I'm sorry, new areas and events leading up to their release just isn't what we do in Lusternia.

We just like to release flavourless bashing areas and wait to see who stumbles on it first.

()

Yeah, I agree with Eventru's sarcasm--there have been plenty of new areas released each year. As far as I can see, the IRE wide promotions have not affected the development of Lusternia's areas. I mean, Hallifax and Gaudiguch just got released in late 2009, and there's been several new places added each year. And there's been some foreshadowing of possible things to come this year.

Here's what was released in 2010 (from the year in review).



So I think this year areas released may be more general.

Wish you'd try it on some of the older players, to us it looks like the Shadowdancers are all sorts of stagnant. I wish being little Daem with Druken being all scary with the Get your triad done! While Shayle is cheering me on to do it, be active, and have more stuff to do.

I dunno, I have some trouble handling really in-depth RP outside of player or admin organized events because I either find that the other person has extremely cliche or grating (bad spelling/nonsensical) RP or it's really not an appropriate place/time to be broadcasting emotes to an entire room, where half of the people there reallllly don't care (Don't care IC, that is).

Remember when Aloysha was going around saying he was from the future? That was a clever RP, and he played it fully out but it made no sense, and he cut it out after an admin/time expert npc told him he was insane during an event. For the most part, people either ignored or were put off by his insistance on something that made no sense. "But that makes for good RP, you can RP thinking he is insane!" You say? I say "Bluh." I'd rather not have to deal with people insisting on things that every character (including theirs) should know is insane/wrong, and not RP-ing a derangement.

The same thing goes for Serenwilde. Every so often we get a bout of people who come through with a half-notion of what the general Seren RP style is, who vehemently insist things are a particular way that they are NOT, either politically or actually theologically. This tends to crop up a lot in the form of "Why aren't we allied with Celest? We are good, they are Light, bluhbluh" which makes little sense with the startup RP of Celest (the Light bit) and the way everyone RPs Celest, like a sort of corrupt church, preaching one thing and doing another. I'm very put off by this.

As a result, I personally have more of an emotional and overarching theme to my character that I follow when prompted, but I shy away from hardcore emotive RP. If I thought I could get away with running around smacking people who have badly done/nonsensical RP, I'd do it, but I can't really do that. I try IC anyways.

EDIT: Don't forget annoying, two-dimensional cliche RP!
Serenwilde-Savage/Snuggly.
Celest-Rainbow Goodness in everyone/paladin (mercy via death).
Glomdoring-Shadows. Blood. Not usually done in an original way.
Magnagora-Evil. Look tough, or try to lie out of things (usually badly).
Hallifax- Intellectual/stogy. This runs into issues if you don't understand half of what you say.
Gaudi- Insane. This is a hard one to play well. Otherwise you end up just being silly or OOC.

Bluh sorry about the double long posts.

On a more positive note:

I think one way to help promote good RP would be to make orders less of simple war-machines or rites of passage. I think that if godadmins/order head players came up with original or deep RP archetypes and orders became less of social clubs, you could bump up some decent excuses to RP. Don't protest at my analysis of your order, please! While many orders are internally more then that, you couldn't tell from the outside.

For instance: I've had experiences with two of Celest's gods on various characters that were extremely off-putting because the feeling I got was more "You aren't a Celestian, go AWAY" then anything indicated by what I heard of their teachings from other characters or the HELP files. This (for me) extremely cheapened their RP. On one character, I incorporated that rejection into my RP, but it wasn't really reconcilable for my other character, so I suicided that startup.

I think that a top-down method of helping would be to divorce the orders somewhat from the cities. If you, for instance, changed the necessity of war shrines and categorical enemying to all of the divine of a particular city, you could legitimize much of order RP in my eyes. Some gods are war-like, so the current way makes sense, but not all are and it's jarring how they are pressured to go along.

I liked the old idea of Elostian as a city-less god, though in practice, I actually really hate the way his order runs, and his player's style of RP/play. At least it's consistent and (seems) to have kept on going the way it was, though it has gained a city.

Celest is not rainbow goodness/church like. This is not Achaea.

Your wish is my command!

Incoming younglings often get that way, or are warlike paladins who vow to purify the world with their sword/angel/song/whathaveyou.
The church bit refers to the feeling of dark ages catholic church, where it became a matter of secular power and might, preaching humility and so on, and turning around to return to their gilt covered downy beds. EDIT: (honestly, this is more interesting, especially if you lampshade it)

I despise references to the church or anything that would liken the Lusty Paladins to the Paladins of Achaea. We're just not like that. The Light encompasses a variety of worthy tenets that pretty much any org can subscribe to. Celest is not 'good'. Celest is all about righteous fury/justice/balance/purity. Celest is not 'bad' or corrupt because they don't mind stabbing a taint-lovin Seren or two, for instance. Methrenton is all about war!

Re: Ascendance.

I'd be up for removing it and going back to old demis, so long as all the ascendants went back too. Or I'd be up for giving everyone access to everything in equal measure.

What I don't care for is, having a small number of people given access to that sort of content, and everyone else hits a hard-coded wall. I'd much prefer that everyone be on the same playing field in terms of what they have access to.

Re: Aetherspace.

It can stay or it can go. The problem with it going now is, a good 80-90% of people would be forced in to influencing, or competetion for prime hunting areas due to the mob changes. Astral is rough. I could double link as a paladin. As a cantor, I've had some really close shaves with single links.

Can you take your tougher folks and bash astral? Yep. But that not only requires having those folks to begin with (looking at you, halli/gaudi), but it also winds up meaning that the only way to get anywhere is plodding around with a group. And I couldn't type the word "hate" enough times to express how much I dislike games that force that.

I'm not talking about the paladin guild, but likening all of Celest's attitudes to either goodness (which you protest), or the fury business in the manner of the crusaders (which you point out is closer to how many are). I'm saying that both are utterly predictable/boring/grating. I've never encountered Achaean Paladins, I kept to myself when I played in Ashtan long ago.



That's precisely what I'm talking about, it's a tired idea. You also see very little of balance from the outside. Some take on that would make it more resonable, imo. The entire Light/holiness through the killing of heretics/infidels is kind of old news.
It also leads to "It's not greifing because you aren't Celest or its political allies (and we declare you are impure), and I therefore have a perfectly RP reason to kill you on the drop of a hat. That's what my character does, deal with it." Admins have warned against this. Also, calling that different what from the old-style church (seriously old schoool, nothing against most modern churches) witchhunts were makes no sense. If you have the dual duties of judge and executioner and use that to gain moral high ground, you are indeed functioning in a similar manner to such organizations of old. (Which again, is OK if you lampshade or acknowledge the fact, instead of two-dimensionally continuing to RP otherwise. )

EDIT: Of course, this is in no way a problem confined to Celest! We run into it a LOT in Seren also.

Make Centaurs a playable race.

I don't know about the "RP is dead/flat" parade that people seem to be saying. In Glomdoring, our families do 'alliances' and 'agreements' (Ysav'rai-Inseira Marriage Agreement, Stormcrow-Nightshade, etc.); Master Ravenwood is an interesting place to hang out because that's where the family heads take snipes at each other. Just recently the Nocht Order revamped itself and activity and interaction seems to be increasing. Regular herofete/penumbra gatherings make people socialize with one another.

I visit Gaudiguch a few times and interact with a few people. Iytha sometimes visits Glomdoring and has a discourse on spirits. Some Celestians and Gloms poke fun at the Light-Shadow team-up.

RP's far from dead or flat, from what I can see.

Not to mention some awesome wonderful and adorable Shikari roleplay.

But yes, we use our families to prompt roleplay, not to mention individual character quirks and what's available from the Commune/histories.

Yes, it gets extremely disheartening when nobody wants to play along, but some of the stuff we're doing didn't pop up over night and there are always times when it's not as strong as it should be or would be nice to have.

I sometimes think about the way things were in Lusternia years ago, the sorts of events that are depicted in some of the history plays I wrote, for instance. I try to imagine something as brave, rich, world-affecting, player-driven, and deep, as the Disciples of Crow versus Summer Court stuff, happening today, but it just makes me glum. Or I try to imagine taking the things that happen today, and trying to force them into the frame of a story that would be worth retelling like a play or book, but that's no better. We used to have conflict about actual things, peppered with but not limited to fights; now we have fights, but are they about anything, is there any conflict behind them? Maybe that's what people mean when they say roleplay is flat now. People still do rituals and have feelings about their cousins and pontificate about abstruse topics, but is there anything anyone does now that should be written down as a story for the ages? That seems like too much to ask. But it didn't used to be.

Roleplay is not something the administration really has much control over. They can hint and they can prod, and I feel like they've done that (just look at the atmosphere of the new cities, for example, and try to tell me the administration didn't care how they were played). The 'chatroom mentality,' however, is something that always has existed and always will exist, to be frank. Looking at the past and thinking "omg that was so much better" is almost never accurate or helpful, either. There's a thing called nostalgia; humans have a tendency to forget the bad things that happen and remember only the good things, leaving behind a sense of a golden age that can't be recovered. It's happened in real life; it's happened in video games. In Achaea the players like to long for the past, when roleplay was better and there were things like the Vertani event. This was also the time when players were doing things like *snuggle* on guild channels.

Slightly unorganized post aside, I don't think it's fair to expect massive world-changing events on a constant basis, or even every year. We've had some big events in the past year, and I expect we'll have some more in future. Quite a bit of hinting has been done re: ice skulls, for example. Bitter is almost never the answer.

EDIT: One other thing that I forgot to add. The only people we can blame for roleplay not being as awesome as it could be are ourselves. Try not talking on your OOC clans for a bit. Just, turn them off and play the game. Don't visit the forums for a little while. Maybe go and visit another city or commune and talk to the people there. While you're bashing, invite someone from your org you don't really know. Don't jump straight to the forums about things that happen in-game (I'm guilty of this one!). I don't mean to sound like I'm rebuking, but these are all tactics we can try to help improve roleplay without immediately starting to complain about how the administration needs to make things better.

Roleplay is really something a character has to seek instead of expecting it to fall down on top of them. Most of the complaints about Celest being this or that really are unfounded as its fairly easy to give broad generalizations about any org that makes it show up in a poor light. While the trouble usually ends up being with the player making the complaints - determining what an org is "supposed to be" in their own minds then never really being flexible enough about things to see alternative view points or roleplay within that same org.

In essence, if you want good/varied roleplay the solution isn't blaming your neighbor, it's really being at exceptional roleplay yourself and having that influence others around you to do the same (yes, even the enemy orgs). Not seeing that often ends up being one's own fault more often than not.

That this tendency exists does not mean that it is always, always, always responsible every time someone thinks something has changed for the worse. Simple mathematics says that 50% of the time, things that change change for the worse. Therefore, sometimes, it's not just nostalgia. Citing nostalgia is necessary but not sufficient. That's why I didn't just say "things were better" but gave specific examples and questions to inspire consideration of what's changed and how. I did my half. Now other people have to do their half and actually consider them, instead of dismissing them because we have the word "nostalgia" in our language.

Untrue. Having two discrete outcomes to an event does not mean that each outcome has the same chance of occurring. Additionally, for outcomes as abstract as "good change" and "bad change", this simply does not hold in any way.

Back to your regularly scheduled thread.

Let's not be pedantic. The man had a good point; obfuscating the issue with semantics isn't helpful.