RPing Planeshift: How to "Enforce" it

[Cyrus Arckum]

Excuse me while I scream at all of you.

 THE GAME MASTERS ARE HERE TO BE MODERATORS, AND THEY CAN BARELY DO THAT RIGHT!! GIVING THEM MORE POWER IS POINTLESS AND SUICIDAL FOR THE COMMUNITY. PUNISHING NON-ROLEPLAYERS? WHY? BECAUSE YOU DIDN\'T \'CLICK\' WITH THEM? IF YOU WANT A WORKING COMMUNITY YOU DO NOT PISS THE MAJORITY OF PLAYERS OFF, THAT\'S WHAT HAS KILLED MANY MMORPGS ALREADY.

 Okay, I\'m done.

[Zan]

Perhaps it \'ll be better to create another group besides the GM\'s that will handle quests and handing out rewards. I don\'t think anyone should be punished by the way since that will only drive people away and create problems. But I don\'t have anything against rewarding roleplaying, I just don\'t want to see a lot of people getting pissed and ruining gameplay for all of us.

Anyway how about a group of Quest Masters or Event Masters who will get the neccesary access to give an extra value to PS by creating story elements and quests. Off the top of my head I \'m thinking of the ability to take the shape of monsters and NPC\'s, change their stats and/or location, change NPC responces/dialogues and hand out rewards in the form of certain experience points, items or trias.

Their job would be to give some variation to the game and make for more interactive experiences. While the GM\'s stay around to do their job. Making sure people behave, nobody abuses names, etc.

[Cyrus Arckum]

Aren\'t all the things you listed things that the Devs can do? We already have DMs, they are the admins.

[Robinmagus]

Well actually Mr. Temper, the devs cant do any of those.

Dev-short for developer. Not babysitter to all the n00bness. Admins...wait..doesnt a member/WTB member become an admin? I wanna know the answer to that before I finish my response.

[Drey]

Game Masters have admin powers(i think looking at the way we get the powers we do..?), so does that make us admins?

I havent put too much effort in to giving quests, yet. When i did the response seemed to be poor, this could have been due to poor planning. I have also seen Platyna attempt to get people moving, she had a nice story line behind hers but players seem to be put off by long lists of collecting items. Currently as i see it we have little that we can use to put on quests.

also like platyna said, if you have suggestions tell us and we can try and get them going.

[Zan]

Originally posted by Cyrus Arckum
Aren\'t all the things you listed things that the Devs can do? We already have DMs, they are the admins.

Of course the Devs can do all those things but do you want to wait even longer for the next update? I \'m certain the Devs have plenty of work for them already, they shouldn\'t be entertaining us and making a game at the same time. And as far as I know the GM\'s can\'t do most of these things, perhaps the higher level ones ...
I understand that the game isn\'t stable enough at the moment to allow people to mess around to that extent though but this is the wishlist forum.

Drey, of course people will show little interest to finding or collecting items. Either a newbie hears you giving out a quest but since s/he is new to Yliakum they won\'t know where to start and it could take them hours or even days to figure out where that item is. So they won\'t be very interested in carrying out such a quest. Or a player who knows enough and knows where to get said item hears it and goes to get it in a few minutes, if it \'s not too far. Again not much fun or roleplaying in there.

The quests I \'m thinking of need to be well prepared and planned, they are probably more like events. I think a perfect example is Ashamn\'s idea of setting up an expedition to check on the Ulbernauts. It was a very fine roleplaying experience with people playing healers, mages, warriors, scouts, ... That was mostly improvised and worked out nicely. However if there were people with the \'powers\' I mentioned above they could create a lot more events like that and build on storylines.
The expedition to seek out the Ulbers was a nice story but I doubt it will go on simply because we have nothing to go on with. Ideally I would like Yliakum to become a dynamic world where everything changes over time. This can\'t be done with programs or code though, for such a dynamic environment to exist it needs to be under human control.

That is where the Event Masters come in, they can control the NPC\'s and the monsters ... make sure they aren\'t always in the same spot, get spawned on that same location or say the same things day in and day out. They generate a perfect environment for roleplaying, where things change and nothing gets boring. It \'s all about giving people oppertunities.

[Drey]

Well Zan, if you have any plans i am willing to help out

[Sensotaka]

My concern about this scheme is how you would prevent corrupt practices by those in charge. Fir instance, suppose 2 playeds do a quest, Player A is not known to the GM/DM and recieves a reward (say 100 tria and 5pp\'s). Player B does the same quest but is well known and liked by the GM/DM, what would prevent him from awarding his friend 1000 tria and 50 pp\'s?

Like it or not, politics is in play in Yliakum...

[Drey]

logging of GM actions, if we abuse our power we get in trouble.

[Keyaz]

GM\'s aren\'t just picked out of the blue and thrown into no-mans land, they are monitored, taught, monitored again, tested and trusted, wether we like someone or not we do treat everyone equally and before people start telling me to shut up because of incidents i have been involved in I\'d say it\'s best to know absolutely everything about it before you throw the blame, impartialness and one sided opinions dont make the truth, being honest and straight forward does, that is what GM\'s do

[Zan]

Originally posted by Drey
Well Zan, if you have any plans i am willing to help out

That is good to know and appreciated. I \'ve already been offered help from quite a few Game Masters with most of my projects or quests. Alden was there throughout most of the Festival of the Hunt and coughed up a very nice sum of prizemoney, a GM was always available when I performed a wedding to rename the happy bride. And recently Stfrn put a bounty on the Ulber\'s head who was making the forest road unsafe.
All this in the defence of the GM\'s ... however, and this isn\'t meant personal at all, the GM abilities to create events like the ones I \'m hoping for are very limited. Basically all they can do is cough up funds or perhaps even teleport a person on occasion. I \'d like to see them or a seperate group, doesn\'t really matter, to have more ways of altering the world in the future.

[Wired_Crawler]

I\'m glad, that someone shares my opinion (Zan, about Event/Quest Masters), I\'m happy that GMs are willing to help (maybe You are not so  evil, Drey ), and I\'m surprised, that GMs have so little powers.
Let me bring to the forum this example once again: Second Life: Features. Players can alter the world in many, many ways, they can also create sub-games... I don\'t say, that PS should copy any of that features (if it is possible at all), but ... NPCs (even with excelent AI) will never substitute living man, who can react to many non-standard player actions and make improvisations. I also think, that it is not good idea to create closed group of \'gods\' controling the world. I think, that life of GMs is not easy, probably sometimes they would like to participate in events like ordinary players... And sometimes ordinary player would like to make others happy by using his invention (I wrote \"sometimes\" ).

Cheers

[Zeraph]

Games I have played, only the first couple of quests in the game are doable in a row, but once you have completed a couple of them, you get to the point were you are not strong enough to complete the next one & you have to spend hours training just to get to the next quest, & by that time the exp/money reward for the quest is not usually even worth it.

So, I say that you should get more & more relative exp for doing quests, if you spent 2 hours on a quests, you should get more exp then if you spent 2 hours endlessly fighting monsters.

You should be able to advance just as fast or faster only doing quests (even accounting walking time from npc to quest & back). And there should be enough quests so there isn\'t a gap were you have to endlessly kill monsters. Also I\'d like randomness in quests (such as finding a certain thing, it should not be in the same place every time you do the quest so it\'s unmapable...)

[Kiva]

The day the GMs start messing with the settings of PS is the day the game gets entirely screwed. Don\'t get me wrong, the GMs are nice and all, but they\'re GMs. They have no clue what\'s the settings is all about. If you want these so called Event Masters, you\'re looking for a solution which includes someone from the settings development team that joins the game with a GM9 char, and plays out a plot ingame. GMs aren\'t game masters in your P&P way. All they\'re supposed to do is make sure people don\'t swear and don\'t get stuck. But sure, if you wan\'t an even worse roleplaying situation than the current one, go ahead and keep wishing for this to happen. I promise you that you\'ll regret it.

[Zan]

But do they really have to screw with the settings that much? Just being able to move things like normal players move a sword lying on the floor is already a lot. I think the game could be made so that things like this are possible with more or less the same interface we normal players have. Of course you can\'t give them access to all the actual game settings. Right now GMs can already teleport themselves and others though so it \'s obviously not hard to build on that command to allow them to move NPC\'s and monsters. That \'s a start already but I do understand this won\'t be happening before everything gets stabilized and debugged.

I \'m just not sure if it\'s really that impossible or destructive as you make it out to be. Of course it will require a lot of work from the devs but this is only a suggestion, one which I think could be made to work greatly and it is something rather unique in the gaming world.