I will not be a doomer

[Smmer 2441]

Dw guys we can go back to doing ddosing trades for crowns and diamonds!

[sapphic_spidy 1089]

There are issues with the server, sure, but I'm determined to enjoy myself out of spite. I've only had a few really negative experiences, because I am determined to have fun. If I don't think I will be able to have fun, or if I'm at all not feeling it, I just don't log on, or I'll mute the discords.

 

Doing LARP has given me a much healthier view on roleplay as a whole. Play for enjoyment and story. I will have enjoyment, I will have story, and no one can stop me :D 

[DrFong 226]

I am very glad to see this positivity! I've been here actively for about 2 years now (on and off since 2016) and have been having a great time roleplaying and trying to build something interesting on LOTC.

 

One observation I have made during my years in the Minecraft server meta-verse:

 

Generally, people complaining is a GOOD thing. It means they care and are invested. They would like to see things improve. There can be gold hidden in those complaints!

 

Be worried if the complaining stops. Because if it stops it doesn't mean the product is perfect, it means nobody cares enough anymore to bother complaining. They have moved on.

 

Thanks for the positivity! Now that I've said my piece I think I will go play some LOTC. I've got adventures to enjoy!

[Rig 17580]

On 5/23/2025 at 3:15 AM, Laeonathan said:

 

How would you say it is, for example compared to 2018? Yeah, Freebuild maybe. But otherwise? 

 

The paradigm shift where Discord was integrated into all facets of the game did enormous damage. Way back, there was a divide in public opinion about whether or not LoTC should swap to Discord at all. Many people were clinging to TS for months until Discord won out due to convenience, and due to LoTC prioritizing it for staff and server related chats.

 

Esterlen has made some very good posts critiquing the ways Discord has reshaped the server's community. This is where the concept of technological minimalism comes in. Yes, Discord streamlines things and makes it extremely convenient to do basic tasks, as well as greatly simplifying the process of speaking to other players out-of-character. However, it also meant that all communication is centralized in two online spaces (Discord and the server itself) rather than multiple (Skype, the forums, Teamspeak, in-game).

 

Sometimes less is more. The function of a technology being limited in scope can have great results. Especially when ideally, we should be mostly conducting ourselves in-game. The forums are more or less for notarizing RP events, storing lore and history, and discussing game-play amendments and features. By lumping it all into one device (Discord), we are hurting in-game presence- not in terms of numbers and activity, but in terms of the quality of the role-play, and the focus of the players.

 

There are some positive changes in the current player culture:

- Intolerance for bigotry and pest behavior.

- Better communication between players.

- Less doxxing and ddosing (though it does occur).

- Great maps, builds and skins. Figura is also an incredible addition to the server for those who install it!

- Admin Team which is not constantly in a state of uproar- admins remain admins for a long time, and policies remain consistent. For better or worse.

- The player community, despite the drama and high school BS, is relatively well-intentioned and welcoming.

 

Negatives:

- People are very coddled and soft. Not because of their politics, mind you, no matter who you spot on the forums whining it's always going to be trying to drill some kind of culture war narrative about stuff pertaining to the server itself.

- The current appeal system is not nearly draconian or punitive enough. But on the flipside to that, Admins are good about issuing Alphabet Bans for people who are recurrent offenders, so this gripe could very well be the most wrong out of everything I'm saying.

- Dynamicism is often killed by Discord presence. Discord makes people clique up and it grows hard for people to run into one another, they orbit all the same spaces, and rarely cross the map on the same persona.

- The issue of players having many personas has been horribly exacerbated, which diminishes the quality of characters due to a lack of focus on one character (this is solely my opinion and less empirical, this has always been an issue, even if it's worse lately).

 

That's more or less my perspective. To expand on the notion of 'Theme Park vs Dynamicism'; in Dynamic RP, things occur because you are prompted to by both the game environment and other players. You are influenced by your in-game presence to make choices for your character. This includes interactions with other players, ET, and maybe fixtures in the environment (world building). Theme Park stuff is essentially you have cut-out nations and cut-out magics which anybody can be integrated in. They get a taste, then swap to the next thing. That's always been a thing mind you, there was always a new nation of the month back in the day which would die not too long after, but the issue with things now is that people have the freedom to do everything, so nobody focuses on one thing.

 

Focusing on one character, one concept, and one task at a time is just quite simply the way to go. Multi-tasking kind of messes things up in my opinion. But people are free to agree to disagree.

[monkeypoacher 8055]

It's a matter of perspective I guess. I've been negative about LotC since the day I joined, I'll be negative about it until I forget it exists, or die, whichever comes first. That doesn't make me a doomer. I've gotten a whole lot of enjoyment out of LotC and the lore and community that came out of it. Even though I never log on, it's a treat to occasionally open the forums and read other people's RP posts, to try and piece together what's happened in the of world of [INSERT 5-LETTER WORD THAT STARTS WITH "A"] since I left it behind.

 

I think you're generally right that LotC hasn't changed that much, and that the majority of the changes have been positive (safety for one, obviously). There are obviously people here who care about this server a lot, much more so than me.

 

But LotC has always sucked! It will always suck! It's always been an ad hoc, cringeworthy, make-up-the-rules-as-you-go-along kind of place. I'll call you on people healing maimings through cloud temple suicide and getting amnesia from golden apples and raise you "*backflips off of roofs and shoots poisoned crossbow bolts at you," or elves tweaking off sugar, or dwarven boat paratroopers, or people replacing their arms and legs with "golem limbs" that let them lift you up in the air. These were good things! Fun, bizarre, emergent pieces of fiction that no one sat down and decided were canon. We either agreed on them or found them too stupid to argue with. If I wanted to read painstakingly crafted, internally consistent fantasy fiction, I would go do that. There's a lot to choose from. But that's not why I come here.

 

I come here because it's where I've read some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever seen someone write in the English language. Someone taking the prompt "you are an elf named Mayilu'taleh (which means "beloved rock" or somesuch in Elvish) in a fantasy world" and running with it from a place of pure improvisation and emotional honesty. I don't think you can separate LotC sucking, it being a minecraft factions server where people write fantasy escapism self insert fiction, from the things that make it a place for genuinely interesting creative expression.

 

You're right, the server has improved. The standards for writing certainly have, to the point where I would argue many of the people here should write their own original fiction. But when we start measuring the quality of roleplay by how extensively redlined and "balanced" the magic lore is, or how professional the builds and skins look, or how many words fit in a single minecraft emote, we lose a bit of what makes this community special. There's a particular strain of aloof zoomer "everything is cringe" attitude that rules on here, and it comes from a place of people not being allowed to roleplay what they want, having to lobby and scheme and bully other people to get to enjoy a sliver of it.

 

TL;DR : Server sucks freebuild now

[argonian 14254]

On 5/23/2025 at 8:38 AM, Tentoa said:

Onto the complaint that everything is arranged through discord and you no longer have to find people, you can still play a character fine without use of discord. IN Aegis you just /t'd the person you were looking for *a bird arrives* and they looked at it and IM'd you IC within moments anyway and all had group chats in skype for organizing RP and btw alarm bells weren't a thing so you could just 'I'm being attacked' in your skype group and have your friends all log on and moderation wouldn't do shit about it because we had no standards for fair play. Most things you did were never discussed IC and were done with flimsy reasoning not for the pursuit of a narrative but the pursuit of a personal goal, only you didn't have to care about other people's fun at all. Anyone telling you something otherwise is blinded by nostalgia for the innocence of their youth. Metaplay has been a problem since the server's launch we just have a name for it now and are attempting to enforce a standard, and while that's not going perfectly, it is making progress. 

This is just fake news though. Skype groups really weren't common until Anthos or late Asulon. Teamspeaks were popular before that, but being a primarily voice-based medium, it wasn't used anywhere near as much and you could only communicate with people who were actually online. /t *bird* was used a lot, but naturally also required you to be online. Offline communication was mostly done through PMs on the forums or books left in chests.

 

And even when Skype became popular - you had a single channel which most people muted. No calendars, no event schedules, no #announcements, no pings. It was useful for metarallying but not for event organisation or anything like that.

 

As for grooming, I'll take your word for it, but I joined the server at literally 10 years old and was never at any point witness to anything like that. There were less rules to ban this sort of behaviour (for example, cybering was only explicitly banned either at the end of Aegis or sometime in Asulon), but again I never witnessed any of that stuff even in Aegis, and to this day Discord ERP still isn't banned, so I think it's 99.99% about what circles you interact with rather than what the rules explicitly state.

[milksoda 2884]

I choose to have fun and when I'm not having fun I do something else that's fun.

[Brevias 275]

It's still pretty good in my opinion.  Although I only stop by occasionally.  I think many changes have emerged since 2011-13 or whatever.  Content provided by Minecraft itself, the growing number of players, and attempting to build upon something repeatedly starting with LoTC's inception can be complex.  Most apparent, is that there is a lot less "skin in the game" so to speak.  The cities are larger, the lore more well though out, it isn't just a crap shoot anymore.  People take time into doing all of this, and that's fantastic.  But, there was a certain charm to the "wild west" style of play we used to have.  I think a big part of this is trying to balance routine, and returning players.  Everyone wants to feel involved, after so many years I think we ended up with larger maps, with less direct involvement, and that's okay.  But you have to recognize you're catering to many many more players, most of which won't be on every single day, and they want some feeling of permanence too.

 

Personally, my favorite was in Asulon, or end of Aegis.  Both were good, but definitely didn't always have the same high-quality RP you see from people nowadays.

 

Things are different, that's alright.  The only real suggestion I could give?  Maybe a smaller world map, it could make things more dynamic, not everyone needs a mansion.