[MakeshiftWalrus]

It's been a while since I've gotten a chance to post my thoughts publicly, so let's give it a shot. I'll try to make it brief.

OOC Characters/Existing OOC

• Characters that exist in the game environment in an 'OOC' fashion undermines the RP environment and can create confusion about when and where it is appropriate to try to start RP with someone.
  
  
• Similarly, people behaving in an OOC manner or polluting the IC channels with memes and OOC jokes are distracting and have a negative effect on RP.
  

Being OOC is one of the few liberties SL2 has over other RP games. In all of my years engaging in role-playing, it has been the only game to date that has even allowed people to walk around, and do things OOCly. This, I feel, is largely due to the tons upon tons of mechanical interaction you can have with the environment, and I don't personally feel this is a bad thing. It becomes a bad thing when people do it excessively, or try to abuse it. But there are areas your character wouldn't necessarily go that has required facilities (Such as Lawrence in Law's End) that essentially forces you to slap on your OOC tag if you're not keen on the idea of paying out five bucks for a science kit in the Asago bank.

The latter point is an issue with the community's viewpoint of the game, and how little the game actually takes itself seriously. It's hard to take it all too seriously with how many pop culture references you can find in the game, or how much inspiration is taken from other media when it comes to design choices. I'm not saying the game is worse for it, but it does shatter the idea of a unique identity.

Applications for Events, Requests, Lore, Etc.

• The process for getting things approved and requesting them is vague. It is hard to see when someone gets something approved and for what reason.
  
  
• For this reason it is also hard to know if someone actually has some aspect of their roleplay approved, or if they're just making things up.
  
  
• Sometimes the lack of transparency creates a feeling of favoritism when someone is denied something, but sees others get things approved.
  

All three of these should honestly just have been a thing from the start. It's a result of being too hands-off with moderating the game both from you, but also from the GMs, of which I was also to blame naturally. The complete lack of actual guidelines for what you can achieve, or cannot only make it all the more confusing for what you could aspire to accomplish, and there have been all too many cases of one GM allowing an inch, and the player then taking a mile. While I don't necessarily think everything of this needs to be, or should be applied for publicly, there obviously needs to be more communication between the staff about what's happening-- steps I know were taken before I left.

Community: Cliques

• The game often breaks down into friends only wanting to be around their friends instead of RPing with others they are less familiar with (for whatever reason).
  
  
• Could partly be caused by people breaking down the RP environment with OOC-like behavior or 'memeing'.
  

It's only natural for people to group up to assure they get what they want out of role-playing. We're social creatures, and why should we waste time with something we don't like, when we could hang out with people we know will give us the fix of creative writing we want? The issue here isn't that people are forming groups, it's that people outside of said groups get huffy that others are having fun, instead of focusing on their own things. In my experience, most of these 'Cliques' are open for people to join in if they actually want, but poor OOC-relations are the actual enemy when it comes to trying. You dislike someone who either spearheads a certain group, or is a prominent member of said group, and it makes you feel unwelcome.

The idea that people are criticizing others for hanging out with their friends is quite frankly incredibly silly.

As for the second point, the memes only (usually) happens in public, because of the incredibly unserious nature the environment tends to create. I cannot stress enough that the general standard of public role-playing is so bastardized compared to the creative writing in more private locations that you might as well be looking at two different games entirely. I've spent countless hours watching people walk around on characters that obviously aren't serious. Sometimes they're funny, most of the time they aren't. The issue with this, however, in my own opinion, is that memes aren't punished unless they actually go too far.

Sure, people shouldn't be 100% serious all the time, but we can't possibly be so starved for creative ideas that we have to use another funny skeleman to make bone puns while dancing in the fountain, right? It wasn't entertaining the first six times, and it probably won't be the next, either.

World Rigidity

• People perceive the world as incapable of being changed or affected in any meaningful capacity.
  Lack of Roles
  • People perceive that there is a lack of place for their character to go, and positions in the existing world that their character can fill. (Not just mechanical Roles.)
    

What people mean with the world is rigid, they mean the average player can't change anything if they wanted to. A player shouldn't necessarily have to go through an eventmin to accomplish something, it should be something that they can achieve with their own, two hands, and their creative writing, or at least, that's how I view it. People want to take on jobs that can affect what they're interacting with, and the eventmins, while largely helpful in these matters, should not be a requirement for an adaptive world.

If you look to other role-playing games, there are almost no important positions that aren't filled by player characters. They have actual sway over armies of others, and has worked incredibly hard to achieve what their power grants them. They can have political opinions, and might choose to rebel, and create conflict with somewhere for example, which is utterly impossible in the context of SL2 as it stands, because as Crixius said before, everything is just fine, and dandy. Everyone is in a big ol' lull in history, and any meaningful engagement between nations are squarely in the past.

Water sourcers are meaningless in the world, and nobody respects a doctor who slapped his name on a board, and got randomly selected through a lottery.

What people want is high-standing political positions capable of shaping laws, or land. Being promoted to generals in the army, and overseeing actual, tangible troops. They want official in-lore guilds to climb the ranks of, which is why the Dormehan Militia is as popular as it is. It's a faction that actually gets a bit of scraps from the game, and that's fantastic.

Things like the Church Knights, the Verglas Monastery, the Geistritters, the Agency. We also want spots like being in Sigrogana's aristocracy, or the Alstalsian High Council. All the roles that keep the world rigid are filled, and that's what I personally feel the core of the issue with these two points are.

If you think this is incorrect, then guide us towards the things we should be doing. Yes, it's our job to create the narrative we want to live in. But it's also your job to show us what we're capable of doing.

Conflict, Rules of Engagement

• Rules for expected etiquette in situations of conflict only exist in vague terms.
  
  
• Playing as an antagonist character carries a lot of risk with very little in the way to bounce back; a single failure often carries extremely harsh punishments, including long times in jail away from meaningful RP.
  
  
• Other parties, including guards, can often feel like an insurmountable, infinite, and at times omnipotent force, stifling antagonist encounters and RP.
  

Most villains tend to exist in the form of event characters, and I think that's a terrible shame. It serves to create this alien entity we can't touch outside of the events they specifically orchestrate, because they have every right to just slap on an OOC tag, or go: "I'm hiding in my secret Alstalsia base nobody can find." I apologize to the people I'm calling out with this one, but I've seen at least six terrorist cells just chilling on Zeran lands, and it just never made much sense to me.

But I understand their sentiment, because whenever villains do make themselves a thing on the map, people always show up en masse, and just mob the villain to death with endless PvP-requests. With how integrated PvP actually is in these cases, it doesn't help that the people playing the villains are super-hyper-optimal as a result of just not being allowed to lose, or are face-swapped characters that exist only these purposes. We have some ways to alleviate the pure mobbing through the fleeing rules, but it isn't perfect, and I feel guidelines for conduct like this are a must.

I feel there are many issues with the guards, but the primary one is not that they're capable of spawning out of the woodwork in major cities. That should be the deterring factor to doing illegal things within large settlements.

Personal Thoughts About Other Things
1) People feel like they can't RP when they aren't max level, leading them to spend more time grinding instead of roleplaying, which can exacerbate the lack of finding RP.

2) It skips over potential character development and puts your character right at where you want them to be, giving them less room to grow.
3) Max level characters appearing out of nowhere leads to characters feeling ephemeral and without much substance.
4) It encourages the same behavior out of other people, as they may feel excluded if they do not.

I must hard disagree with the notion of an increased level cap. It wouldn't make characters any less likely to disappear, because the way players treat characters is by swapping new faces onto old characters once they've gotten bored of them. Why wouldn't they? They've spent hours grinding up a Vampire to do stuff on, so if their new concept is a Vampire, and it has all the gear they need, why not just ask a GM for a name change, and boom, enjoy your fresh new character without any of the effort.

That's what makes characters feel ephemeral.

Having been a GM, I can safely tell you that any GM-involvement in checking things in-game just would not happen. The GMs as a whole aren't on the game enough to make this ideal, and I have little doubts that any of them want to feel forced, or pressured to be around more. Even so, rather than increases to parameters that will obviously just be abused for more PvP-shenanigans, the aim should instead be to reward the people who dedicate to their characters with unique possibilities.

Things like I mentioned before: Important positions in the society of the game, or unique items which aren't stronger, or better, but might hold importance to the lore. Unique opportunities to accomplish things that other players might not, unless they also dedicate their time to growing less than ten characters over a longer period of time.