RP as just the way of things. We shouldn’t.

 

Just add a nice simple rule that “All emotes must be responded to and resolved before PVP can be called”, and you fix that whole problem just like that. Basically with the click of a finger. There are tons of problems on LOTC with no easy solutions, but this isn’t one of them. 

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2 hours ago, CrocsGuy said:

the players are forced to play as protagonists, with no place for villainy roleplay during events.

I asked mystery if my shade group could be given some sort of approved pathway to do villainy that would help do something for the story of Athera, such as sabotaging a boat, helping an event bad guy, siding with someone the good guys aren’t supposed to, etc, and I wasn’t given anything. Furthermore, villainy for the most part was disallowed... unless you were a dark mage. If you were a darkmage, anyone could do anything to you because you’re evil grr. It was really disappointing.

 

2 hours ago, CrocsGuy said:

The only feasible things you can do while roleplaying as a villain are banditry or kidnapping/ransoming.

There are other things you can do, but most of those involve no one ever knowing that you’re the cause behind x happening or that you were even a villain at all.

 

Good post though. It’s really disappointing that there are so many people on the server who shun away from villainy rp just because they don’t want bad **** happening to their character. Bad **** brings out the best in characters, and that’s what I want to do as a villain. Provide a good side story that helps affect another character’s larger story. I’m constantly referring back to villains I’ve dealt with in the past just because they left such important marks on my character, and I want to be able to do the same to others.

 

I want to make an impact and provide good rp. But a mix of both bad villains and bad victims ruins it all, and I doubt moderation or really anyone in staff will be up to making any changes that would affect villainy rp and dynamic conflict for the better.

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