Mr_Muffles

Okay, so I will preface my opinion with a story. In late June of last year, an aspiring RPer by the name of Muffles first logged onto LOTC. A few days before, a barely-acquaintance had sent a discord DM about LOTC, and the intervening time had been spent wandering through the wiki (Oh, how foolish I had been) looking for character ideas and submitting my application to join the server. I appeared in Cloud Temple, saw several people around, and... kinda stood there. I tried out some chat, discovered how to talk in OOC and RP, and then wandered around, unsure of what to do. Eventually some orcs found me and brought me to their VC, and gave me the basic run down of how to play, and I set off following road signs to Renatus. After a couple IRL days of logging on occasionally and wandering the streets of Helena, I got picked up to do construction work for a noble. Had it not been for that, and the ensuing rollercoaster of rp and fun, I almost certainly would have left LOTC for good within a few days. At no point did I receive monk guidance or assistance, and as such had no chance to have a negative experience. Now, obviously it is impossible for staff members to be available 24/7 to greet new people, but my experience makes me pretty sure something needs to change. That answers the second and third questions and renders the fourth, fifth and seventh NA. As for “Do I think Monk Guidance is necessary/beneficial?” I have to say yes. Without monks, new players are more likely to have a negative experience on first joining the server, and of being terminally confused at everything going on. This brings us to the first and most important question, How can Monk Guidance be improved? First of all, I think it should be made clearer to NPs that the Monks exist and how to contact them (I didn’t learn about the monks until several months into my LOTC experience when someone mentioned them offhand). Additionally, adding self-help items would be helpful-the recent Wiki program is already doing some of this, as the Wiki I had when I joined was out of date and unreliable. Enabling players to figure out commands and basic lore without needing a staff member’s hand-holding is useful for when no staff are available. I saw one of the staff members mention that new players are asked to do a /creq command (Which I am unfamiliar with but assume is similar to a modreq) on both the forums and discord, and while I can’t guarantee that I didn’t get a forum notification I definitely didn’t get a discord message-I just read through my entire PM list to verify that. And expecting people who just joined a community to constantly check the forums after they got their WL without telling them to is a very unreliable means of communication. To conclude, none of my criticisms are meant to attack staff members or their competency; if I sound petulant then I apologize. Let’s all work on improving this chaotic, unique, and most importantly of all fun place for everyone together.

I personally feel that matchlock muskets would work fine. Primitive, experimental and unreliable gunpowder weapons are great for RP, and you can’t powergame with them, really-wandering around with a loaded matchlock or flintlock is impossible, the former because of the necessity to have a burning wick, the latter because the powder would escape the pan, so it’s just as easy to enforce RP-reasonable emote requirements to fire muskets. Besides, muskets are a really cool part of a ~~fifteenth century-analogous battlefield, and as a military-rp fan I would love to see pike-and-shot formations clashing. Just my two cents.