OOC: The Future of II

[Niur]

What the hell do you think a petition is going to do?
Besides, the problem is not thee lack of grammar skills or realistic estimates, it is the lack of an actually interesting RP. For example, I entered the Turgov Rp when I was still a Newbie of a couple million, without reading the stickies, nuked the entire place, and guess what? Did anyone call me out on what I did? No, because it made the Rp quite a bit more interesting, and the thread, ripe with goddmodding and oneliners, was one of the best RP's I had ever been a part of.
Nowadays I am met with three types of RP's: The ones with giant blocks of boring text in letter form only, which are not as much RP's as they are a various declarations of war ; The ones made by players about my age or a little bit older, tht veterans of the new forum, and these consist of large chunks of boring text, about generic wars and such; and finally the ones populated almost entirely by newbies, which aree less generic warfare, and have the possibilty to be intresting, but have no older RPers to actually turn it into an RP, or if they do theese older ones tend to spend the whole time with ooc staements stating what is wrong with the newbies RPing,and doing little RPing themselves.

But when the third and the second types of RPing is combined, You get a story that is both intresting and well written. Yet threads like this only seperate the old and the new even further, dooming II to three stupid and terribly boring types of RP.

[The Great Lord Tiger]

What the hell do you think a petition is going to do?
Besides, the problem is not thee lack of grammar skills or realistic estimates, it is the lack of an actually interesting RP. For example, I entered the Turgov Rp when I was still a Newbie of a couple million, without reading the stickies, nuked the entire place, and guess what? Did anyone call me out on what I did? No, because it made the Rp quite a bit more interesting, and the thread, ripe with goddmodding and oneliners, was one of the best RP's I had ever been a part of.
Nowadays I am met with three types of RP's: The ones with giant blocks of boring text in letter form only, which are not as much RP's as they are a various declarations of war ; The ones made by players about my age or a little bit older, tht veterans of the new forum, and these consist of large chunks of boring text, about generic wars and such; and finally the ones populated almost entirely by newbies, which aree less generic warfare, and have the possibilty to be intresting, but have no older RPers to actually turn it into an RP, or if they do theese older ones tend to spend the whole time with ooc staements stating what is wrong with the newbies RPing,and doing little RPing themselves.

But when the third and the second types of RPing is combined, You get a story that is both intresting and well written. Yet threads like this only seperate the old and the new even further, dooming II to three stupid and terribly boring types of RP.

Wait, so your three types are:

- Lots of writing, political 'action'
- Lots of writing, call and response battling
- Not a lot of writing, but 'not generic'.

You seem to be missing both:

- Character-driven RPs (both 'party-type' in which a group of people do something together, or war/political threads written from a character perspective) and
- 'Premeditated' wars (IE participants communicate in TGs, OOC threads, or some IM service to figure out what's going to happen and/or who needs what to occur, and then writing the best possible narrative to make a fun-to-read story)

Unfortunately, your categorizing seems to be rather limiting. There's only two real kinds of RP for you -- lots of words (which, from what I gather, means lots of reading = instantly boring), or 'less generic' warfare (which, from what I know of the quintessential 'newbies', means short-text replies). Don't get me wrong; I agree that using nuclear missiles and/or planetkiller SWs is less generic than a massive tank battle, but that doesn't make it better.

Spontaneity is great, sure, but there needs to be some measure of restraint. Remember that role-playing is, first and foremost, about making an exciting story that not only you enjoy and that other participants want to read, but that other players who aren't even involved want to read because of its excitement/action/appeal. Sometimes I think people here lose sight of that, old and new alike; RPing IS NOT ABOUT WINNING. If that were the case, D&D games would take hours, not weeks or months. If you enter a RP thread with the intention of victory or for an excuse to blow stuff up, you should reconsider whether or not your should participate.

The problem is with what defines a 'great' RP for you. Does it mean exciting? A dry, wordy political exchange isn't for you. Fast-paced? Narratives, even war-based ones, probably take too much time to build up detail. Like to keep the chit-chat to a minimum? You won't like a character RP. I'm not going to start inserting MY beliefs in here, or say that the only good RP is a verbose Tom Clancy knockoff (albeit in space/medieval times/post-modern times), but you can't simply lay out a 'best RP' template and expect everyone to agree. The problem with one-liners and godmoding is that it takes the control out of the hands of all the participants, which is something that shouldn't occur with our community-based RPs. Now, if we had DMs for threads (oh God, please no), they could, of course, 'run' it. As it is, the problem with these things -- and the reasons that they are frowned upon -- is that either 1.) Godmods take away choice from other players, and 2.) One-liners/too-short replies leave other players with little information or idea of what's going on (leading to the inevitable [OOC] conversation where they're like "Wait, so he's doing what now?", hardly conducive to a good thread.)

And that's my two cents. Thoughts/rebuttals?

[Avenio]

What the hell do you think a petition is going to do?

Besides, the problem is not the lack of grammar skills or realistic estimates, it is the lack of an actually interesting RP. For example, I entered the Turgov Rp when I was still a Newbie of a couple million, without reading the stickies, nuked the entire place, and guess what? Did anyone call me out on what I did? No, because it made the Rp quite a bit more interesting, and the thread, ripe with godmodding and one-liners, was one of the best RP's I had ever been a part of.

Nowadays I am met with three types of RP's: The ones with giant blocks of boring text in letter form only, which are not as much RP's as they are a various declarations of war ; The ones made by players about my age or a little bit older, tht veterans of the new forum, and these consist of large chunks of boring text, about generic wars and such; and finally the ones populated almost entirely by newbies, which aree less generic warfare, and have the possibility to be interesting, but have no older RPers to actually turn it into an RP, or if they do these older ones tend to spend the whole time with ooc statements stating what is wrong with the newbies RPing,and doing little RPing themselves.

But when the third and the second types of RPing is combined, You get a story that is both interesting and well written. Yet threads like this only seperate the old and the new even further, dooming II to three stupid and terribly boring types of RP.

Corrected for spelling and grammatical errors.

The 'blocks of text' you're reading aren't just boring RPs, if you took the time to read them you would know that. Taking the time to flesh out the proper politics of one's nation, the personalities of one's characters and the description of the settings are what makes an RP interesting to read.

The problem with II lies not with the older players specifically, as you seem to think, but with the population as a whole.

[OMGeverynameistaken]

I think a GOOD first step would be bringing back the troll identification and classification project.

A lot of the trouble seems to come from peoples apparent inability to discern trolls from newbies and noobs. Even among older players, they tend to innocently attempt to help a troll out even when it seems quite obvious, to me at least, that said troll be trollin'. Look at Youngia, as sourced earlier. It took people, like, a week to figure out that he wasn't interested in help. And my bets are on him being an old player, not a random noob.

You get that sort of thing a lot, especially as a board/forum/what have you gets older.

I wonder if that thread is archived. Now I can't remember if it was on Jolt or here. Pah.

[The Regency of Stars]

Oh great.... Because the numerous 'II umpires' and 'RP rules summit' style posts aren't doing it for you.

If your too elitist to hang out around the masses, find a bunch of fellow elitists, and throw yourselves closed events. If someone RPs to your standards consistantly, invite them into the group. In addition, perhaps one should say 'no, that's godmodding' to the "I sendz millonz of tankez and infuntray at joor nation. they iz shooting at joor leaderz and defeeted joor armies" Most people are willing to accept that maybe they took a single step too far and those that don't tend to be trolling.

If people are posting one liners, it's generally from lack of knowledge of what to post, or lack of things to post. I mean, I don't wish to re-iterate that Senior diplomat Wolt is sitting at a precarious angle of X for the fiftieth time, and has his hand inside his jacket around his hidden derringer waiting for a reason to shoot so and so. I mean, just stating he has his arm hidden inside his jacket takes less time, and is one hundred times less redundant. The difference between a long post and a good post is huge, and sometimes, a one liner, like 'So and so Shot his fancy pistol, slightly hunched over. The bullet cut through the air like a heavenly arrow, cutting the wind with a thunderous crack.' is better then a three page description of the chemical composition of the bullet, what impurities there are in there, that joe the factory worker urinated in the metal before it was processed, etc etc. I mean it's one thing if all you post is a one-line of everything. I
n addition, Opening posts should contain at least a paragraph of usefull information that I can use to think of a reason why my nation could be involved in the assassination of hitler clone number one trillion sixty seven, the leader of Nazi Germany clone thirty two.

[Niur]

What the hell do you think a petition is going to do?

Besides, the problem is not the lack of grammar skills or realistic estimates, it is the lack of an actually interesting RP. For example, I entered the Turgov Rp when I was still a Newbie of a couple million, without reading the stickies, nuked the entire place, and guess what? Did anyone call me out on what I did? No, because it made the Rp quite a bit more interesting, and the thread, ripe with godmodding and one-liners, was one of the best RP's I had ever been a part of.

Nowadays I am met with three types of RP's: The ones with giant blocks of boring text in letter form only, which are not as much RP's as they are a various declarations of war ; The ones made by players about my age or a little bit older, tht veterans of the new forum, and these consist of large chunks of boring text, about generic wars and such; and finally the ones populated almost entirely by newbies, which aree less generic warfare, and have the possibility to be interesting, but have no older RPers to actually turn it into an RP, or if they do these older ones tend to spend the whole time with ooc statements stating what is wrong with the newbies RPing,and doing little RPing themselves.

But when the third and the second types of RPing is combined, You get a story that is both interesting and well written. Yet threads like this only seperate the old and the new even further, dooming II to three stupid and terribly boring types of RP.

Corrected for spelling and grammatical errors.

The 'blocks of text' you're reading aren't just boring RPs, if you took the time to read them you would know that. Taking the time to flesh out the proper politics of one's nation, the personalities of one's characters and the description of the settings are what makes an RP interesting to read.

The problem with II lies not with the older players specifically, as you seem to think, but with the population as a whole.

For one thing, I am typeing om my granparents broken computer with a keyboard that barlely works, and with out a working backspace button.


Secondly, these thread may seem interesting to you, but to a newbie they are intimidating (yes I know I didn't spell that right, stop making an ass out of yourself.) And to me these threads seemed as if they are much to spread out. A single post loses its value in these RP's.

[Leistung]

:-)

It's just a game and let's be quite clear: NS is totally lacking the basis for roleplay.
I like roleplay in general but i never quite understood why people try to do it with NS accs.
Heck, the missing "core information" as one needs it in games like D&D isn't available at all here, making a "we have 2 million supersoldiers, ultra-mega trained, equal in skill and efficency to 50million soldiers of your country. we know because our spies got the information about your army." very easy.
Just accept NS as some trollcave instead of rp-place and you'll be fine :-)

If you don't want to, i strongly suggest starting to work on some rulebook to prevent "annoying" things just like that.

Because, you know, we don't have any sort of rules or regulations already...

The problem is formalizing things too much. When you do that, then everyone is more concerned about making sure they have exactly the number of soldiers or tanks that they're 'allowed' to have, and the narrative element departs.

Those are neither rules nor regulations.

Either way, it would appear clear that the petition has no further use as moderation has made it quite clear this is not a concern of theirs. If we could all allow this to die, I'd be much obliged.

[The Great Lord Tiger]

:-)

It's just a game and let's be quite clear: NS is totally lacking the basis for roleplay.
I like roleplay in general but i never quite understood why people try to do it with NS accs.
Heck, the missing "core information" as one needs it in games like D&D isn't available at all here, making a "we have 2 million supersoldiers, ultra-mega trained, equal in skill and efficency to 50million soldiers of your country. we know because our spies got the information about your army." very easy.
Just accept NS as some trollcave instead of rp-place and you'll be fine :-)

If you don't want to, i strongly suggest starting to work on some rulebook to prevent "annoying" things just like that.

Because, you know, we don't have any sort of rules or regulations already...

The problem is formalizing things too much. When you do that, then everyone is more concerned about making sure they have exactly the number of soldiers or tanks that they're 'allowed' to have, and the narrative element departs.

Those are neither rules nor regulations.

Either way, it would appear clear that the petition has no further use as moderation has made it quite clear this is not a concern of theirs. If we could all allow this to die, I'd be much obliged.

Poor wordchoice. I meant guidelines.

If you bothered to read the bottom half of my post, you would have realized that and also realized that I was arguing that, on the other side of the coin, too MUCH control would ruin everything.

Also, it seems that this thread is bringing about debate that extends beyond the usual "I hate noobs" vs "quit noob-bashing!" debacles these tend to regress into. There's no reason to let it die in that regard.

[Leistung]

Alright, because it's Christmas and because it's rather late, I'm not going to bother to match words with you. Suffice to say, you said rules and regulations, and the entire point of the thread was that there were none.

Evidently that's not what you meant, so before we go on about semantics, let's just agree that we were both at fault and move on.

[Reploid Productions]

One thing that I think would greatly help not just the quality of posts but also the overall atmosphere would be more people reporting to moderation when we get these one-liner borderline spam RPs... and also reporting players that make a habit of dogpiling on any new player or 'inferior' quality RP. We all have to start somewhere, and a newbie's thread that gets flooded with posts of little more than " " aren't going to help anybody.

Remember guys, we can't be everywhere, and the players are our eyes and ears for this stuff. If you see an RP that is a one-liner and likely spam, post a report in Moderation instead of spamming the thread to the top of the front page!

[Bavin]

I feel lucky to be dragged out of the noob stream, I almost became a noob, but luckily the Auctland thread died, and then Amazonian Beast's thread forced me to write a paragraph instead of the one-liner I preferred at that time. Thank you

This ^

If it wasn't for that Ex Fide Victoria thread with DGNT and Avenio, god knows what kind of crappy-ass one line I would have turned into.

Perhaps a lesson can be learned from this: if you let newbs that are willing to learn into your mid-high quality RP's, they'll learn fast(ish)

[Gc1mak]

Well, after that thread I learnt how to write a paragraph ( although my first paragraph is lousy, involving flying a biplane and crashing it in Edo's harbour). I then stepped into Imperial Civil War thread, which is indeed a very good thread, but got noob'ed and died. The thread's creator told me to write something that actually describe the bigger situation, which is true for a war thread. I realized I spent too many time writing stupid things about how that two soldiers in an old cargo ship chat about their new roomate. And instead I switched toward describing deployment of force, what happened and etc. Sadly the creator is now gone. I liked him though. And then after a month or so, I joined the Draftroom community after having a designer crush on Lyras ( And after someone introduced me to his awesome tank ), and then decided that his designs is so awesome and I joined the region. Which turned out to be a good roleplaying region, I then joined the Smoke on the Water thread, with a bit lulzy starting post. I actually felt my roleplaying skill improved over time, and my military knowledge also did after arguing with designers about each type of weapon's usuage and etc. There's still a long way to go to become an awesome roleplayer, but I am sure that I can make it. The society want to avoid peoples with no language skill at all, and completely unwilling to learn and purely annoying. As far as I see, alot of peoples are like this. But most of the noob here are unable to catch up fast, and start with a very bad post in a serious rp, which annoy the veteran completely. Another thing is completely no concept of OOC and IC, which annoy players in the thread. Beside that, the ' noob ' often choose to create a first thread about invading or declaring war on some country, badly-wrote and most of the time non-sense ( Just like my civil war thread ). That make their reputation among the veteran plummet to the lowest point, and of course the veteran decided they don't worth helping. And noob are not only '09, there are worse situation I saw where I can describe some of the older players still active as noob. It is a horrible situation in fact.

[Mirnect]

I'd like to propose that the thirteen pages of this thread be transferred to a roleplay. Any roleplay. Which ever one you want, because this thread has achieved little except giving Encyclopaedia Dramatica something to showcase on their page on NationStates about how 'the NS community is divided between crap n00bs and elitist country clubs'.

[Malikov]

One thing that I think would greatly help not just the quality of posts but also the overall atmosphere would be more people reporting to moderation when we get these one-liner borderline spam RPs... and also reporting players that make a habit of dogpiling on any new player or 'inferior' quality RP. We all have to start somewhere, and a newbie's thread that gets flooded with posts of little more than " " aren't going to help anybody.

Remember guys, we can't be everywhere, and the players are our eyes and ears for this stuff. If you see an RP that is a one-liner and likely spam, post a report in Moderation instead of spamming the thread to the top of the front page!

It's unfortunate, but many people in II seem to be Mod-aphobic. THey either dislike, or are afraid of the Mods. They are un-willing to get them, or to proud to get them. There's always a reason, and it's never very good, but it seems like the majority of players in II attempt to "self-police", which without a Mods BAN, or DEAT-ation powers, is impossible.

[Ozymos]

[...]Remember guys, we can't be everywhere, and the players are our eyes and ears for this stuff. If you see an RP that is a one-liner and likely spam, post a report in Moderation instead of spamming the thread to the top of the front page!

It's unfortunate, but many people in II seem to be Mod-aphobic. THey either dislike, or are afraid of the Mods[...]

Which is really silly, in all honesty, because as long as you're not flaming, trolling, or generally being an arse on the forums, the mods are easy to get along with.

If you are trolling, flaming and being an idiot, then that's a different story.

[Terlaka]

It's unfortunate, but many people in II seem to be Mod-aphobic. THey either dislike, or are afraid of the Mods. They are un-willing to get them, or to proud to get them. There's always a reason, and it's never very good, but it seems like the majority of players in II attempt to "self-police", which without a Mods BAN, or DEAT-ation powers, is impossible.

Agreed by virtue of self experience. In my case I'm too modest to call the Mods, I don't feel that I'm capable of calling out a nation for breech of [anything] and don't wanna waste the Mods with firverous (sp?) complaints. In compensation I try my best to point out what mistakes a player has made and how they could have improved (without trying to sound pretentious and elitist) and I feel this is just as adequate.

[Chazicaria]

I agree with the OP.

[Telvira]

Why is this still in II?

[Akimonad]

Why is this still in II?

Because it pertains directly to II, maybe?

[Telvira]

But it's not an International Incident. This seems more like a Gameplay thing.

[Ewa beach]

But it's not an International Incident. This seems more like a Gameplay thing.

I don't know...it deals with RPing, and most RPing happens in II. Not in gameplay.

[Telvira]

But in of itself, this is not an RP. It's bunch of people arguing about the quality of RPing.

[Ewa beach]

But in of itself, this is not an RP. It's bunch of people arguing about the quality of RPing.

And the guides are not RP's.

[Chronosia]

If the FT argument thread can be here, so can this thread; it definitively yet misguidedly points to matters key to the heart and soul of II; here it must remain, till those who crafted it know better and/or actual change comes from it.

[No endorse]

One thing that I think would greatly help not just the quality of posts but also the overall atmosphere would be more people reporting to moderation when we get these one-liner borderline spam RPs... and also reporting players that make a habit of dogpiling on any new player or 'inferior' quality RP. We all have to start somewhere, and a newbie's thread that gets flooded with posts of little more than " " aren't going to help anybody.

Remember guys, we can't be everywhere, and the players are our eyes and ears for this stuff. If you see an RP that is a one-liner and likely spam, post a report in Moderation instead of spamming the thread to the top of the front page!

Go go gadget Reploid Productions! Been well?

Anyways, does this constitute a ruling that oneliner crap is spam? (obviously subject to individual review) And do we have a ruling that a wall of OOC nonsense is spam?