I haven't seen the new IG tutorial yet, but I would guess it would be a good place to announce either rules, tips, or anything that may get players in trouble. Be it a link or a section of the tutorial about it. The old RP section wasn't bad at all, I just fear with the new quest system most wouldn't read it anyway since they don't
need to (already wondered many times how did some people get through the old one).
but it is mostly my view on RP...there are for sure others views on this topic.
So here you have some more.
Since nobody is using this I've made public the tutorials Aiw's were based on (which were as well based on others) I wrote for newbies in my old guild. Links to the original ones are in each tutorial.
I think the problem isn't defining rules.... any reasonable person would soon conform to the community's expectation. The problem is people who don't care about RP but play anyway because it's free. There are more and more of them, and they're the problem, not defining RP.
Nope, these people aren't really a problem, just raise the player count and hopefully find some bugs. They do not roleplay and don't use Main that much, thus they don't get the chance to mess up an RP or the general atmosphere. Of course it would be better if they would roleplay and contribute to it, but not doing so isn't either disrupting it.
The problem are people who think anything is legit in RP. People playing gnomes, winged dwarven ghosts that shoot devil arrows, klyros that can fly from town to town, babies who force actions on adults, cellphones (read as IC tells and guildchats) and a long etcetera of grotesque characters that can be seen around.
But to deal with this you can't do with a "please do RP or get banned" rule, first because this seems to enforce the meaning of
everything that looks like RP is RP thus legit and second because it's pretty hard to tell what is and is not allowed with such open "rules".
If you're going to kick or ban somebody for any reason, there shouldn't be much room left to personal opinions since this would probably only bring a lot of trouble between players and GMs about what happened and what didn't, what is in-setting and what is not, what is godmodding and what is not, what <insert the next possible rule here>, etc. It should be as objective as other rules are: cheat ---> ban; harass ---> warning then ban, and so on. But I see no other way than going about it than setting detailed rules.
Thing is, this basic information is available everywhere touching on PS. It has and can only help people interested. Most simply aren't. The outlaws guide is a good one, but the problem has never been people who would willingly read something of that length, the problem is just the opposite.
Well I'm pretty sure it can be explained in more simple words. Besides these (and the links I posted) aren't rulesets but just guidelines to do good RP, and these are obviously not the only ones... the net is full of them. So there is plenty of information to pick ideas from.
In the end you don't need everybody to read all these, but everybody, in any online game, needs to read the game rules to play. So if the team comes up with a more simple but detailed enough ruleset (which could contain links to some tutorials) I would guess rules can be policed just as the Naming Policy is, or the Cheating one is. Players may not have read the naming policy but if they create a char called Pinkpanther and a GM spots it the name will be changed no matter what. The same way they are asked for a name they would prefer in such case, they can be advised as to how to re-direct their behavior into a suitable one before getting punished. We have a lot of GMs now, one would think that as long as they know the rules, enforcing them in a not very abrasive way shouldn't be a real problem.
