Crash Out Mission: The Misleading of Regular Players

[Samson Option 9652]

Some banter to lighten the mood before reading, chill & don't come at me.

Spoiler

 

 

 

For context, a recent conversation I had with a player. I will redact the player's name from the copied logs, but will state plainly that they are on the Covenant side of this current war & I on the Church side of this current war (I play a character established in Krugistan - my Discord is IbnKhaldun).

 

Spoiler

• IbnKhaldun — Yesterday at 12:46 PM

  I will explain more here in a bit

• [Redacted] — Yesterday at 12:49 PM

  listen man, if you're different from the rest of the orcs great. fantastic. genuinely wonderful. but you have to understand something from our point of view. the rest of the orcs and the church do not treat us with any respect or with decency. they don't want rp, they don't want resolutions. they want an empire and they will go through the whole server to get it. i've been at the hand of them breaking crp and banditing rules just to get their way, specifically when raiding and when they know they can get away with it. i've seen them sling insults and be toxic af after a raid just because they can. they specifically engineer their rp to pass as the bare minimum and that's it. so why should we put any effort into interacting with them? why should we not rule-lawyer and defend ourselves to the absolute maximum, when it's clear that they will bend, sometimes straight up break the rules to get what they want? it sucks, and it's not the rp I want, but it's what I'm stuck with until this stupid war is over.

• IbnKhaldun — Yesterday at 1:12 PM

  [Redacted], respectfully I have to urge you to separate your OOC feelings from the results of the dynamic RP playing out on the server. I will not speak for the Church. I will only speak about the Orcs. None of the Orc players have any hard feelings or malicious intent to harass you all as players. What the Orc characters (not players) have is the intention to punish Hyspia as a Kingdom for the sanctioned act of betraying Grommash Elder (our past leader). RPly, we have the understanding that Hyspia's leader invited Grommash Elder for diplomatic talks only to then arrest & behead him. What I will offer you on an OOC level is to discipline & reprimand Orc players if I receive evidence from you (screenshots) of any rule breaking. I want & have been raising the standard of conflict roleplay through my character Zilzibin Taunttongue. For example, our raid to capture Pricilla Fontesar (tadabug2000) was purely in CRP and was logically/reasonably played out with moderator supervision (DragonNomo). We respected tada's request for no torture/gore RP. I have personally let LordCrowe escape with his mined goods though it would make perfect sense to pilfer them from his dead body since we are both at war. RPly, I've actually established a way out of the current bloodfeud (what we are calling our war against Hyspia). If you want, I can explain it OOCly but expect you not to apply what you've learned immediately in your character as your character & my character have not spoken.

 

• You have to keep in mind you applied to Lord of the Craft which is a dynamic roleplay server. It isn't a Garry's Mod where you get to curate every single detail of the sandbox that you get to play in. That is the beauty of this server. All hands are in on making this cake. Its something that I've always appreciated as an oldhead writer/roleplayer.

[Redacted] — Yesterday at 1:28 PM

Sorry my man. But there absolutely is hard feelings and I can prove it with one simple callout from the very first raid. Someone, and I wish to god I had the presence of mind to screenshot who, called me as a user out, as someone who played a Vikelan back when Vikela still existed. In roleplay, as if I was still playing that character. I have been continuously targeted/called out for having played a Vikelan. And whatever you opinions are about Vikela, which I can talk about all day, I do not deserve to be borderline harassed for having played a Vikelan character. Multiple people escaped from the raid where Grommash was killed. It is common rp knowledge that we tried to establish some sort of diplomatic talk, and that Grommash came with only one intent: to raid and kill. He showed up with a raiding party pre-kitted and ready to kill our NL. We were lucky that help showed up. If the people who escaped lied, fine. But it's a flimsy and lousy excuse. As for separating OOC from Rp? When the entire war is and has continuously been OOC-motivated, it's nearly impossible. The established RP reasons are flimsy at best and almost everyone can see through them. The OOC-motivated wars have been called out since the war on the East and nothing has been done about it. So forgive us if we're a little frustrated. And even so, there is rp reason. We're scared; cornered. Continuously trapped within our walls and raided, unable to leave without risk of being killed. My character especially is unable to visit family and friends because of the war. Events are ruined because orcs, specifically your character run around the walls calling out threats to scare and intimidate.

 

• When our rp is reduced to trying to avoid near-constant villainy, banditing, and raiding, I think you can see why we get a little jaded. And if you can't, maybe you should imagine what it's like to not be able to leave the walls whatsoever, because you'll be killed the moment you step foot outside. Because someone is waiting, watching.

 

IbnKhaldun — Yesterday at 2:11 PM

I'll be honest, I don't even know what Vikela is nor would have any reason to concern myself with whatever Vikela is. This is a common issue that I am seeing from players who are mixing their OOC & IC cables too much (character bleed, etc). You are trying to apply relatively that anyone besides yourself has "lousy" "flimsy" "OOC-motivated" reasons. I'd advise against that. What you've described with the part of the paragraph starting with 'We're scared:' is called the consequences of ongoing roleplay. Your character should feel them, but not you as a player. If you are feeling these feelings as a player, I'd advise taking a break. The character you play has multiple ways of responding: PTSD, cowardice, forlorn hope style fighting against us, strategically trying to adapt to the current circumstances, trying to sue for peace on a personal level, etc. That is up to you. I've played on losing sides of wars in the past on this server. I've chosen different responses based on the development of my character at that time.

 

• Now, as it relates to you & I interacting personally. I think I once passed by you fishing and, as I could see you were backing off immediately, I messaged you that I'll leave you alone and go ahead fishing.

• Events are ruined because orcs, specifically your character run around the walls calling out threats to scare and intimidate.

  So there has been two instances that I've done this. I'm playing a very Genghis Khan-like character. The first instance was me fooling the Hyspians into believing that I was leading a raid party which was nothing but cover for me to commit some arson on a different area. The 2nd instance was actually me legitimately letting you all know that you had 5-6 players locked out of your city trying to attend what I think was called El Puente? Some celebration I found out in RP.

 

[Redacted] — Yesterday at 2:35 PM

There is no character bleed. There is no applying OOC to IC. And I didn't reference Vikela because I expected you to know what it is. I referenced it because it shows that players on your side don't care about the rp- that this is and always has been ooc. There was no reason to even say the nations name during a raid otherwise. What we have, is aggravation with the ooc motivation that I personally have endured since joining this server. Frustration with the toxicity. And also? Don't lecture me on how my character should/could respond to the "consequences" of ongoing roleplay. It's not just "consequences", it's bad faith attempts to make sure we can't have any enjoyment. It's what they've done since the very beginning, and not only is it frustrating, but having it denied/downplayed is downright infuriating. You do not understand what we're going through and the lengths some of the players on your side have gone through to make this a hellish experience for us on an OOC level and out of pure bad-faith. Furthermore by denying it and excusing it, you're saying it's okay. There's no point to furthering this conversation. You either don't see or don't care to see what we've been going through and don't care to understand how it affects our enjoyment of the server. I'm sorry you felt targetted, I assure you that you weren't. We're just trying to get through this war with our in character and real life sanity intact.

 

I have noticed a bad trend recently and I am calling on both sides to help police this & raise standards. This trend is the psychologizing of what is essentially gameplay/roleplay whereby leaders and/or certain individuals among player-groups are whipping up mass hysteria among the player-groups themselves into believing the most trifling, unreasonable, & harsh opinions about those on the other side (either other player-groups or certain individuals - refer to the Yeetboy situation for an example of the latter).

 

Before someone claims that "I'm not doing my part", I'll redirect you into reading the conversation in the spoiler above. I am doing my part. We need to remember that we play a multiplayer roleplaying server and that, by its nature, many hands are in the pot so to speak. Everyone gives inputs whether to the server-side story or in affecting individual storylines of characters and that the trend of claiming Person X is bad-faith is simply ignoring that reality of our multiplayer roleplaying server, that the trend of claiming Person Y is desperate & grasping for straws because they are losing is engaging too much in an OOC meta-narrative whereby we should only be focusing on our characters, their actions, & the consequences rather than peeking over the next computer screen and mocking the player next to you figuratively, that the trend of claiming Playergroup Z is the devil incarnate and that to jump sides, go neutral, or do anything besides surrendering to some weird OOC hive-mind is ludicrous and I would recommend you take a long break from the server.

 

Most of all, do not impart your unhinged & strange pathology of how serious you take this server onto the regular players. To use some urban slang, sending the regular players on crash out missions is wrong. Bullying pink-tags & new players is wrong. Denying the reality that this is a multiplayer roleplaying server and not a single-player Second Life game where only you & you alone get to curate every detail down to the consequences, results, & outcomes is wrong. Mistreating players (players, not characters mind you. Remember not to mix your IC & OOC cables you dig? Just because my character killed your character in Encounter A does not mean I am mistreating you the player.) is wrong.

[HIGH_FIRE 5490]

I can't fault a point you make. Morality IRP and Morality OOC are too vastly different things. A player can RP our the most devilish evil creature that would ever exist and be a genuinely good person OOCly, but some people will OOCly view them as a bad person for the RP.

 

I'm guilty of this before and I think most if not all players have fallen into this sense of person X is evil because they do action Y or fight for person Z. It's a trap that many fall into and it really ruins the enjoyment of LOTC and RP. 

[BurberLord123 375]

I completly agree, people have gotten to the point where they are not seperating IRP actions from the OOC person, which is insanly important in a roleplay server.  

 

This was a problem a few years ago, however people as a community worked past it. We must do that again

[TaraJess 2848]

as someone who has seen people struggle to differentiate irp actions with ooc actions, it is indeed a problem. I should not have to defend my friends oocly for their irp actions. It breaks my heart honestly.

[DrunkPapaBear 2292]

Props to Gaius for this. Its a real issue we need to fix and the easiest way to do so is by starting with how you view the server.

The goal of lotc is to have fun, who cares if you win, loose, die or loose all your rp items. Will it really matter in a week, a month or a year? Caring too much about these things will only make you sad and angry.

 

By playing an orc, its hard for me to understand how some peeps feel so bad while playing lotc, but here’s my advice anyway :

 

Just have fun! Why else would you log on every day? If lotc is not enjoyable for you, maybe its time for a break, maybe its time for you to change the kind of rp you’re doing.
Don’t like wars? No one is forcing you to participate.

You got killed in rp? No one is forcing you to pk.

Lost all your cool shit to bandits? Who cares its not even real and you can always get more.

People are toxic to you? Ignore them lmao they’re people hiding behind a screen ragebaiting you and by reacting this way you’re only giving them satisfaction.

 

You’re the only thing stopping yourself from having fun on lotc.

 

Spoiler

Make an orc and come smoke green and travel the planes of existence, most fun I ever had 🧙🏿‍♂️and we’re keeping the ooc drama pretty low

 

[Samson Option 9652]

8 minutes ago, HIGH_FIRE said:

I can't fault a point you make. Morality IRP and Morality OOC are too vastly different things. A player can RP our the most devilish evil creature that would ever exist and be a genuinely good person OOCly, but some people will OOCly view them as a bad person for the RP.

 

I'm guilty of this before and I think most if not all players have fallen into this sense of person X is evil because they do action Y or fight for person Z. It's a trap that many fall into and it really ruins the enjoyment of LOTC and RP. 

 

I appreciate the admission and none of us are perfect. I've no doubt slipped in my long time playing LotC tbh especially in my younger years.

Also, I want to be clear in general. This thread is not me expecting anyone to "confess" to doing any of these nor a sneak diss or a sneak recruitment strategy. This is just an encouragement to raise the bar and to encourage especially leaders/established vets to raise the standards in whatever groups they find themselves in.

[HIGH_FIRE 5490]

1 minute ago, سكون said:

 

I appreciate the admission and none of us are perfect. I've no doubt slipped in my long time playing LotC tbh especially in my younger years.

Also, I want to be clear in general. This thread is not me expecting anyone to "confess" to doing any of these nor a sneak diss or a sneak recruitment strategy. This is just an encouragement to raise the bar and to encourage especially leaders/established vets to raise the standards in whatever groups they find themselves in.

 

 

I don't think anyone should take this as a diss nor a confession, it's a conversation that LOTC and LOTCers need to have. Far too many times have I seen people stress out far more than they should over RP. It's taken a while but I think I personally found a much more healthy outlook on the server and its RP in the last six months or so. I'm certain everyone can get there, it's just a matter of honesty with yourself and others.

[Disheartened 809]

I do agree with what you're saying as a concept, but a few things to point out.

 

Firstly, not everyone has the same interests. People absolutely do act oocly and do things to help leverage themselves for an advantage. That's something both sides do, it’s just tough to recognize sometimes from people on your own side because it isn't directed at you, and you don't necessarily see the consequences. You can't generalize the interests of a whole population of players. You are only one person with your own unique set of beliefs - as we all are!

 

We also need to acknowledge the complexity of "keep ooc and rp separate" because at the end of the day we are all one individual person. Naturally, we might get frustrated at things that happen in game on an ooc basis. I think that's normal, but it's all in how you handle it going forward from there. Can you or should you take rp action simply due to ooc frustration? Absolutely not... but let's be honest and understand that these lines blur and cross regularly. Some opportunity might pop up and you have some bias there in your mindset just due to x y z things that happened that one time in a vc. Sometimes we're oblivious to that bias.

 

How can we fix all that? We can't, but if we notice it happening we can help our friends and peers fall back into line to the best of our abilities. It's definitely helpful to have all this in the back of our minds during times of war or other "intense" roleplay periods. Good conversation to have!

[Narthok 10416]

I am a grumpy person, and there are people I genuinely dislike on both sides of the war.

 

Re: Hyspia, we don't really interact with them enough to have actual beef. I think people blow up how important they are in other people's lives. Most Orc discord discussion of Hyspia is just Gaius posting screenshots of his gorilla wagh interactions with random Hyspians seething as in pic related. The rp beef is over the violation of a treaty that was already a huge compromise / concession for the orcs.

 

8 minutes ago, سكون said:

they don't want rp, they don't want resolutions. they want an empire and they will go through the whole server to get it.

I pointed this out in the Horde discord but I'll reiterate it here. The whole narrative arc of the orcs has been trying to secure space for themselves in the face of a world that hates them. Rply orcs are by far the most reviled of the main races ontop of being the least numerous. The history of orcs on lotc is them doing random banditry before getting nation wiped by a huge coalition death-stack.

 

The idea that Orcs want an 'empire' is hysteria. Even as is the various human factions of the church alliance will randomly insult, grief, draw swords on Horde delegations at alliance rp war councils. The covenant has made no attempts at diplomacy at all. When Orcs walked up to Haense in the face of an obvious war kicking off and offered their mercenary services they were just asked to be neutral. Meanwhile the Church, which had been threatening Orcs with genocide 2 weeks prior over the Hyspia issue consistently reached out and offered mercenary payments to secure Orc support in the war.

 

I do not like how people are so caught up in their insane discord scheme culture that they assume that our community acts and thinks the way they do. We don't do discord scheme chats. We don't sit in VCs and become 'friends' with people for good diplo outcomes. The Orc reasons for their actions are pretty clear and have been RPed out and written about at length.

But I think what really makes me annoyed about the type of thinking displayed by the anonymized player is the idea that the Orcs are 'evil' or 'bad faith' as a community just because we are at war. We as a community have made a significant effort to improve the quality of RP, narrative and the welcoming nature of our OOC community in the Horde discord. This is not just me bullshitting, the fruits of this effort bear out.

This is what our activity looked like when I first took over the Orcs.


This is our activity now.

 

The changes we have made to our community have caused more people to come visit, caused more orcs to rp, and to rp for longer sessions. All because we have really been putting a focus on rp quality and actually telling interesting stories.

If we were actually 'bad-faith' and just wanted to exterminate Hyspia and form a human empire because we are ooc friends with the church or whatever, then why would we PK when it is inconvenient? Why do we consistently do capture / hostage RP?

I forget the name of the Hyspian that delivered Grom's head, but they can attest to the fact that we are legitimately trying to tell a story and that through dynamic RP different narrative outcomes can be achieved. Why did Grogmak instantly kill the Hyspian girl character? Because they showed up with allies and didn't even make an attempt to negotiate or save her life.

This type of No value for life rp where the only concern is 'winning' as opposed to actually ROLEPLAYING the way a character would react to seeing a loved one's life threatened is ******* LAME. Half the time when we go scout Hyspia to see if its worth raiding the city guards will just start yelling at us OOCly. But I digress.

But in short. Do I have some resentment against the Hyspia community? Yeah probably. I think the way Grommash died sucked and I didn't appreciate the meme rp that surrounded his death. He was my favourite character ever. But because people are caught up in this NVL never PK mindset they treated his death as just another murderhobo exercise instead of the execution of a character that has been interwoven with the story of Hyspia and the southern desert for almost 100 years. But I don't think that has in any way led me to be rude or 'bad-faith' to Hyspians oocly or irply.

On Thrall when Hyspian war prisoners are brought to me I will generally try to give them quality rp and a way out. The other day I asked a prisoner why I should let them live and they just kept giving me variations of 'kill me it doesn't matter' in roleplay. They were not interested in storytelling or roleplay. They were mad they had gotten wiped in a fight and were mad they were losing a war.

Idk I just find these play to win mindsets really lame. The Orcs were part of the losing side in the last war. If you read our posts you will see consistent mention of the consequences of that war and the impact it had upon the narrative of our nation and the pscyhe of our characters. Lotc is a 14 year old world. If you play long enough at some point your self insert character and your beloved high-school simulator nation WILL lose and fall on hard times. You can either choose to take that and make it part of the cool dynamic experience. Or you can stomp your feet and say [other tribe] is evil because they are [other tribe]

13 minutes ago, DrunkPapaBear said:

Props to Gaius for this. Its a real issue we need to fix and the easiest way to do so is by starting with how you view the server.

The goal of lotc is to have fun, who cares if you win, loose, die or loose all your rp items. Will it really matter in a week, a month or a year? Caring too much about these things will only make you sad and angry.

 

By playing an orc, its hard for me to understand how some peeps feel so bad while playing lotc, but here’s my advice anyway :

 

Just have fun! Why else would you log on every day? If lotc is not enjoyable for you, maybe its time for a break, maybe its time for you to change the kind of rp you’re doing.
Don’t like wars? No one is forcing you to participate.

You got killed in rp? No one is forcing you to pk.

Lost all your cool shit to bandits? Who cares its not even real and you can always get more.

People are toxic to you? Ignore them lmao they’re people hiding behind a screen ragebaiting you and by reacting this way you’re only giving them satisfaction.

 

You’re the only thing stopping yourself from having fun on lotc.

 

  Hide contents

Make an orc and come smoke green and travel the planes of existence, most fun I ever had 🧙🏿‍♂️and we’re keeping the ooc drama pretty low

 

Orc love

[Islamadon 9158]

I haven’t gone on any raids during this war but will say I’ve found it extraordinarily disingenuous from many Covenant players to parrot the talking point that they are the side of RP and that only they RP and are just being bullied by OOC schemers, PVPers and imperialists. Caroust, Norland, Numendil, See + Vassals, and Koyo-Kuni ALWAYS have RP going on and each country has their own motivations to be in this war. I see Norland and Numendil constantly in events aswell. Covenant never even bothered to reach out to Koyo-Kuni either BTW prior to our entry.

It drives me crazy because a lot, if not all, of the tragedy and supposed RP squashing could have been avoided if they simply won raids (easier said than done) or did not enter the War in the first place. Such is the RP consequence of actions taken RPly against a coalition that has momentum and hunger. Players have to realize that even if they lose it’s not the end of the world (RIP Aesterwald, Caliphate, Oren, Marna, Nu-Kaedrin, Etcetera). Go with the punches, RP it out, and in time your RP will return and flourish and those big bad “bullies” will have moved on or devoured themselves. Not denying the existence of BM raiders tho, but that’s been a thing since the dawn of time.

 

[winterblood 11181]

Too many people care for OOC legacies, unfortunately, to think about offering genuine and dynamic narratives.  People are too focused on "winning the game" at any possible opportunity, both on a social aspect and mechanical, too.  It is really unfortunate to see so much of it bleed into RP, it disrupts so many narratives and turns them sour - no matter how hard YOU might try to keep it flowing on your side.

 

It's a general issues with most nations, even outside of the war; nation RP has been reduced to public-relations larping and it just becomes 10x worse in this war.  Not every nation is so bad with it, but some communities are painfully obvious about what they're trying to maintain.

[TuggIsHere 54]

Absolutely. Players, on both sides in this war, have been getting dragged into the OOC politics of it- in one fashion or another. It's gotten to the extent that rp scenarios are absolutely being affected. I understand the tendency of people to rp characters almost as their persona is they themselves- but if it begins to blur the line between OOC and RP emotions towards a certain group or player, it should be toned down.

[Navigator 4260]

To say this war hasn't been toxic is to be absolutely clueless - the toxicity is just hidden away this time.

 

I agree with Gaius across the board. I'm guilty of the lack of separation sometimes, but having characters on both sides has given me some perspective and I've been tryna get better.

[MailC3p 2403]

I have come to revise my clearly bad take post. 
 

Obviously, there is toxicity and OOC that is clear on both sides. Will it ever go away? You’d be hard pressed to get rid of it, but of course you can try your best to atleast minimize it.

For Haelun’or atleast, especially ever since Celia’nor tried to annex it only about 4 months ago, it was clear there was a heavy anti-Celia’nor bias in RP. In turn, when they joined Haense’s side in the war, Haelun’or leadership saw the chance and jumped straight into the conflict on the other side. 
 

Now, to say that Haelun’or is a bunch of “ooc” “pvpers” (which, i know no one directly has, but it does sound like there is broad generalizations of the Pontiff States and her allies) would be disingenuous, as it is difficult to get anyone in Haelun’or to care about the war outside of killing Celia’nor. Meanwhile,  most of my RP lately has been about a pirate ST event (first one in hnor in a year and a half btw bc ST are lazy (except WightWolf love WightWolf)) and simply just walking around the city on my council member talking to the locals of the city about pretty much anything. 
 

at the end of the day, i understand the doomerism, the league simply has more people as well as more experienced leadership, as well as generally more experienced playerbase as a whole. It does not help however that multiple NL’s and their council immediately pinged everyone in their discords “the last war sucked, this war is going to suck too” , i would feel the doomerism too if i was a member of those nations

 

[Samson Option 9652]

7 minutes ago, Navigator said:

To say this war hasn't been toxic is to be absolutely clueless - the toxicity is just hidden away this time.

 

I agree with Gaius across the board. I'm guilty of the lack of separation sometimes, but having characters on both sides has given me some perspective and I've been tryna get better.

 

I genuinely thank you for editing your comment. Won't speak on what it had before because I can tell you changed your mind to reflect the higher standards.

 

I am also under no illusion that there aren't any "toxic" players. However, I think the better method of rooting them out is by encouraging leaders & veteran roleplayers into sitting said specific individuals down & reprimanding them rather than the 'shoot from the hip vagueposting'. That last sentence is not directed at you as a rebuttal, but a general word of advice to everyone including myself.