Northern Socialist Council Republics wrote:Lavan Tiri wrote:a general agreement to avoid reliance on Discord
This is and has been for some time a routine complaint of mine.
Nothing kills my interest deader than an RP that launches with all the pertinent world building already complete, a half a dozen registered reservations right from hour one, and an OOC thread that’s more boring than a church because everyone’s discussing stuff in a private server.
I'd disagree that Discord communities are a problem. As I've said before, they're more a response to a problem. One of the problems, I think, is that just the typical method of throwing up an OOC thread and waiting on signups from a random selection of players doesn't work as well as it used to.
To sum up my view of it quickly... Someone else in this thread pointed out the numbers, and just how many more threads were running in 2015 compared to 2020, for example. You didn't really need to work as hard to foster a community because there was an overall higher level of activity and even if some people were inactive or dropped out, you had a higher chance of getting the required activity to keep the thread going. These days, there's less fish in the pond. Losing "fish" hurts your thread more. Part of the rise of Discord is because having a private community encourages closeness and builds investment and increases attachment to a thread. These things matter more than ever.
Let's be real - running a thread can be a lot of work. It's exactly as much work as you put into it, but many of us come up with detailed lore, intriguing plotlines, and of course spend time thinking of how the players will interact with the thread. Making sure that everyone can do something and that as few players as possible will be left feeling like they're just sitting around without a role. We might have to think about things like difficulty. Not making a task like combat too hard while also not simply making it a display of how awesome the player characters are as they blitz through the opposition with no challenge by virtue of being the protagonists. Most people don't want to read curbstomps too often, in either direction.
You get the idea, there's a lot to do. So let's say you're doing all this and you think you have a great thread on your hands. What do you want to do from there? Stick to just an OOC thread and hope that it gains traction and people get invested just from that? But we all know that an OOC thread isn't exactly allowed by the mods to become a chat thread, and even assuming you don't need to have a chat thread to be successful, just have a look around the forum now and at how many threads have very active or large OOC threads compared to the past. There's not as many, and not all of those threads use Discord.
Not having Discord doesn't bring back the old school OOC thread mentality where people talked a lot and the thread could jump a bunch of pages in one night and others would log on the next morning and ask for recaps since there had been a ton of posts. Most of the time it doesn't bring it back, anyway. There's a thread or two around now that still has this kind of thing, but these real active OOC threads went from a usual occurrence to an exception to the norm. Also, I think Land of the Free has the most active OOC right now.
That thread is originally from like 2019 and the 2019 thread is a successor to one from 2017 or so. In other words, in a way, it still is a relic of "older" P2TM that's lasted into the present day. One of the other largest OOC threads belongs to Dance of Chaos, which was created in 2018. After doing the math, I can see that it's had about 3.7 posts per day since it was created, on average. Which is respectable. I respect the longevity and how it's going still after all this time, certainly. But is that really all we can do when it comes to activity around here?
Really, I'm pointing all this out to say that the era of really active OOC threads seems to be mostly gone. There's like one really active OOC right now that I know of and that's about it. I'm also not counting threads that have a bunch of pages after being made recently because the start of an RP is the easiest time to rack up pages. To get a bunch of pages right from the start isn't really hard at all. But after a week, a couple weeks, a month, that's when you see what the thread is made of.
Much of the time, as an OP, it's more attractive to try to build up a community on Discord where there's not a restriction on chatting and where it's easier to build investment. And investment is key because without it, the work put into a nice looking thread and interesting plotlines and a cool premise or anything else doesn't matter. Far too many times, this goes out the window after the thread gets a decent burst of activity at the start and then this tapers off and the same players end up seeing it slowing down and jump to a different thread with their activity instead. But are they just as likely to do that if they've gotten more attached to their characters through discussion on Discord? Or used it to plan out plots in more detail than the kind of planning that usually happens in an OOC thread? Or if they know the in-jokes and are friends with other players, in large part because they've talked more than they would have while just using an OOC thread?
In my experience, things like these are often the difference between something great that gets remembered for a long time and a thread that doesn't take off at all - or one that lasts for a bit with a slow existence of dropping in and out of activity. Now, I'm not knocking threads like that, not everyone can post actively because of either circumstances or their own lack of interest in doing so. But those of us who aspire for more have to rethink our methods, because the objective numbers show that things aren't the same as in 2015 and that using the same methods has only brought about less net activity at all.
As an aside, I'm not saying this all for doom and gloom either. This "RP decline" is avoidable IMO. I'm saying it as a sign that anyone with a more than casual interest in RPing on Portal should really think about their "tactics" so to speak, instead of keeping the exact same conventions from half a decade ago and expecting the same outcomes.
TL;DR: The old style pre-Discord OOC threads that a lot of people remember and talk fondly about are very nearly dead. Many threads exist without Discord and this doesn't do much to bring back the busier OOCs people remember from the past. And OPs should think more about these facts when making a thread, depending on their aims. The formula from a half decade ago doesn't have the same results these days.