[Tanasinn]

I'll pitch in a couple opinions on the state of SL2 as someone who does not exist in any real clique, has only one or two real friends to speak of, and is in public roughly 99% of the time I'm actually on.

The first, the community is often heavily toxic towards roleplay in public.

Ever since I first started playing SL2, public RP has been treated as 'gross', 'lazy', and 'bad'. I cannot count the number of times I have seen people say things to the effect of, 'lol imagine rping in public' in a condescending manner. I have seen people drop by a public spot solely to drop something insulting in emote or looc and leave the area. I have seen people who were active in public to a high degree get poached into a clique and then within a week regurgitate the same tired complaints about RPing in public, despite everything. I've seen people specifically targeted in attempts to force them off the game because they didn't RP the right way in public. All of these things add up - Especially when the people who complain usually do the exact same RP things, just in private.

I have seen this even extrapolated into the wonderfully circular, "You RP in public" -> "RP in public is bad" -> "You're a bad player for RPing in public" -> "We'll never allow you into our groups" -> Stuck always RPing in public because there are no groups to be a part of.

In the end, some people end up not wanting to RP in public because it makes people see them as 'fair game' to insult and mock behind their backs, or sometimes, straight to their face. Nobody wants to play when it feels like trying will get them shit-stomped by everyone for it, especially when dislike of one character usually gets extrapolated by people into dislike of the player unless they're already friends. That isn't even bringing up general toxicity, like new players getting told to kill themselves for selling things that aren't 'valuable enough', or anyone with a basic question getting shouted down. If you don't luck into a group or people who will be nice to you, this game is impenetrable and painful.

The second, playing an antagonist really do be like suffering.

You generally want some kind of conflict to help drive RP, but often, it's really damn hard. I can't blame people for their IC not wanting to interact with people they dislike, of course, but let me give an example.

For a little while, I put together a group of people to RP bandits. We had a headquarters, we would go out into people's camps, and we would rob them. We didn't force fights, and we didn't even demand actual goods, having been perfectly willing to accept fluff items/money. The hope was to give people things to talk about, stories to tell, maybe occasionally an injury or two for further RP and growth. In short, it was the most mundane antagonistic thing you could realistically have that wasn't jaywalking.

What ended up happening was, between emotes, someone wandering into a camp, leaving, getting half a dozen people, coming back, and jumping us. When dragged into Arjav, we were left in a holding cell for over a real life week waiting for... Anything. While waiting, I then got several angry messages accusing me of being a terrible player intending to make people quit, for daring to be antagonistic.

This is what attempting to do even low-level antagonistic stuff nets you. Locked out of the game, and personally insulted and hated. God forbid you do anything more permanent, even with giving them a chance to evade consequences, because people will hold grudges for over a year. This is why antagonistic stuff is generally locked to a very specific group of community-liked players, and only in their own cliques, as someone else mentioned. If people want more conflict that isn't manufactured by people bantering back and forth in private discords, something about guardwork or the community's reaction to things happening has to change. As people have been saying for as long as I've been playing, getting jumped by half the server sucks.

As a further note on antagonism, if you end up with a lengthy prison sentence, you are forced into solitary, which means you are doubly locked out of RP, because you can't even RP with other prisoners.

I'd also wager a guess that some of the downturn is that now we have event-admins, groups are now actually able to have their events with a bit less focused planning, which leads to people being busy with those and RPing around those, coupled with the state of the world and other things coming out to drive people's attention elsewhere.