[GM] Seizure of the Red Crystal Den by order of the Octarch

[cdmoreland]

I don't know that anything will make a difference at this point, Gonger. I (Waesed) was at the Devs meeting the day they took the RCD and was not told of anything. We had at least 3 events in the planning stage. We have been more dedicated to the RCD than the Devs have been for showing up at their own meetings.

The damage is done and it's time to move on.

[Donari Tyndale]

The problem wasn't the management of the RCD, I think Damola did a fine job, but there is only so much activity that can be generated with 20 players online. Taking one of the last player owned venues out of their hands helps reduce the players interested in the game even further, great thinking, GM team!
If you really want an active RCD, you should instead focus on making the game more interesting to play (Not mechanics wise, RP wise), instead of taking any incentive away to play.

[jemima]

My thoughts about the things going on regarding the RCD.

Usually I keep my mouth shut. You hardly ever hear me on any forum.
Since I was involved in the proces of taking over the RCD I have to stand up and talk.
At the time Ad Libertatum and the Family took over the RCD I was the guildleader of the Family. That's how I did get involved.

Around april 2014 the RCD had not opened for a long time. Dannae did not have time to open. She was willing to hand over the keys to a new owner.
Weased from Ad Libertatum did want to take over the RCD. The Family also was interested.
We did have a talk with Dannae. While making plans for the future of the RCD both sides did agreed that we - Both Ad Libertatum and the Family - would run the RCD together.

I did have long talks with a GM. I wanted to be sure that we would not get harsh interventions by GMs. When he did assure me that that never was going to happen. I did agree to the whole plan.

A donation of 4 million tria was made to DOX and keys were exhanged.

So... Let me make very clear... NO GM was involved at this stage. They came in later... Much later... with shattering force...

Both Weased and Damola would run the place.
They soon did find out how hard it is to get enough players together to have the Den open as often as they wanted.
But still they managed to open the Den. Sulaika soon joined the staff.

In 2014 the Family was - at least for planshift standards - a big guild. Both Ad libertatum and the Family were big enough to open the den frequently. Over time many active players disappeared. Now the biggest guild is only able to get 5 active players online on a good day. The same goes for the Family. We are a small guild now.
This means it's hard to open the Den.

When Damola opened the den... I was there. I always was there...
Even with 20-25 players online we managed only to get 3 to 5 players inside.
Damola behind the counter and two to three Family-members talkling in front of the counter. If we were very lucky... one or two other players did show up.
With less than twenty players online... You could get two or three players in if you were very lucky. I can remember many openings when Damola and I were waiting for other players to show up. They never came.

I know everyone wants to enter the building in their own terms and in their own time... but that's not how the Den was run. And to be true... It could not be run that way. All drinks and food where there for everyone to take.
Only with a person behind the counter we were able to prevent the place to be robbed empty.

And now.. The den is closed...

How to go from here?
I don't know. Actually... I don't even care.
Since the GM-staff did slam the door behind them there is no way back. We only can go further on the chosen path.
I don't know where this path wil lead to... but I won't be suprised if the den will stay closed. If we are lucky it wil be transformed in a place as thrilling as Guildlaw. At least that would mean that we can enter the building.

We can only hope the players who screamed the loudest to free the Den will step in and make things work.
If they do. I will even look where and how to support them.
But still... talking is easy. Doing something is not. It means that you can't sit back and wait. So I think it's up to the GMs to handle things.

I did speak a lot with (former) GMs and devs. All did tell me the same story over and over again. A few even let me read part of the logs they still did have. 
The rudeness displayed in these logs always did amaze me. Every time you think things can't get worse someone managed to find a way to top things. This is how we lost many good and active members of the GM and dev teams.

It seems that this way of behaving is now displayed to players willing to help out. The blunt way the GM-staff did behave to the staff of the Den will never be forgotten.
In stad of feeling sorry for themselves that they did have handle. The GM-team owns de Den-team a huge apology for the rude way they did handle things. I'm sure this will affect the involvement of these players and their guild as a whole for a long time.
Judging from the reactions in guild-chat the family-council will prevent any future guild-involvement with any long-term activities. Maby even any activities at all.

I feel cub enough to apologize to Damola, Weased and Sulaika for screwing up.
After contacting a GM I really did think we would't be harmed by the GM-staff. I really did think we could pull this off.
That both guilds could do something for Planeshift with minimal interference of the GM-team.
I was proven wrong. I'm sorry that my poor judgement did put you all in harms way.

I know this ship is slowly sinking. I think most players know. You won't safe the ship by kicking part of the crew. You need to give them tools to save the ship.
Now we have tools nor crew.

Jemima

[cdmoreland]

I went in when Iridia opened the Den and got the armor I left that was to be given away. Iridia never said anything though I greeted her and then told her I'd got my stuff. Maybe she was afk.

[Roled]

Another abuse of self appointed power...

The management has killed their own game.

[MishkaL1138]

Over the curse of the years I haven't agreed with the Game Masters and the Development Team in many of the choices they've made, even going so far as to actively try and be a pain in the ass for them - with hilarious consequences. I have also made many a plea and pulled on all the strings I knew could pull to try and get a guildhouse when the market for them was dead, and tried to make it so that I'd get a reward for (egotistically) thinking myself a great roleplayer and then use it to build a thriving roleplay metacommunity inside the slowly dying playerbase.

Boy, was I wrong.

You know, my choice to stay out of PlaneShift was mostly to flee the drama that developed from whiny players and misunderstood actions. Since I have found out it's nigh to impossible for me to flee it I've decided to come on in and chip in with my two tria cents:

Another abuse of self appointed power...
The management has killed their own game.

As usual, Roled, I can't help but feel you're mongering hate towards the administration without actually stopping and thinking about the underlying motives that have driven them to carry out these actions. When you're on fire you just don't run around blaming whoever caused the fire: you stop, drop, and roll to try and fix the problem. What I'm suggesting is that, instead of wailing and ripping at our head and chest hairs, we thinking about the road that has led to this (I'll admit it, unfortunate) turn of events.

[A whole message I won't quote completely, but you can read if you click the link above. I highly recommend you do, though.]
~ by Jemi

This right here is where it went wrong. I was there when AdLib started. It was a great idea - no really, it was! Antisystem radicals against the otherwise oppressive government. I didn't agree to it ICly or OOCly - I just didn't like the idea that it was based off, but that's just, like, my opinion. Good. And they even had the manpower to go with it, and even manage the Den. But... you know, it needed more. Political discussions in the Den, providing asylum to prosecuted people, all that. After all, they were going to take over the RCD, weren't they? The thing is, we were expecting more RP, and we were let down.

The Family was originally a guild in ezpcUSA, the non-RP server. It is, to this day, a quasi-dead guild full of PLers that barely (if ever at all) roleplay, other than to drop shields on your toes, and not much more. Now, I'm making a generalization, but you can't really say I'm wrong when you think about it. As to playerbase dwindling...

The problem wasn't the management of the RCD, I think Damola did a fine job, but there is only so much activity that can be generated with 20 players online. Taking one of the last player owned venues out of their hands helps reduce the players interested in the game even further, great thinking, GM team!
If you really want an active RCD, you should instead focus on making the game more interesting to play (Not mechanics wise, RP wise), instead of taking any incentive away to play.

How about you open the Dark Empire guildhouse for all to enjoy? Or why didn't you step up and ask for am old management switcharoo? After all, it was just 4 millions - you could've asked around and get everyone to chip in, for the sake of keeping the RCD alive. I'm not blaming you personally, I'm just baffled you know about the playerbase becoming smaller and smaller overtime and not exactly taking blame for not being the change you want to see in PS. Because it's the players that make the playerbase smaller. Less players, smaller playerbase.

Oh. Right. Real Life. And other games. You see, PlaneShift has a LOT of good things that many people don't know they like, and many other bad things that can be overlooked but everyone, being the goddamn nitpickers they are, won't choose to ignore. PlaneShift is free. PlaneShift has player-driven fun. You can't rely on quests to give you the fun, you have to make your own fun. In a sense, it's going back to your childhood. The problem is when unimaginative people play this game: cybering, leveling, and whining is all it'll be reduced to.

I won't go into what is causing the playerbase to slowly fade away into nothingness. But, honestly? Why it all boiled down to this?

THE RULES

Behold! Take a look!

• 7 - Do you accept that any guildhouse given can be taken away at any point if it is found you are unhelpful to new players, combative with Game Masters, failing to role-play or not keeping sufficient server presence to merit the use of a guildhouse or for any other reason deemed appropriate by the Game Masters or any other development team? (Note - A guildhouse should be considered a privilege, and not a right.)

THIS. This right here. I emboldened it for you. What does this mean?

"You're not doing your job. We're taking your house away."

So, while we're acting all entitled, we've got to remember: no matter how much we claim and whimper, claims aren't facts. No matter how much you argue you've worked for your boss, if he thinks your rates have gone down, you're still getting fired. And when this is all done and said, repeat after me:

We could've done something.

But we didn't. Me included. Now let's bawl over spilled milk, and try to find another place to use for roleplay. Because, let's be honest, who isn't roleplaying about it in game?

Mishka out.

PS: Curse you all for making me log in to try and bash some sense into your thick heads.

[Jilerel]

The problem wasn't the management of the RCD, I think Damola did a fine job, but there is only so much activity that can be generated with 20 players online. Taking one of the last player owned venues out of their hands helps reduce the players interested in the game even further, great thinking, GM team!
If you really want an active RCD, you should instead focus on making the game more interesting to play (Not mechanics wise, RP wise), instead of taking any incentive away to play.

How about you open the Dark Empire guildhouse for all to enjoy?

Coming soon™

[Illysia]

Honestly Mishka, while I figure the game will never actually die, I don't think there is much any of the players in game can do to lift it up. I'm not saying the basic premise for your post is wrong, but I don't think being the change you want to see will be enough at this point. It just leads to burnout.

Making an RP community work requires not only the investment of the players leading the RP but also the players around them that participate it. But, from what it sounds like, there aren't enough players left around to have enough support in either group.

At this point, players might as well just try to have fun the best they can, and if they aren't having fun take a break. Burnout and animosity will do worse for the long term prospects than lower player count.

[verden]

At this point, there is nothing that can be said that has not been said already. If the "solution" were a simple one, it would have happened already. An art overhaul -- as basically impossible as I know it is to do -- would get people coming back to check out the game. But the problem is really one of _reputation_ now. Not to mention that it is impossible to have a consensus on what the roleplay chimera really is, in a way that is meaningful to all people involved.

[Illysia]

I think reputation could be overcome with enough charm, but Planeshift's charm has always been it's RP community. There are games with "worse" graphics that have completely devoted fans. However, if the community is too small, it will be hard to develop the charm as no one can be everywhere at all times in the game.

[Jilerel]

It's a feeling I always had.
The game itself doesn't work on its RP aspects. It's like if the RP was a mod of Planeshift.
I mean, almost everything in the game is not helping Roleplay in my opinion. Grinding, alt char/death system not really worked on RPly, economics...

[Illysia]

I've seen RPers hang on in games with far less for RP than what PS offers. Verden is right, though I don't think it's the larger part of the problem. The game needs more goodwill, especially between players.

But, I think it is hard to get a central RPing core in this game that is able to hunt down and draw new players into it's circle. The world is too large, the players too few, not enough agreement on what to do, and after a while you don't want to have to teach everyone you try to RP with. Sometimes, you'd like to just be be able to enjoy the activity without instructing. But, without that core, I don't think the game will every really recover.

Also, there isn't much to RP from on a grand story scale. The world is too stagnant beyond maybe the GM events and the few events run by players. If you miss out on those, you may not have anything to work from. I had that trouble several times in the past. I couldn't say much about what my character was up to beyond business, there was little to talk about in Hydlaa beyond murders, and even with characters mine knew well you could only rehash old history so much.

[Volki]

Honestly Mishka, while I figure the game will never actually die, I don't think there is much any of the players in game can do to lift it up. I'm not saying the basic premise for your post is wrong, but I don't think being the change you want to see will be enough at this point. It just leads to burnout.

It's the players and the moderation.

For PS to survive, all kinds of roleplay need to be allowed. Where Mishka says there is no imagination, I see potential. Roleplay is an escape for people. They're going to cyber, they're going to level, and they're going to whine. These are natural human behaviors. Players need to be given the freedom to do what they want, and more people will play the game.

Moderation needs to be equal for every player, it needs to be held back until necessary, and players need to feel welcome to express themselves and roleplay whatever they want as long as they are reasonable and responsible. The GM team should be separated between those who can essentially be dungeon masters and those who can moderate the players.

The game needs less focus on hardcore grinding and more on roleplay. Back when PP and tria were necessary for training, we had an economy, and removing the importance of those two things in regard to training made it disappear. Not suggesting we go back to that, but it might be worthwhile to greatly reduce the amount of time it takes to max out a skill, or preferably make leveling negatively exponential so that grinding is only really useful up to a certain point.

I honestly think that constant grinding reduced the amount of roleplay. Then, when players no longer needed cash for buying levels from trainers, they no longer needed to interact with other players to sell goods at a reasonable price.

There are probably a myriad of reasons, but I believe it's these things which led to the disappearance of the player base. At this point it's up to the remaining players to rejuvenate the game. I'm currently working on my own real skills to hopefully build new assets for the game (when I have time, which is now, luckily).

Here's muh five-point plan to rejuvenate PS:

1) Give more freedom to players: less punishment for undesirable behavior, such as cybering (responsibly), leveling (as long as they're not egregiously OOC), whining, criticizing, and simply being offensive (which is NOT harassment, so get over it).

2) Use game mechanics to necessitate an in-game economy.

3) Do something about the GM team. People have been complaining about this for ages. A good moderator is not necessarily a good roleplayer. We need DMs to run events, not GMs.

4) Change the leveling system. Make it negatively exponential, which is reflective of reality and will prevent players from maxing skills in a way that won't annoy them.

5) Players need to contribute. Become part of the team, run events, use the forum, and, most importantly, roleplay.

#ElectVolki2016

[Jebow]

Interesting. I had not considered the loss of need for PP to be the cause of the loss of the economy. But I had 100K+ PP and could generate PP faster than I could tria when I was having to buy a level.

So, here is my opinion, however worthless it might be, for what is wrong with PS:
1) No economy - Goods that might be interesting to have are dramatically expensive (ie 300q magical armor of some sort), making tria is easy when grinding making those items both (a) affordable and (b) unimportant when I can make my own or close to it - so why bother buying it from someone else(?).
2) Ridiculous amounts of time to level anything except stats, which just takes enough money and the right NPC - 0 to 400 in a few hours if you have the cash.
3) Quest trails are difficult to find - you might do one or two only to not be able to progress because you didn't find the start of the trail to begin with, NPCs aren't always that helpful at pointing you in the right direction in many (most?) cases.

Fixes:
1) (Disclaimer: I'm not an economist) Paying more for better quality is still a good idea, but maybe not dramatically more... perhaps the NPCs who sell things could sell better quality items for more as well... this doesn't keep me from buying from players, but (I think) could make the market a bit more competitive. As it is, buying anything from an NPC results in a 50q item, but what if I could buy a 50q short sword from one NPC, but a 150q short sword from a different one, but if I really want something 200q or better, I either have to make it myself or find a player merchant, at least then I have more of a choice of how much money to spend or with whom assuming my character doesn't make the item I wish to purchase.
2) no idea... have seen both ways, liked it better when I had to pay a trainer, but finding the trainer was also annoyingly difficult. Maybe a hybrid approach that doesn't allow me to progress as fast over time until I buy more training (ie like a certification or something kinda like the magic ways used to be or maybe still are with adepts, apprentices, etc). So a trainee sword maker can continue to train (aka grind) forever, but the Q for making swords will max out and the trainee won't get  any better until they see a trainer and level up to journeyman, which allows them to start making higher Q swords quickly but diminishing over time to a max, etc. Would possibly not fix the length of time to max out a skill, but might make it more reasonable to support an economy. Also worth considering if there are skills which conflict, so that improving one prevents improving another... just an idea - maybe not a good one.
3) (Disclaimer: I have noticed some improvement on this one already) but it might be nice if a particular NPC knew more about the NPCs (a) close to them and (b) who train similar/same skills. So if you wanted to learn music, but you talk to the wrong NPC who happens to know about music, they could point you to the right person to talk to, or if they don't train music but are "close" to someone who does, could point your to the NPC close by who could point you in the right direction.

More on topic to this thread though, I'm saddened that the GMs took the approach they did, I'm saddened that we perhaps lost some people I enjoyed to RP with over how this was handled. However, even though I was only in the RCD once in a while (usually due to timezones) I don't think there needs to be such a thing as specific venues where RP takes place. Be IC and talk to people as you go by them... walk more often than run, after all you don't go dashing about the mall to buy things IRL, right? (or maybe you do...;-) yes it will take longer to get places, but you'll miss fewer opportunities to engage other players (however few there are) with little bits of casual conversation and possible adventures.

I will miss the RCD as it was, we'll see what the future holds - Thanks to Dannae, Damola, and others (whose name I unfortunately don't know) who ran the Den for a while, I, for one, appreciated the effort you put into making it a cool place to hang out.

Best,
Jebow

[Illysia]

Stop what?

Here's muh five-point plan to rejuvenate PS:

1) Give more freedom to players: less punishment for undesirable behavior, such as cybering (responsibly), leveling (as long as they're not egregiously OOC), whining, criticizing, and simply being offensive (which is NOT harassment, so get over it).

2) Use game mechanics to necessitate an in-game economy.

3) Do something about the GM team. People have been complaining about this for ages. A good moderator is not necessarily a good roleplayer. We need DMs to run events, not GMs.

4) Change the leveling system. Make it negatively exponential, which is reflective of reality and will prevent players from maxing skills in a way that won't annoy them.

5) Players need to contribute. Become part of the team, run events, use the forum, and, most importantly, roleplay.

#ElectVolki2016

Some of these may work, I can't say. But I think the problem is that players get into a rut of how they "should" do things, and if they have to do differently they just don't. I remember clearly how much more I RPed outside of PS, partially because things hadn't stagnated so bad in those places yet. I even picked up new skills. It's probably not a lack of freedom but a lack of moving outside of a comfort zone.