gralkik wrote: ↑Thu Mar 04, 2021 2:07 pm
Terris wrote: ↑Wed Mar 03, 2021 12:41 pm
People frequently talk about the 'lore' of the game, but frankly, there is minimal lore in the game at all. There are no libraries describing battles of ancient times, no descriptors of the settings. There's basically no support for RP in game at all, and directing people to a wiki that is supposedly player run doesn't count. That's what I mean by it being an afterthought.
Many people recently have complained about the lack of RP on the game. If you look around, what do you see most people doing? Skilling up. Whether they're artisans, elemancers, Dwaedn Wyr, whatever.
There is significant lore in-game; it requires RP to really learn of it with other players. In all my years playing this game (6 or so years), there is a point grind at times, but other times there can be a lot of RP. RP is solely on the shoulders of the PC. If there isn't enough RP, then take some initiative and generate positive, healthy, fun RP that everyone will enjoy playing. People also sometimes want the relaxing grind of their characters rather than deal with RP's negative sides or be engaged in negative/toxic RP (because who even really wants to be part of such?) RP is on the player. Players can run events. In this sandbox, there are always options and avenues to find RP and Lore. This is the way.
I don't believe it is correct or healthy to place the responsibility for generating roleplay on the players alone. It should be a team effort otherwise we sort of end up in this null zone where so many MUDs are of players doing endless amounts of roleplay without any progression.
How the interaction between players and staff actually takes place is completely up to the management but when you frame roleplay in the fashion of its a player owned responsibility to generate it then the game goes from being a game for fun to work and most people play games to escape work and responsibility so it defeats the purpose of logging in.
This might sound unbalanced at first but at the end of the day the staff accepted the responsibility of being staff to make the game for everyone else. The only responsibility players have is to respect the rules of the game, the community they share with everyone else and have fun.
Also to prefusely thank the staff for giving up the right of being funf reeloaders to actually make the fun part for us possible. And for the few willing players to courteously support them in whatever effort they are putting forth and recipricate it in kind when they do ask for help or a repreave. or at least, thats the opinion I hold on how things ideally should work.
I've been a longtime supporter of staff taking breaks from being staff to actually play the game for some portion of the year so new staff can be rotated in, but sadly a lot of MUDs in general seem to have a problem where the staff are in a limbo state of perma responsibility and so burn out, drift away or leave projects hanging for months at a time as they take rightly deserved breaks from constant management.
I also wanted to echo terris's sentiment of lack of lore. Whilst i don't agree that lore doesn't exist in game, the access to the lore itself is low. Now, I had a sense that being the lost lands etc, there is not going to be this big repository of history and information and indeed. I feel knowledge should and would b kept under lock and key given the fallen state of society and the greed of the factions to ensure some kind of security and control but even for that level of post apocalyptic paranoia I feel the lack of information is still too low.
80 percent of the lore I am aware of is OOC and I've been playing for nearly a year regularly at this point. My character realistically has seen the hints of old cities and what might have happened to them and such like that but in the IC environment he doesn't know any details of even a rather big event like the inquisition or Mistlake's forced pale soldier enlargement program.
the rumor system is lovely but isnot and I don't feel was meant to be a substitute for lore wholesale and whilst players are given some tools to record events, said tools are not intuitive enough to perminantly record lore and keep them organized in such a fashion as to be accessible to new players without,, in one case,, joining a guild to ruffle through their board and letters.
All this and I am one of the few players it seems who's characters will go out to super dangerous locations above their own skill simply to read room descriptions and see if he can figure out what happned to this village that was clearly inhabited recently. Even when I do find something, most players I ask about a mystery come back with. "No idea boss. Haven't even heard of that" / "Yeah I've been wondering about that thing for years."
My point that ,, I hope,, comes across is that there is a great deal out there and whilst I do find the game fun enough to log in for now. Its mostly to reach a riln goal I've committed to and for me, watching my bank account grow is fun for the time being. After that point I will likely return to my more mechanics and grinding focus till I get bored. I feel that the game's built in systems and even help and suggestions from other players hasn't adequately taught me to interact with the environment in such a way as to win the kind of engagement that would encourage me to focus more on my roleplay.
TLDR, if there is lore and engagement to be had, it should be loosened up a little to flow more freely. Lack of access is equal to non existence and whilst I feel that Terris is a little aggressive at times in how he words it. I do find it a little discourteous to be told, you just need to do X as a response. if I needed to do X for this last year and haven't been doing it already then the game needs to automate a way to have taught me to do X sooner. As is, I feel like with the way the think ritual and request systems are implemented vial manual approval at every step. it places an untennable amount of work load on the staff and fails 70 percent of players IMO.
P.S.
In no way was any comment I made above meant to offend anyone. I hope its taken in the constructive manner in which it was written.
