Fail RP, Rep, and Forum "Roleplay".

[Beholder 372]

I definitely feel as though removing rep would be a decent step toward addressing the underlying toxicity on lotc, or at least as it appears on the forums.

 

You're right, a lot of people see rep as a metric of popularity, it's a numbers game where bigger number = more right in a lot of people's minds.

 

Whether this is in the form of dismissive posts from one faction or people rallying their discord to give rep so they ratio another person's post, I feel like the only real benefit to rep on the forums is the spike of dopamine you get from seeing your number go up.

 

EDIT: An update due to reflecting on my dumb monkey brain: Even on this post discussing rep, I find myself refreshing the page to check how much rep I have.

Edited October 18, 2024 by Beholder

[salamanderfantasy 1340]

19 minutes ago, Charles The Bald said:

 

I personally don't think you are not in the place to argue here when you've spent the last weeks on mod discord trying to gather sympathy to your side. The post didn't advance the narrative, the forums are not the place to be funny. Your people/nation knew what they were getting into when creating a nation, they should go see narratives fully and show up to warclaims if you want us to take you guys seriously going forward.

 

You guys went around every old/new player discord to get people to rep it, like do you guys know how to roleplay ? The forums are not the place to get one over others or make funny posts.

 

You are highlighting the big problem and a clear example of that new mentality. It's also quite sad because there are "older" players on LotC that could've guided you.

 

It's obvious you guys cared more about your OWN narratives than creating a major narrative for EVERYONE on Lord of the Craft. It's not because you have a realm that you are protected by outside politics and not interacting with others. You didn't encourage your players to show up to warclaims, you allowed them to cry in OOC. You didn't create a guard force or try to get your people protected, you didn't try to negotiate in good faith IC, you didn't try to talk and rally your people, you didn't try to be better, you tried nothing at all. I can name so many different narratives you guys could've gone through and actually rped out. If you want to be a peaceful nation, then be a peaceful nation, do not try to recruit and host spooks/nations.

 

Sorry if it's rash, but to me, that's the truth.

Spoiler

i think you're overestimating the halfling side significantly there and interpreting that as us doing bad on purpose. that was genuinely the best effort of everyone left, who actually wanted to play (and half of them didnt), combined. which may look bad on us, but eh.

 

its not an OOC slight that we suck at war, we just do. thats the narrative.

pivotin' back to the topic at hand. i joined around arcas and DO see the increase of people posting on forumns. But as someone whos spent the last month regularly being awake at 4am to roleplay with people. i don't think the entirety in the rise of using the forumns as a semi-irp messageboard is a bad thing. there's a reasonable assumption that off-screen, characters arent just sitting silently in an empty room. making posts about RP events or making in-roleplay announcements via forumns is a good fill-in for the word-of-mouth transfer of info, which is much trickier ingame, imo. absolutely goes too far at points. but i think for a LOT of people, the lotc experience would be signifcantly more clunky and miserable, especially for anyone w/ the crime of not being american.

 

i also dont think that the forumns should be reserved for solely lore and ooc management/guides. again -- agree that its overdone to an extent ect, but many people would miss out entirely on a lot of roleplay bc people just cant be online 24/7, esp large worldchanging events which happen Outside Their Window, but they just arent online for.

 

in arcas, i didnt even know the map ending events had started bc i rarely checked the forumns, and id just log into settlements i lived in to find them flattened overnight. and i dont nessecarily think that makes the LOTC experience better. so generally. i think theres a middle ground in usin things like the forumns to improve the RP experience, and then ppl who go too far w/ that.

 

Spoiler

which u know. may include me gettin too silly w/ a post. dont nessecarily agree that the forumns arent the place to make jokes but Well We Sure As Hell Were Silly With It.

 

[Unwillingly 18096]

admittedly I was really ready to dismiss this post under the assumption that, while clearly well intended, it would simply be trendy for a few days before being forgotten like the myriad of other posts like it. as we all know most discussion posts (with rare exceptions) tend not to inspire actual change, are simply unable to inspire change, or propose non-useful, non-viable solutions that are the equivalent of asking the playerbase to hold hands and expecting them to do it

 

obviously it won't fix everything but the outright removal of rep would be an interesting social experiment for admins to consider, even if just for a few months. making the forums less desirable/rewarding to post on could either encourage more engaging, sincere conversations, or have the opposite effect where we see fewer people engaging with content, fewer people dunking on their enemies with a quick quip both irp and OOCly, and a potential ripple effect that at could at least no longer enable some the server's other underlying issues

 

even if we gave rep the benefit of the doubt, the most value we can amount forum it to is that it's a quick, recognizable indicator of how much support a post or idea has, and I mean this in the most general way possible, because sometimes (as we've seen) trendy forum posts can be a simple consequence of people sharing it to their network of friends or discord servers asking them to +1, as well as outright herd mentality

 

I don't know what all I can bring to the table that hasn't already said but I can't think of a single consequence to making rep obsolete and would encourage admins to seriously consider the idea. and yes everyone knows it won't fix all of our problems but it's sure as hell a good place to start when it seems like nothing else we do on this server ever works 

[Fekr 424]

((I just opened the forums for the first time in three years))

 

When contemplating it; the fundamental reasons a lot of people are attracted to LotC makes me think of how mundane and uneventful many of their real-lives can actually turn out to be, purely because modern society is boring, with that in-mind, the server offers alot of things that are either impossible to gain irl, or severely lacking from modern times, rare experiences, emotional moments, accomplishments, camaraderie and so on:

 

That is why I think one of the reasons for the increase of forum roleplay is the gradual realization that once you make posts they are there forever, the things you were apart of, the accomplishments you helped come to fruition, and all the other things you could think of that would have worth- they're all visible on the forum.

 

Compare this to in-character, where  we find ourselves witnessing legacy vanish through various ways, map change, settlements deleted, books lost, the few characters that knew of the events/information ending up innactive or PK'd, and what you find yourself with is very little evidence of what came before, or that it ever happened at all. Its very appealing to want your time to be written in stone to last the ages.

 

Reputation is irrelevent in my opinion though, yet forum roleplay is most-definitely very appealing to the larger playerbase for its enduring record.

[Cheese 8875]

he's become the very thing he sought to destroy

[Jihnyny 5233]

i like forum rp.
i like reading old posts from 2012 and upwards where rp meetings were done on forums.
i also like memes.
i like seeing funny memes being posted on the forums.

i think a way to fix this would be forcing a strong divide between OOC and RP posts. Its actually stupid that when i look at latest topic i see 'x's MA application' spammed to enternity. Get tech to only show PROPER RP posts, and mods to hide the ones that clearly OOC post. But dont remove the OOC posts as long as they are OOC tagged.

[gremlockgremlin 755]

3 hours ago, The King Of The Moon said:

 

How Did We Get Here?

 

Over the past few years, 'forum RP' has seen a steady rise in popularity.

Back in the day the forums were reserved mostly for OOC pragmatism - lore, settlement applications and other server discussions -  whilst IC concepts on the forums were few and far between. Governmental missives, bounties and the occasional IC theses made up the bulk of forum roleplay, which even then were heavily scrutinised by the (often overzealous) Forum Moderation Team. 

 

You need only go back to the Atlas subforum to see how starkly different things were. The further back you go before then, the more distant the then-purpose of the forums seems to the purposes they now serve. Of course there were exceptions, but generally the forums' function in aid of roleplay used to be regarded at best as an arbitrary catalogue for character sheets, culture and history posts, event and government announcements.

 

The change in attitudes by and large came about during Arcas, or in non-lotc terms, during the Covid-19 Pandemic.

 

Perhaps more than any other map, Arcas reconceptualised people's perception of Lord of the Craft and Roleplay more generally.  Those of us who were there before and after it saw the community explode with a myriad of faces old and new. The 'Minecraft renaissance' amidst lockdown helped many new players discover our niche community, whilst many older players that'd either completely quit or could only dip in once every few months to say hello now found themselves with the free time to return in force. 

 

Most noteworthy for me, however, was our shift to Discord; that app staff had encouraged us to abandon our coveted Skype Chats and Teamspeak Servers for toward the end of Atlas, which many of us luddites thought would never catch on. We'd seen Mumble and Ventrillo crash and burn - this would surely be no different - after all Skype and TS were tried and tested.

How wrong we were.

At this point there's points to be made that I'm sure some of you see coming, and have seen made before so I won't repeat them. Though in the briefest of terms it was from this point that we became far more OOCly connected than ever before, which came with a number of pros and cons already discussed at length here:

For the first time, many of us were given the opportunity to share our roleplay posts en masse. No longer confined to single-channel chats, personal DMs or the reach of the OOC chats on the actual minecraft server, LotC forum content could (and sure as hell would) now be put before large groups and kept stored in a visible medium for later reference.

In addition to this, the decision was made by administration around this time to merge the Forum Moderation and Game Moderation teams into simply 'Moderation'. Whilst sub-teams have come and gone within the new structure to handle the forums, and there are still Moderators that dedicate significant time and effort to monitoring the forums, there simply is not the manpower to comb through the sheer volume of posts on the forums and scrutinise them in the same way. There also isn't the same design philosophy; once upon a time FMs would call out certain RP posts that overshared IC information as 'metabait', a concept that simply does not exist anymore. 

The impact this had on roleplay is impossible to tangibly measure, though irreparably our view of LotC was changed. Like the real world advent of the printing press, so too did characters (usually handwaved by 'birds' making proclamations known) suddenly have access to mass information from every corner of RP.

For better or worse, IC access to information is now only restricted by how far the player wants to suspend their disbelief.

If you had asked the average Haelun'or character who the King of Oren was in Vailor, they might've been able to tell you it was Guy de Bar. If you asked them how he came to be the king, they'd have probably shrugged and (incorrectly) assumed he inherited it. If you asked them who played the King of Oren they likely wouldn't have a clue, unless they had an alt in Oren themselves.
Why? Because at this point the vast majority of RP took place on the server. If you weren't involved in it, you as a player likely didn't know about it - let alone your character. Though there were proclamations on the forums, most people didn't see them. In fact, I recall as a new player getting the vast majority of my information on nations from minecraft signs on noticeboards... Most cities don't even need noticeboards now. Why would you go check one, when you can just tab out to check your nation's #announcements?

This post isn't meant to look back on those circumstances and advocate nostalgia win out over convenience. Whilst it certainly takes away from IC realism that everyone knows everything proclaimed on the forums - in fact, it's an expectation to keep updated on IC communities and groups; people will call you stupid if you're a human who doesn't know what the Church's stance on Azdrazi is - it's also just now the way of things, that would be impossible to change without excessive 'metaplay enforcement'.

I don't think there are many of us that see this as a feasible thing to reverse, given the 4ish years (far longer in certain circles) in which this culture has become embedded, and I suspect there are even more of us who would be opposed to the reversal - after all, it can be beneficial to RP to receive IC information in a timely fashion. Narratives that would've been far more drawn out or confined to "/msg [!] Bird:" are now able to touch more characters more quickly. This isn't a black and white bad thing, it's just... Different. The server is old, and with its age the world has changed. It'd be silly to expect LotC to remain a stagnant 2011 time capsule, and so this post doesn't hope to 'fix' that.
 

In Defence of Forum RP
 

With Arcas came what, in my opinion, was the most successful Staff orchestrated event line in server history: the Inferi Invasion. Through the coordinated, momentous efforts of @Riftblade, @ScreamingDingo and many other dedicated and talented individuals, the bar was set for the storytelling capability of our community.

Though other eventlines before and since - Undead 1.0, Mordskov, Apotheosis - were in their own ways brilliantly orchestrated, the Inferi Invasion is noteworthy here as the first time in which our playerbase (bolstered by the aforementioned 'Pandemic Generation') had the higher stakes of our lore and IC setting spelled out to them through forum posts cataloguing many criss-crossing storylines and buildup, coupled with the unprecedented level of OOC coordination which Discord had allowed staff and players alike to use in maximising event interaction. 

Though many today gawk at hundred man events, intimidated by an ocean of emotes and the general chaos of handling such, it's important to highlight the utilisation of the forums and Discord really were the first time in our server's history that these were made possible. Every player understood there was an invasion underway, and more importantly so did every character. We all in some way big or small had our personal narratives touched by this storyline, that was made impossible to ignore both on the forums and on our minecraft server. 

So then what problem is this post trying to address?
 

Fail RP

Whilst there is no set definition for this term, and many old LotCers will likely cringe at it as the term itself fell out of fashion in our community many years ago, the consensus amongst online roleplay communities is that 'Fail RP' or 'Non RP' is roleplay rooted not in logical IC interaction but an OOC desire to derail the RP of others, through intentional disruption, trolling or - as I see most prevalently in our own community - attention seeking behaviour.

I'm sure plenty of you have seen myself and others groan and vaguepost about this before. But here's some regurgitated examples:

 

This issue can be described with a myriad of different names. 'Rep farming', 'Twitterfication', 'Reddit RP', though they all stem from the same root, and feed into the same broader issue of what @squakhawk's aforementioned post meant to highlight: metaplay. 

We've all seen this social media style of forum use creeping up over the past few years with OOC quips being poorly dressed up with "my character says:" at the beginning of statements clearly aimed at players, not characters, in the IC context of an empty room. It's nothing new, though this past year in particular has seen the forum roleplay devolve into an absolute quagmire with Moderation accommodating memes and flat out OOC commentary on roleplay so long as it's under a spoiler - which even then is seldom acknowledged. 

We're all guilty of doing this at some point or another, myself included, though due to the recent actions of certain bad actors the lines between OOC performance and IC motivation have become more blurred than ever. 
 

Rep Over Reason

 

It's understood without controversy now that social media has an impact on our psychology. You need only look to the countless studies about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram to understand the two basic premises.

 

Firstly, human beings are social animals with an inherent pack mentality. We are instinctively drawn to behave at a bare minimum of conformity to the larger group. This is sometimes referred to as a mob mentality, or crowd psychology. When we see that 'most people are doing X', we're quick to assume there's a good reason for it and follow suit. Regardless of if we want to be contrarian or not, objects of attention draw our attention as well. We all know about the latest big meme because enough people have referenced it in front of us for us to look it up, and probably reuse it ourselves. We've all listened to the newest album because everyone's talking about it - even if only to smugly disagree. There is controversy, though in social media spaces our engagement with popular content is simply a fact of life, due to our psychology and algorithms that feed into it. On this latter point, though our forums certainly aren't built with the same philosophy as other social media sites, we can still see the echoes of it on our front page (current topics not relevant to this post).

 

Secondly, human beings are social animals that crave attention and gratification. We are stimulated by others engaging with us, and what some call 'social media addiction' is a direct product of this. People share posts on social media websites for a myriad of reasons, though almost always the engagement of others - likes, comments affirming the thing you are representing, actions clearly borne of your stimulus - give us a sense of happiness and self worth. This isn't anything new, but it's important in the context of our forums.

These two phenomenons have in recent years changed the way in which we use and respond to the LotC forums, and in turn have greatly diminished the value of actual roleplay done on our server.

I have already mentioned the way in which the relevancy of the forums to roleplay has exploded since the days of Arcas. Once upon a time, interactions done on the server through emotes, builds and mechanics were the be-all, end-all of roleplay.

If characters were Canonist, this was demonstrated by communities coming together for Mass in regular RP, characters being converted with actual emotes and Canonist acts being regularly carried out by characters.
If a character had an opinion on something, it was held personally unless shared with others through actual actions and dialogue.
If two groups went to war, they would march on eachother and fight.

If characters had disagreements with one-another, they would be (or at least, should've been) settled on the server through roleplay.

Whilst all of the above are still options, and still occur, they are no longer the only option. 

 

Roleplay is no longer the exclusive solution to in character issues.
Why?
Because OOC popularity is more useful, and therefore important.

 

For many narratives now, the 'meta' is not to roleplay on the server; it's to make a forum post about it. 

If I want other people to be Canonists, all I really need to do is make an RP post calling them out and get more rep than the other person. Pack mentality does the rest; 'if everyone is upvoting this post calling this guy cringe... Well, he must be cringe and maybe I just lack the context'.
If someone is posting about something my character disagrees with, what I should really do is reply to his post and try to ratio him; 'if this comment has more rep than the original post, it must be right and the other one must be wrong'.

If I want to win a war, my best bet is to attack from the forums first and the server second. So long as my friends can make better memes than the other guy depicting his group as a bunch of losers and my group as a bunch of chads, more will want to join me than him... So long as they don't outrep me first. 

If my character disagrees with someone else, FAR MORE people are going to see things from my character's point of view if I send this "IC" letter to them via a publicly accessible forum post (regardless of if it is meant to be ICly readable by the public) rather than via the server's aviary plugin that wouldn't broadcast my writing to anyone but the recipient character.

It feels right to rep the person you agree with, and it feels right to agree with the person with the most rep. It feels better to get a post that will stand the test of time on the forums buried in rep by my friends than it does to post a fleeting emote in the server chat only to be seen by those involved in the roleplay.

 

At this point there will be those of you rolling your eyes at the mentions of psychology, and there will be those of you that think this is a strawman - that you're impervious to the forum post > minecraft emote mental. But you're not. None of us are. We're all guilty of looking to what's popular and aligning ourselves with it. We all want to roleplay with the group that seems to be winning, and that has the most activity. The forums are where this is most widely broadcast... And this snowballs into the reality of our narratives.

 

Forum roleplay now impacts narrative exponentially more than OOC cabals in 'metaplay chats'. It does far more to determine each and every character's struggles and stories than any IC conversation might. On the personal level, playing on the server is still the best way for characters to develop and communicate, but if you want to push for a movement, no shout emote will ever be loud enough to reach every single player in every nation. No IC spoken word or aviary letter or minecraft book can reveal the OOC popularity of a cause or group.
 

But a forum post can.

Metaplay and Toxicity

 

More often than not, OOC popularity determines what our characters can and can't do. To some extent this is natural; no-one can be expected to join a group led by a player understood as horrible, after all. We have shared values - as players - that will always effect the scope of one another's characters. 

 

Though the difficulty we're now faced with is where the lines blur our OOC and IC conceptions of others. When emoting in context, we filter our interactions through our character. In an ideal interaction your character forms their response to others through their worldview and the limited information available to them, often coming to a conclusion about another character distinct from your own opinion on another player or group.

 

On the forums, however, this filter doesn't exist. Your character cannot rep a post. Your character cannot see or hear other people's comments quipping in response to said post. You, the player, are the target of these narratives whether intentional or not. 

In the same vein you, the player, are performing to other players when you choose to post on the forums. Roleplay posts are by and large written to inform and entertain other players, in a manner quite removed from how you engage with others in your immediate vicinity on the server. Subconsciously or not, therefore, your character quickly ceases to be the medium for whatever it is your RP Post is trying to get across.

 

Whether it's promoting an ideology, publicising roleplay, or looking to slander someone else, you, the player are demonstrating something to others with your roleplay posts. It's how you become visible, which is now an expectation for some communities.
A magic group that lacks a forum presence 'is an inactive circlejerk' in the eyes of most players. A nation without a forum presence may as well not exist. It's in everyone's best interest to the extent that it's a requirement to forum roleplay.

Unfortunately, these semi-OOC interactions are very quick to spiral in a nonsensical manner. We've all seen some dark mage's "nothingburger" post get ratio'd by a based protag character making fun of them in the comments. We've all seen a nation leader blatantly attacked as a player with a meme in a spoiler comment. Not only does this effect our perception of these narratives in a way that without fail supersedes what a character's logic should be, but it also - unsurprisingly - has a pretty awful impact on the communities and individuals they target. 

 

I had typed up a storm giving a recent example, but have since decided this post is more than long enough to get my point across. What I will say is, it is incredibly upsetting to spend hours upon hours roleplaying with others toward a goal, only for someone with little to no involvement and a cursory opposition (who often seldom logs in) to take to the forums and make fun of you "IC". It is exhausting to see roleplay completely invalidated by those who put in the bare minimum effort of Fail RP, to the point where roleplaying on the server feels less and less worth it to those with a mind for large scale narratives. Even then, the small scale is easily diminished and invalidated by a single well crafted post to attack your character or group. 

 

It's easier  to take to the forums. It's more rewarding to take to the forums. It's more popular. 

 

Why bother trying to create a narrative, if it's going to all come tumbling down the moment someone decides to make a horribly out of character roleplay post or response to your roleplay post clearly aimed at you as a player? 

And why do we, as a 'roleplay community', stand for this kind of behaviour? 
 

The Solution?

 

I hope the sheer length of this post goes to show that the issue is multifaceted. There's a whole host of problem behaviours that need to be addressed not only in each other but ourselves. We each, myself included, need to be more mindful of what weight we give to the forums as a roleplay medium. There are, as mentioned, times when forum RP is not only useful but necessary. 

However if there's a point to be taken from this post it's that the forums should never supersede our server. We should respect our own efforts and those of others more than that, and take in-characters posts as they often are: a few paragraphs compiled in a couple of minutes before being pinged in our discords, more often than not defying our in-universe logic should we decide they reach our characters. They are not the hours, days and weeks of roleplay that they're often up against. They're a one-sided, personal projection of an often OOC perspective.

 

I'm sure at least one person will reply to this with some meme or a "haha didn't read", and chances are that person will be amongst the problem players alluded to earlier, though nonetheless I hope this post can bring out some of your own thoughts pertaining to this issue. To reiterate, the vast majority of the problem stems from player mentality - not just actionable staff interventions.

 

Though, knowing plainly as we do that the green arrows do not exist in our characters' universe, perhaps taking forum rep out of the RP equation would be a good start.

I have soon been on this server for a year and now for like the past months or so I found no enjoyment with my favourite character. I want to rp and I find the Azdromoth eventline to be one of the only events that were well thought out even tho the outcome was very predictable. I have enjoyed the events that @6xdestroyer and @BobBox made as they were smaller scale which made them feel more personal in a sense that you were one of the few people who got to see it. 

But over all I think some players need to rethink themselves and their rp. I love roleplaying and found great comraderie with a plethora of players and it is pretty sad that much of this servers narrative is not being played out ingame but over the forums instead. 

 

[Kylo 153]

ILOVETHEFORUMS123

[indiana105 5126]

whole server is “failrp” conducted in discord group chats by sweaty losers. removing rep might make it less outwardly cringe when some soylent man dms u saying “UPVOTE THIS IS BIG” but idk

 

doesnt address the actual problem which is nation/pvp leadership. will never be addressed bc its pervasive across every sub community and staff members either a) are spooks/inactive or something and don’t really understand it, or b) in on it

[Isvinity 729]

Can't agree enough about how sick I am of putting in the time and effort toward roleplay ventures on the server only to be met with the red tape of needing to do XYZ forum minigame or cater to some dude in a discord server for a group I've never even heard of ICly. I recently faced issues with trying to revive a certain community where most of the oldheads have been banned or are otherwise inactive because I noticed quite a few new LOTC players interested in it, only to be met with constant red tape OOCly in both discord and on the forums - so much so that people who don't even play their nation leads were commenting things like '/me frowns' on my posts despite having absolutely zero presence in-game for years at a time. The need to 'play to win' forum politics in order to have a good roleplay experience has become incredibly disheartening for those of us who prefer to just handle everything in-game and I really hope we see some changes implemented to help ward off this mentality the modern community has adopted - forum rep removal seems like a great first step.

[framalam 837]

1 hour ago, Fekr said:

purely because modern society is boring

No it is because LOTC players have no life. Hope this helps.

REMOVE REP!

Edited October 18, 2024 by framalam

[Werew0lf 24179]

 

 

 

 

LOTC forums are a market and I'm in control of it.

 

I'd watch your back from now on, Mordu. You thought revealing the truth was going to change how this server works? Want to go back to the good old days? Nah, I ain't letting that happen.

 

I always come back.

 

 

[ivery 590]

Interesting post and props for trying to think of a specific solution to start off with. Something I feel like is a significant factor beyond Discord and the lockdown's effect, however, is very rarely mentioned in this discussion: the average age of the playerbase.

 

While I don't have the exact numbers for obvious reasons, the average age of MCRP has gone up by a significant margin. Back in the early days that keep getting mentioned (disclaimer: based on my own experience on other servers since 2015), most active players were in the 14-18 range, generally in school or maybe with a part-time job. If you were older than that, it was notable- and it's understandable why. The way that MCRP works is inherently addictive, with a lot of social pressure from their factions - with promotions largely based on attendance - and random events by ET that you just need to be lucky enough to be present for. It's basic psychology (and marketing) that younger people are significantly more vulnerable to all of that.

 

These days those same players, now designated as "oldheads" or otherwise longterm players, are adults. They have jobs, for one thing, and a variety of other important responsibilities that have to come before LOTC. The forums and Discord being used to post announcements, advance dates on events, recaps, etc is a way for those players to still be able to stay in the loop without having to be online for the amount of time (a solid 3-4 hours at least if you're in the right place from the start) it would take to get enough information, not to mention having to plan in advance if they want to take time off from work or other responsibilities to participate in LOTC events that are important to them. You see the same methods on other roleplay platforms (GTAW, FFXIV, Zomboid and Gmod based on my own observation) that are largely for adults.

 

Obviously this has evolved far past just being conscious of players' time for all the issues that other people have mentioned, but I think that it's important to realize that LOTC and MCRP as a whole has evolved to a point where we can't just return to what it was before, because we are different.

[kuebiko 684]

Just as two cents, I know it doesn't touch upon much of what the forum post itself says but I've found as a newer player (<year playing) that it can be hard to find roleplay or new groups without use of the forums. How do I meet people outside of running around saying hi and hoping I get lucky, find something engaging, and stick around. The server is so large and vast that it's hard to know what's going on if you try to do things solely in character. More niche ideas like the circus group, or spook group recruitment posts sort of have to be on the forums so that the most people could hypothetically see it and if they're interested, reach out. In a perfect world this could happen in character, but we don't live in a perfect world. 

 

I've always liked reading old forum posts, they've always been sort of like bookmarks to me. Someone found this roleplay interaction important enough that they sat down to make a forum post. Maybe it's not important to me, but its a cool peek into another character's story. Before I actively played and was simply whitelisted I used to hop on the forums and just parooz around from time to time. By reading over forum roleplay posts a new player could find something to get interested in, like a woah whats this moment. 

[ryno2 1285]

5 hours ago, Charles The Bald said:

The Halflings didn't even try to win the war as I have seen, they turned the thing into an OOC war because they didn't care about the roleplay of the orc community. We should think about where we put our foot down going forward with this type of post. They showed up to the warclaims to do half-assed efforts and their leadership cried in the mod discord. It's not like Lurak didn't do the same either.

 

The halflings and their allies were outnumbered 3 to 1 since the church declared a crusade on them, and they did try to defend in one warclaim, but they lost, so they decided it was a doomed effort and surrendered- something which has happened on lotc multiple times before. I think in addition to this post detailing the issues with forum rp superseding in-game rp, there should be discussion about the ooc motivation to war nations and wipe them out to reduce "nation bloat"