Originally posted by Karyuu
PlaneShift\'s purpose is to be a true roleplaying game in the sense that you act in-character as much as possible. This is the goal of the team, and all players should realize that. If in doubt, there is a stickied Player Policy made by Talad, the very head of the project, explaining this. However, the current state of the game does make it difficult - no one can argue against it.
But. As the game grows, as the world expands and features become available, there will be more and more concentration on in-character actions instead of 3D chatrooms - anyone who played MB and then CB would already see the huge differences. No one is forcing anyone to roleplay, but roleplay always has the first priority - that is why anyone intentionally disturbing it will get a very quick kick, that is why we have roleplay Naming Rules, and etc. This is not being fanatical, this is explaining what the game is meant to be for.
Originally posted by BlackAcre
If you want to create a 100% strictly enforced role-playing game, it\'s going to have to be private--or tyrrannical and elitist.
Although I can definitely assure you that it won\'t be possible in the slightest to make PlaneShift a 100% enforced roleplaying game, I am wondering what the problem would be if the dev team wanted this? It is their project, their hobby, their brainchild - you are here for free, paying absolutely nothing but your time. If you disagree with their rules, you can leave and go do something else. There are no chains and shackles, no contracts, nothing to keep you here if you do not like it.
Moreover, there are a lot of people who for some strange reason think that roleplaying means standing in one spot and being all \"bardic.\" This is nonsense. Roleplay is doing anything in-game as your character, instead of the player sitting at the computer. You can train at the Arena for hours and be in-character. The only thing that matters, is that you interact as much as possible with the characters of other people, instead of the players.
They have offered to the public a game. If they want to make it strictly enforced, then that should be what the public wants, and not their cadre of elites, but it\'s completely within their rights to do so anyway. If you did this now, you would, of course, be creating quasi-contractual obligations that didn\'t exist before, and this sort of thing would probably drive a good many players away--which isn\'t altogether important. I stand by my conviction that this would be tyrrany and just a crap move on their part in any event.
As well, the \"leave if you don\'t like it\" mantra is a rhetorical attempt to defuse arguments by denying them to be heard. If any number of players want to air their greivances, they should be heard, not ignored or minimalized. Banishing or shaming them isn\'t going to get my support. It\'s also, completely within the rights of the developers. But again, you don\'t hold something out to the public, offer it for free, and then retract it over and over again while qualifying their use of it, if you know what\'s good for your product. Or hell, maybe that\'s the definition of open source.
Me personally, I think the naming rules should be narrowly defined, rather than forcing anything remotely recognizable as English to be banned. Which contradicts the point you make that \"nobody is forcing anyone to roleplay.\" You\'ve forced me to use an incoherent jumble of letters having no rational foundation other than it sounds like something you might read in a conan comic-book--rather than a name which is just as plausible in any universe. Simply banning l337 names and numbers would be enough. Cesalthino is no less pretentious than \"Crackle\", one being a frequentative of \"crack\" no more or less offensive and no more or less likely than any other name given to a 6 foot tall horned demon from an unknown hellish home, and the other being a meaningless word jumble created by a generator. So, in effect, we\'ve already enforced role-playing. OOC conversation
must be in parentheses, so role-playing is indeed, already enforced. The question I keep asking is when and where does the enforcement stop. I see very poor reactions to anyone suggesting anything but puritannical role-playing directives--and I think that\'s the wrong way to go.
As far as what role-playing is or isn\'t, I won\'t argue the point. I have my preconceptions, and nothing in this game has so far, changed those preconceptions. I\'m hoping that it will as I\'m new, so hopefully that\'s really all it is. I don\'t spend a whole lot of time in game as of yet, the client is still kind of dodgy on the mac.
Finally, the online \"community\" should create itself, and not be directed like Providence Plantations, to behave itself in certain ways. I think if the game gives us things to do, it\'s easier to role-play--that\'s all. Role-playing at the expense of fun is what I want to avoid in the end. Sometimes, what happens in a meta-aesthetic sense, above and beyond what character you are playing, is what makes a MMORPG fun, but I think I might\'ve stated that already. Of course, this could all just be the Hamiltonian in me, hoping for the best, worried over the possiblities a \"new republic\" has in store for it. I think MMORPGs similarly get to recreate society in a sense everytime a new one begins, I think that\'s fairly cool to watch.
