Where is everyone?

[Nachti]

Keep it civil please.

And if you really want something to change. Take the time and summarize the results of this topic.

[Steve]

It is exactly the attitude I spoke that is causing problems - complete denial that any kind of issue exists.

I do not think I denied that no issue(s) exist. There are simply some issues we cause ourselves through unrealistic expectations, and some issues that are caused by external factors outside our control.

Based on that construct, you have 1 option that you can do something about.

[unexplored]

I ve read a bit of this thread. Not sure if this has been mentioned before but if you ask me I want a rule to have a small description of your character enforced. Just pointing out the obvious. To learn the guy is a genasi because you read "you stumble upon a corpse of a dead genasi" shouldn't be the way to learn he is one if you have ventured along with him before.
Just a few lines, really.. something to check out quickly if you meet someone and watch him over.
Nobody ever reacts to that if you emote that you take a closer look at someone.


peace

[NegInfinity]

It is exactly the attitude I spoke that is causing problems - complete denial that any kind of issue exists.

I do not think I denied that no issue(s) exist. There are simply some issues we cause ourselves through unrealistic expectations, and some issues that are caused by external factors outside our control.

Based on that construct, you have 1 option that you can do something about.

No.

Frankly, I expected only people to exist and roleplay reaction to events that happen around them. Can't get lower than that. If that's unrealistic, there is a big problem going on.

Any person online is already putting decent effort in it, by sacrificing their time to provide you another character to interact with. In return, you do the same. This is a high price, especially if you take how long it takes to get anywhere on BGTSCC.

Asking people to change their playstyle or character style is unrealistic expectation. Instead of going for compromise, good portion of people will simply leave, because they can't find a place for themselves. They'll be absolutely correct to leave, by the way. Different people are comfortable with different things and are looking for different things. Unhappy players means someone's failure to accommodate.

"Accomodate" part is also important. Because the server requires BOTH players and developers, and TOGETHER they make a world they like. Developers provide backdrops, players provide characters. Playground is useless when it is empty.

When people feel alone or left out, it indicates that there is a problem, and their feedback indicates that the server does not have accessible niche for them. That is something that needs fixing, otherwise those players will leave.

Also, please do people a favor and do not devalue their contributions to the world, no matter how small it is. Even the worst roleplayer will provide you human-controlled character with some kind of unique character, story, name and behavior. And if they leave, you will not be able to replace them with anything aside from another human, because there's no AI powerful enough for this kind of thing yet. It is very easy to make basic combat AI nowadays. However, it is still remains impossible to make an AI with "be a dwarf" as a goal.

By saying to people that "nah, it is you that have problem", "nah, you have unrealistic expectations", you pretty much spit on what they already did in the world and tell them to go to hell. That is not the way to do it. Personally, I find this kind of attitude insulting.

Instead you should evaluate playstyle, identify why people feel left out and try to create a niche they can fill. Fail to create a niche, and players will leave. Keep doing it long enough, and the server will be empty, because lower number of players means less chances for EVERYBODY else to get fun.

For example, some issues I have personally noticed that may or may not turn away some people:

• Assassination rules reduce number of possible assassins, because of difference in conseqeucnes. Assassination victim have nothing to worry about, assassin may get permastrike.
• Conversely, there's no reason to fear anyone, because death is temporary setback. No consequences whatsoever. Even if you tick off someone hard enough to hire assassin, nothing's gonna happen.
• There's literally no place on the surface for evil mages and necromancers. Map has 2 or 3 secluded locations total that can be used for evil scheming and does not have hostile spawns in it. The only place to go is zhentarim, which is locked to lawful alignment. Even roaring shore does not take magic well. So because of that they're encouraged to go to underdark.
• At the same time there's artificial barrier between underdark and surface, so even if evil can blossom underground, it can't really clash with surface forces, ever. That kills opportunies, many of them.
• Not to mention that underdark is drow-centric, so you'll be strongly encouraged to be either drow or a wizard down there.

That's just a few. There's possibly few hundreds more.

The "look into mirror" attitude is passive denial of the problem. It does not fix anything, does not change anything and only creates illusion of making a difference. Encouraging does nothing. People should feel at home even without forum account.

One of the biggest issue bgtscc has is the lack of will to make anything new. DM team is great, players are great, but in my whole time on the server I have only seen one suggestion to make it through - that is "add benches in baldur's gate". Everything else was shot down, forgotten or ignored.

I believe that eventually this issue will kill the server - because people can be ignored for only so long before they get angry and leave forever. Current "dry spell" with low player numbers may or may not be related to it. Time will tell. If you'll be around one year later, then good for you.

Anyway, I do not have anything more to say or add, because I already spent enough time explaining the obvious. You wanted practical honesty, you have it. Have a nice day.

[joleda]

Maybe some of the squashing of conflict between characters, factions, groups, cities, regions, etc., has made the role play stagnate? It's too bad that NWN2 has almost no balance between classes in PVP. What other forms of conflict resolution do people use other than ignore?

P.S. I'm just asking.

[Steve]

Negs, how do you want to be part of the solution?

[Dreme]

Is the problem that "Lone Wolf" types are.. lonely?... I don't sit around the camp fire generally.. and I don't approach strangers and start sharing my life story.. Still have plenty of people to RP with.. However, it should be noted that if you are sneaking around in a black cloak, black clothes and a hood, hiding your face or such, being all "Mwahahahaha" obvious evil like.. my character is probably going to avoid yours. Just saying...

It has been a long running joke on every character I have made that there must be an evil society out there somewhere that hands out black robes, cloaks and hoods to all the evil people once they have proven themselves, probably with some truly evil deed... Bells and I plan to steal all the black dye and change it to pink, so then all the evil doers will at least be colorful and cute!

[emeralddream]

Is the problem that "Lone Wolf" types are.. lonely?... I don't sit around the camp fire generally.. and I don't approach strangers and start sharing my life story.. Still have plenty of people to RP with.. However, it should be noted that if you are sneaking around in a black cloak, black clothes and a hood, hiding your face or such, being all "Mwahahahaha" obvious evil like.. my character is probably going to avoid yours. Just saying...

It has been a long running joke on every character I have made that there must be an evil society out there somewhere that hands out black robes, cloaks and hoods to all the evil people once they have proven themselves, probably with some truly evil deed... Bells and I plan to steal all the black dye and change it to pink, so then all the evil doers will at least be colorful and cute!

Be that as it may. Most evil characters are made for other peoples enjoyment as much as theyre made for the player rping them.

Evil characters are antagonists, Breathing life in this black & white world of BGTSCC. If everyone plays a Chaotic neutral or Lawful good character. How much fun would it be to RP? Im sure there are people like you out there, Who enjoy having your set group of friends to RP with probably even knowing them quite well oocly and probably never had an issue finding someone to play with. Sadly not everyone is you.

Oh and the black cloaks etc is kind of sad OOC things i doubt a black cloak would stand out very much in the setting overall.

There is tremendous amount of pressure on a Evil character in this server where the good players act like evil people towards all of the non neutral/good characters. More often even worse as the Evil characters are restricted by the rules.

An Evil character getting ignored because he is Evil by ooc knowledge or by the way he dresses is a failure by all accounts in my opinion. Not by the evil person even if he was sneaking around going "mwahahahah". (My first instinct would be asking if such a person needs help getting to whatever asylum he escaped from rather than going "oh its a evil person!")

[Dreme]

Is the problem that "Lone Wolf" types are.. lonely?... I don't sit around the camp fire generally.. and I don't approach strangers and start sharing my life story.. Still have plenty of people to RP with.. However, it should be noted that if you are sneaking around in a black cloak, black clothes and a hood, hiding your face or such, being all "Mwahahahaha" obvious evil like.. my character is probably going to avoid yours. Just saying...

It has been a long running joke on every character I have made that there must be an evil society out there somewhere that hands out black robes, cloaks and hoods to all the evil people once they have proven themselves, probably with some truly evil deed... Bells and I plan to steal all the black dye and change it to pink, so then all the evil doers will at least be colorful and cute!

Be that as it may. Most evil characters are made for other peoples enjoyment as much as theyre made for the player rping them.

Evil characters are antagonists, Breathing life in this black & white world of BGTSCC. If everyone plays a Chaotic neutral or Lawful good character. How much fun would it be to RP? Im sure there are people like you out there, Who enjoy having your set group of friends to RP with probably even knowing them quite well oocly and probably never had an issue finding someone to play with. Sadly not everyone is you.

Oh and the black cloaks etc is kind of sad OOC things i doubt a black cloak would stand out very much in the setting overall.

There is tremendous amount of pressure on a Evil character in this server where the good players act like evil people towards all of the non neutral/good characters. More often even worse as the Evil characters are restricted by the rules.

An Evil character getting ignored because he is Evil by ooc knowledge or by the way he dresses is a failure by all accounts in my opinion. Not by the evil person even if he was sneaking around going "mwahahahah". (My first instinct would be asking if such a person needs help getting to whatever asylum he escaped from rather than going "oh its a evil person!")

Set group of friends? Aside from Hoihe everyone I RP with has been met by my character in the last month or so.. And I am still meeting new people daily.

Black cloaks would be VERY noticeable in this setting.. Historically speaking people wore bright colors, not black and brown like some people's misconception. Even in the D&D setting people typically wear bright colors.. Black is a very crude color, and since probably 90% of evil doers wear black, it has a stigma to it...

Evil characters are antagonists, agreed! Now be evil and do evil things like.. lie and deceive.. stop being so obvious! Manipulate.. be interesting.. I've been playing RP servers on NWN for like 12 years... most of the evil doers are the same, wears all black, sneaks around, doesn't speak to anyone.. then you have that small percent that actually RP with people, manipulate, con, lie, cheat, steal, and try to look like the good guy while doing it all (some times successfully!) Those are the interesting evil doers I want to RP with!

[Dreme]

[Dreme]

I am not trying to be condescending (although I realize I probably am), but I am trying to make a point... Being evil doesn't mean being obviously evil, and it doesn't mean avoiding people.. Surely your character has to have some goals.. realizes they can't achieve them alone? Needs other people to achieve those goals? Being antisocial wont get you far, and I don't think you should be surprised when being antisocial limits your social interactions...

[Caleb]

Historically, bright colours were generally reserved for people with money. Notice the reds and blues on royalty. These were expensive to produce colours. Although there are exceptions (blue woad dye was cheap).

[emeralddream]

I am not trying to be condescending (although I realize I probably am), but I am trying to make a point... Being evil doesn't mean being obviously evil, and it doesn't mean avoiding people.. Surely your character has to have some goals.. realizes they can't achieve them alone? Needs other people to achieve those goals? Being antisocial wont get you far, and I don't think you should be surprised when being antisocial limits your social interactions...

Dont really care about what you think some evil character has to act like.

A PC rping slightly antisocial yet still doing emotes & other things and not getting approached by your goody2shoes social butterfly. I dont think the issue lies with the slightly antisocial one when he gets ignored.

Anyhow i merely commented on your obvious evil character stereotypism.

[Taintedglory]

I'll tell you how I feel about all this.

More often than not Higher level people barely interact with lower level PCs, and then most who do treat them like little children and toy with them.

And that drives away players and makes people feel unwanted.

So mostly I have been looking to interact with people around my characters levels and just kind of give the Higher level people a short and sweet RP before moving on. Ofcourse this has its drawbacks, as Im a picky RPer and if the person Im RPing with does not seem to have the basic grasps on IRL human interaction I just start ignoring them. Examples of that would be someone who literally cant type a functioning sentence to save their lives, Or they have no clue what RP is and just thinks that what they saw in WoW is whats considered RP.

There are some who interact with the Lower level people like normal people and actually RP quite well, but for the most part its not like that. Experiences I had with certain alignments of the High Levels have been thus:
-People play Sneaky characters of the CN, LE, NE, CE varieties tend to just sneak around and pick on the lower levels, whispering dumb things to them for hours and threatening them, not really interacting with them as a normal person would.
-People who play CN in general are just being "Gimme money or Im gonna help the badguys" as I had experiences three times with players who are CN like that in events.
-Good or LN people tend to sit around and chat for the most part, but always seem bored and not into the RP to terribly much, like all of their enjoyment of their character is gone.

[Invoker]

Some interesting points guys, thanks for taking the time to write them.

A few things from my own experience, that might or might not help, you decide:

Lastly, I'll say this to you directly and with practical honesty: playing a "less social" character and expecting to have "meaningful" RP interactions, is setting yourself up for direct and constant failure. YOU WILL ALWAYS FAIL. There, my honest opinion.

If this is true, then the server is useless. Because your statement dismissed larger part of the necromancers, assassins, rogues and villains from your story. "Nah, you guys are not needed".

In this case, what is the point of playing?

I think Steve was trying to discourage players that find difficult to find others to interact with from setting up a complicated situation for themselves right from the start. But it's by no means impossible, otherwise you'd be absolutely correct in saying BGTSCC would have a fundamental issue.

By my side, I play a necromancer on the surface, and he constantly interacts with good people. Do they suspect him? You bet! Do they want him dead? Kinda, yeah...he's obnoxious, so who wouldn't be irritated ? Do I have RP and interaction? Tons of it, since the character's creation 1,5+ years ago.

It's obviously hard. But very, very possible. As I said, I don't know how much this will help you, but it is being achieved, and not only by me. The other archetypes you mentioned also are played with the same success if not more.

For example, some issues I have personally noticed that may or may not turn away some people:

• Assassination rules reduce number of possible assassins, because of difference in conseqeucnes. Assassination victim have nothing to worry about, assassin may get permastrike.
• Conversely, there's no reason to fear anyone, because death is temporary setback. No consequences whatsoever. Even if you tick off someone hard enough to hire assassin, nothing's gonna happen.
• There's literally no place on the surface for evil mages and necromancers. Map has 2 or 3 secluded locations total that can be used for evil scheming and does not have hostile spawns in it. The only place to go is zhentarim, which is locked to lawful alignment. Even roaring shore does not take magic well. So because of that they're encouraged to go to underdark.
• At the same time there's artificial barrier between underdark and surface, so even if evil can blossom underground, it can't really clash with surface forces, ever. That kills opportunies, many of them.
• Not to mention that underdark is drow-centric, so you'll be strongly encouraged to be either drow or a wizard down there.

Thank you for compiling a list, I think it's full of important points actually. There are however some bright sides that often people (maybe not you, but generally...) overlook:

- As an Assassin, you can kill NPCs easily with DM agreement (like you'd do in PnP, nothing different). This is classic D&D, and can be achieved splendidly on BGTSCC (it's been done several times, and solved key issues during wars and other server-changing events). For PCs, you need a bit of OOC talk/agreement with the other side, but I think that's kind of normal given the circumstances. It's limiting, I agree, but we cannot demand much more in this respect when another player is involved.

- Death is only as temporary as we make it. I permakilled and retired several of my characters, for instance. It is up to serious RPers to do this, or find other ways to satisfy both sides. I think this is a problem we create ourselves: the server isn't at fault here. You need no mechanic for this (and actually, have an RCR NPC which sort of facilitates the process)

- I don't think evil needs a "place". There are several guild halls both on the surface and in the UD, belonging to factions that are so evil they could scare the Devil. In addition, several evil characters (like a few of mines) are either unaligned faction-wise, or constantly in contact with good factions, even sharing goals with them. Means? Not so much...but goals, at times...often for different reasons. Suffice to say, when a character is complex enough, you can easily exist as an evil character on BGTSCC's surface. It's actually fun, and rewarding.

- The barrier is probably food for another thread. In view of what I said before, though, it is evident I do not personally believe it's a problem. In my opinion, it has actually contributed to preserve the integrity of the setting in the years.

- I don't agree with the last point in the slightest. It's like saying that in BG, the Radiant Heart has a lot of influence, so every paladin is strongly encouraged to join the Order. Being a Drow gives you a place on the social ladder, and being a mage brings status with it, but overall it's just another role to play. Being a Drow Wizard is no better than being a Tanarukk Cavestalker, RP-wise: OOC, power is an RP parameter, not a goal.

This is JUST what I think and what my experience on the server has been. It's not meant to be any kind of St. Cuthbert's Truth, or something...