I played this game for six months straight before getting bored. I had already tried the free Korean mmorpg's and hated them, nor did I went to try WoW, Guild wars or EverQuest because all they are is going out and killing stuff, how boring. I decided to go out and purchase NWN for $15 u.s. That has got to be the best single purchse I have ever made. I thought the RP here was good to, until I logged into some of the RP servers on Gamespy. You AVERAGE rp server in NWN blows anything I have ever seen in PS away as far as RP goes.. hands down. On top of that, for the most part the community is even better as well. The icing on the cake is DM run events.. these drive rp in a somewhat focused direction. They drive a storyline that encompases the characters, the guilds, and the entire world. If PS had this then I think we would be much better off. I realize the fundamental difference is NWN not technically being a mmorpg in the sense PS is.. and the fact that Ps is an alpha stage demo done as a hobby by the devs... but it just seems to me that with the small number of things to do and the community at large PS is.. well... boring. Perhaps that is why the community is dying? Or perhpas its the lack of respect for players that have been around since the beginning. Or perhaps its because of the guilds like the D.C. that have been around for a long time now seeing all of their hard work and hours and hours of game time wiped because some noob can't resist exploiting a bug?
NWN is 10 times better than PS on the interest that the roleplays give, for now I hope.
Well perhaps GM Events should be inspired by the way a DM makes an epic saga instead of minor, isolated happenings that they currently are. In other words, some of the GM Events could actually give a chance for the characters participating on it to become true heroes after a long amount of several connected GM Events leading to something greater like the way a DM makes the roleplay of a module, with great plots, twists, real dangers for the life of the characters, interesting and unique NPCs and several possible outcomes.
NWN "events" commonly involve taking down dark cults, saving a village from its doom, investigating a murder that leads to a much more sinister plot, betrayals, strife among things that makes a character intended to be or become an hero have such opportunity, as even searching for a cure for a relative suffering from a rare illness may give one many challenges ahead. Those "events" last many hours, although in a roleplaying session some of them could last for even a whole week.
PS events(both GM and Community made) usually are marriages, fetching items for crafters,gemcutters,etc. among other minor events that are everything but epic or heroic on the way they happen. Also most of them are pretty predictable, nothing uncalled for usually happens, only few events had some unpredictability(and mistery).
An event that could become very interesting if further developed into a whole plot, would be the "polymorph glyph" for example.