[Rasengetsu]

I've been noticing a (personally perceived) lack of people around. Even when the byond page says 50 people and I do a world tour I usually find like 5 scattered around in accessible areas.
Now, I'm pretty new to this game. I've seen active moments and dead moments since I first made a character two weeks ago. The thread is pretty big so far and I've glossed over a lot of it because everyone feels like writing light novels every post, but a few things I've read resonated with me. And now, I'm going to hypocritically write a small novel myself because it's the trend. 

Living World
Living worlds are definitely a great thing that help roleplay. The issue is that while everyone on byond always expects living worlds to "give players full freedom to change the world", as a retired game admin on different games: Fuck that; they're wrong. Players work best as the steering wheel, not the engine. The driving force of a living world cannot be the players because they won't push the story unless it benefits them or directly relates to them. People who like roleplay are, inherently, more introverted than extroverted. Introverts don't go out and seek people. It's best to have a slowly changing world that people can "reactively" interact with in ways that help steer the changes, but not to have a frozen world that only changes if people make it change. Freedom is only perceivable when within confines, else it quickly becomes forgotten as a concept.

Hutting
Nothing new here. People have been doing this across every roleplay game on byond since the history of forever. It's not going to change and no matter how much everyone likes to claim they don't do it, everyone is guilty of it if not already then eventually. I try to stay away from it, but since you're most likely to get some development in these places I end up being guilty of this crime against roleplay regardless.

Player Villains
If you want player villains, the game cannot have a structure that actively punishes such behavior without offering any sort of support. All we've got is the stick and no carrot right now. You can make a villain, but everything about the current game structure makes life easier for the good guys while heftily punishing the bad guys... And who the hell is gonna blow a couple hours grinding a character to max level (god forbid they even LE them...) just to have them die off to guards/prison boredom within a day. Prison sounds nice on paper but ultimately requires more effort to maintain than is possible to work with. You can repurpose when you die but even then, you made that character for that purpose in the first place so it's unlikely to help your motivation regardless.

Event Staff
It shouldn't be up to the event staff to carry us (the players and our roleplay), but experience tells me that it will be regardless. It's a thankless job and it's a lot of work. Even with a team of 10 people it was an ordeal and a half to provide entertainment for 100 over a week, and we had a daily population of 200. It's a massive struggle and I thank you for the work you put in. My advice on the matter is to have many short adventures planned and open to the public with group limits. And if the world is to have changes, plan out many small events for people to participate in. Big events sound nice on paper but never work out in a satisfying way because of sheer fustercluck.

Conclusion
The situation this game is facing is as old as byond RP itself. It is unlikely we will change the way people play because playing shouldn't require effort and changing requires effort. Thus, changing how the game interacts with players is the most likely solution here. We don't need gigantic history-changing events all the time, but a sense of making the world change a little at a time would go a long way to reinvigorating what currently feels stagnant to so many. Small things like a job to take out bandits in an area leading to a raid on Cellsvich/Tannis in repercussion, or finally ending the black beast threat, or through the efforts of players a new town is founded, etc etc, are what I'd like to see personally. We don't necessarily need a bunch of public RP; We can simply have a lot of publicly available private RP.
We probably can't support a full-on villain community (god knows I tried with 200 players and an actual structure for them...) since that would just split our already small(ish) activity, but without (quick) access to items, mercs, shops, inns, or literally anything once you reveal yourself (without risking it all anyway) it's not very conducive to a game that wants this kind of player character. They have no backup (guards etc) and no place they can really call a hub with access to commodities and services.
I also don't believe in OOCing around so... Yeah.



PS: HI MOOSE, I'M IN YOUR CELLSVICH PLAZA PICTURE ON PAGE 3! YAY!