[Jerry]

People play games to have fun. If they have fun with particular people more often, they'll actively seek those people out for more fun. If those people lead to more people who give an equal amount of engagement and entertainment on the regular, that ends up forming a clique when all those people start actively seeking out those same people for more fun. It is not at all uncommon for cliques to form around- and almost exclusively revolve around one singular individual who's particularly outgoing, creative, or even just charismatic. If people find you pleasant to be around, that can happen even outside of communities like this one. It's how popular kids become popular kids these days, as I understand it. By being the most entertaining and charming.

Cliques fall apart and devolve into personal drama when a bunch of people all get together just to be near that one particularly fun person, and they start fighting for their time and attention, or for relevence in that person's narrative. Or that person suddenly finds themselves suffering from burn-out, smothered from all sides by people wanting their attention and entertainment all the time, to the point that the game stops being relaxing and fun for them and becomes a second job. Without that shining star serving as the heart of the group, it implodes in on itself before too long.

People bring up cliques a lot as a bad thing, but be honest, if you found yourself reliably having fun with one particular person or group- and otherwise being bored and ignored- you'd probably actively sign on for cliques too. If you find yourself bored and alone, you could try being more outgoing and entertaining, producing fun and entertainment rather than consuming it, but hooonestly.. It's exhausting, don't you think?

I don't know, maybe this is common knowledge, and people just like to have the comfortable gripe to fall back on, "Those damn cliques, back in my day-"
If that's the case, my mistake, I'm maybe a little drunk and felt a need to lecture about something unimportant. I get the frustration, people get rooted in with their cliques, and can't be bothered to try meeting new people or giving anyone else a shot to impress them. Too satisfied with what they have to bother seeking out anything more. Some times, it really does just boils down to how fun you are to be around, though. Though you can't please everyone, some folks come into the game looking for one particular kind of experience. The PVP, prosy high-brow RP, power fantasies, if what you're looking for doesn't gel with what they're looking for, you might not have much fun together anyhow. Pushing yourself to be entertaining is exhausting, too. Not much fun for you to constantly be working hard to ensure everyone else has fun. Plus, the more charming you are, the more people crowd around you. You can end up drowning in attention and expectations before too long. Whole different issue, maybe..?

This is one of those issues of being unable to understand each other's hearts at the end of the day, or some kind of romanticism like that. Everyone's just chasing after their idea of fun. Cliques are inevitable so long as some people are consistently fun. If you don't want to form a clique, stop being fun. If you don't want to get stuck in a clique, branch out and give other people a chance to impress you. If you don't like seeing other people in cliques, ahhh.. Well, sabotaging that is kind of- just be fun, alright? Everyone have fun. Spare that extra minute to think about how what you're doing or what you're planning might look or feel from other people's perspectives, spare a care for the extras on your stage, oh star, or you may find yourself alone on it before long.

I love all of you goofballs. So have fun.

[Sawrock]

am i popular

[Sawrock]

am i popular

yes

nice

[Poruku]

Cliques are bad when they start excluding people forcefully or being rude to them. That being said, I don't mind cliques as a concept. Just do your thing and have fun.

[Shujin]

Cliques are bad when they start excluding people forcefully or being rude to them. That being said, I don't mind cliques as a concept. Just do your thing and have fun.

Pretty much, thats the short version of it.


Long Version:

Usually when people mention "damm cliques" they aren't really referring to a group of friends that just hang out, but they far more refer to Toxic Tribalism thats coming from that group. No one is against a friend circle of people enjoying themselves, everyone has their "go to" people for their own reasons. And I doubt anyone does actually mind that.

I think its also worth noting that Cliques in real life and Cliques in tiny community groups like this, can't be weighted equally. In real life you get away much easier with having just 1-3 friends even if the rest of the world ignores you, in a community driven game where the engagement with the rest of the people is pretty much all you can really do to enjoy the game to the fullest, the usual negatives that are associated with "Cliques" when people mention them are way more back breaking, such as: Gate Keeping, Toxic Tribalism, Witchhunts-The people that blindly join the Witchhunt cause friend said so, or simply how the population of the world is distributed/How acessable it is for new people to find the "Real RP".

In SL2 we had it quite a few times where certain Cliques "Exploded" in various ways. Be it that they just become a "guild" thats out there to troll everyone else, that an emotional outburst happend and people simply in order to "win" fuel oil in the flames and attempted to draw people on their side of the sotry and lie about what actually happend or are just over protective of something and take it way to personal and one of the so called "Charming people" uses those people to protect them. 

But that can't be fully avoided. RP is an emotionally loaded topic, many people that play it are very emotional people. Drama happens, Clique happen. But people can certainly reduce the amount of Toxic Tribalism within those, and I think most people refer to that whenever they mention the Cliques and how it used to be, me included.