[Neus]

Player characters can’t affect the world. Player characters can’t become leading forces when it comes to events that could become lore-changing, and in some cases, lore-breaking. I and many other players currently think that SL2 is far too stagnant and too static to be considered a legitimately fun and immersive roleplaying game – right now it just feels like a dungeon crawling MMORPG, and the roleplay that does go on (although not always so) is very frivolous and lackluster.

A very vague and subjective desire. What does it mean to 'affect' the world? You can carve out an identity and help create a facet of the world just fine, and for everyone else, that means you affect it. Furthermore, I'm not convinced that people try very hard to do so, considering the lack of communication on the subject that's been passed to me. Should all characters be able to 'affect' the world equally? Even the ones we dislike or are poorly roleplayed? Probably not, right.

Why can't players become leading forces for 'lore-changing' or 'lore-breaking' (this doesn't sound like a great idea) events? You never really gave reasons why. Have you ever tried or discussed this with a GM? Tried to get some sort of roleplay response from my side through them on the matter? Because the few times people have, and I've seen proper effort put into it, I've typically said yes to such events. Granted, perhaps with different results than what was expected in the end.

Allow player characters to assume positions of power – to actually play characters already established by lore, or completely new ones engendered by players themselves. If a player, for some reason, needs to abandon a character with significant pull in the plot or in the world as a whole, I suggest making sure that the characters always have logs of things they say and do (likely kept in a file in the game, of course), which can then be reviewed by the new player assuming the character and going from events that have transpired.

Going to quote myself above and say no one's really tried or asked. The idea of playing characters 'already established by lore' isn't likely and I don't know why it would ever be; it sounds like a free pass to a position of power and doesn't make sense. You also bring up the very significant issue of 'what if this player decides, suddenly, they want to do something else' and everyone else involved getting screwed over because of it, but your solution doesn't really solve much. Is your idea that a new player is going to play that character instead? I assume most of the time the actual player of that character is going to take issue with that. Even if they were, very few people are going to dedicate the time of reading through huge logs over multiple weeks to try and be consistent.

Allow players, through admin supervision and event forum applications, to create events that could significantly affect the world or portions of the world – wars, infrastructure changes, reconstruction, advancements, technological innovations, companies – all those great things.

Players can and have done events in this manner. I'm not going to flub established lore and NPC reasoning just so they can start a war of dubious RP import (which will just lead to a bunch of people complaining about class balance even more or powergamers on one side; how do you have a war while the permission-only-death rule is in effect? Does it become a war of attrition until one side decides they want to do something else?) Infrastructure changes are very vague; what infrastructure, what changes? Reconstruction of what? Advancements of what? What kind of technological innovations? Why can't you already start a company?

Allow typical characters created by players to go “from the bottom to the top”. Change can be very dramatic and radical – and if a character garners enough of a following, even a political powerhouse could go down and a new leader could reign supreme.

Again, very vague desire. First of all, a lot of 'political powerhouses' aren't very well established in the world, which is part of the reason I'm doing write-ups of noble houses in different parts of the world. Secondly, 'political powerhouses' are often powerhouses for a reason, and they don't always play nice. They'll kidnap your loved ones, they'll kill your men in the street, they'll take you to their hideout and execute you. Risks that some players aren't willing to take on or will try to weasel their way out of, or be the first to complain about GMs/me being too controlling, putting us in awkward situations when really your plan might not have been very well thought out. Again, this is just speculation and former experience moderating RP, because no one's actually come to the team with a desire to do this.

Allow players to map for the game – this has been discussed briefly already, and perhaps setting aside the tools to do this (much like Mitadake High) to incorporate new map features could be established. Through doing this, new areas can be created, and change can be seen in current I.C. locations and venues.

I'd still like to do this, at least for new areas. Existing areas have complications because they have NPCs and such in them and honestly I don't need someone spending a lot of effort editing an existing map for a change that I don't want or agree with. New areas could be good though, so I'll spend some time soon trying to get it working in a way that I'll be able to use in the main game.

Recruit new GMs -- perhaps with applications asked to be filled out, an intake taken, or something -- something to assure that the person chosen is trustworthy in handling the job.
o Likewise, give GMs the ability to cast events once more, with far more stringent and rigorous rules and guidelines set to avoid any abuse they may dole out with whatever new-found, expansive editing powers they may be given. Keep a log of this – a log of each and every editing action a GM gives, I.P. logged, et cetera, to pin-point any potential abuse – if any at all.

There are very few candidates who are active players, and the last one we recruited didn't stick around for long, but we always keep an eye out for potential recruits. As for events, there's nothing stopping GMs from running events currently except lack of tools. I know we discussed this the last time it came up, but it's something I plan to actually dedicate time to after I finish the 10* updates, since I've had a desire to use them myself.

As for houses – right now, they’re great, but unfortunately, the customization is still a bit limited. We can’t customize the exterior of houses, and likewise, the interior furnishings that we can create are magical, but not enough. It’d be great if players could have access to actual map icons to further increase the quality of their houses – for those tiles and those objects used for mapping the world are fantastic.

Exterior of houses is a bit complicated, but maybe if you could put exactly what you have in mind for exterior customization in a suggestions thread, along with tiles you want to use in houses, I can sticky it and look into doing another housing update sometime after the 10* one, since we haven't had one in a while.

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Basically my summary is;

1) A lot of the ideas presented in the thread are really vague and hard to approach discussion for that reason.
2) A lot of the ideas presented in the thread, even vaguely, could happen, but no one has made their efforts aware to the GMs.

I suggest putting something more concrete into words, because I would really like to discuss this topic and see if anything feasible could be done.