well i was trying to be humorous, but if we want to be super serious, i'l throw out something to think about. refer to the D&D playbook; rp'ers and their dungeon master. the dm sets the tone, but its the rper's that bring the story to shine.
when i started my traversing through the PS scene I thought the GM team was going to be the DMs of the world. to an extent, they were. all the people rp'ing moved around the world, being the little busy bees they were, and the GMs hung around the plaza and moved around as needed to keep the flow, and spicing things up every once in awhile with their own touches. The famous incident with Drey and the ulber onslaught of the city, as example.
but then the times of change started to unfold. GMs went invisible, the still existed, but were "behind the scenes" the DM was removed from the eyes of the world and put into a new "police force" role. the RPer's were left to fill the shoes, without the tools to do so. their ideas had to go through screening processes to be "approved" before "the official GM team" could even think about getting involved. and like everything else, it all needed the stamp of approval by the head guy himself, so that it wouldn't conflict with the grand story he has envisioned.
later GMs regained some freedom; they could make "events". now official little tidbits of fun to spice up the world. good intentions yes, but executed poorly. not enough GMs, not enough events, large crowds whispering all thier friends whenever they'd see the special colored character names appear in the world. all to collect the possible shiny rewards they may collect for participating, regardless of whether or not their character they have made would ever do those such actions. they did it as a player to get an award, not as a RPer, acting out their character they made. the role of player and DM still was not balanced.
i have been away for many the past years yes, so I can not speak as to where the wheel of change rolled on towards since my departure. all i can do is to reflect on the major changes that I have seen back in my day, that i believe started the change of the tide. and for this conversation, we'll just ignore the day before when there wasn't any official GM team, or when all there was to do was collect crystals, or even before when all we had was the forums to act out things.
to recap my badly worded ramblings into somewhat coherent speak. to RP proper requires players fulfilling the roles of the characters they have dreamt up, and reacting to situations thrown at them in character, but there also needs to be a DM to make the world and help create the situations. the players can't do it all by themselves, although many a good one have tried and succeeded for quite some time at the cost of all their free time, logging in every chance they could for hours on end to keep it going. Or if you go the other route where the DMs are restricted in their ability to be the DM, you swing the other way, where whenever they do act, you as a person fell that you must participate in some way, as it is a limited chance at being involved in something.
I place no single blame at anyone or side for what happened. everyone is a little at fault in my mind. the players complained about people that had silly non-RP esque names or billy complaining that his sister pulled on his hair or poked him and the GMs had to threaten to turn the car around if they couldn't behave properly. but at the same time they were also limited as to what they could do, like i was limited to what i was allowed to say, or the conversations i could par take in on the forums, as we where the official body for the PS team, so we needed to be more PR nicey nice, or the GMs could only do little things because we wouldn't want to do something that would effect the cannon story line.
but maybe i'm just an old fart wearing his rose-tinted glasses again. PS will continue to be developed regardless. Players will continue to come and go. Life moves ever forward. I just wish that back when there was really a hustle and bustle around here, that the game would have been developed a little more balanced around providing new and exciting things for the player base to do, with the side of things that let the GM team become more truer DMs as well as being given a little more free will to just spice up the world as they saw fit; without the complaints or fears of complaints that they'd be showing favoritism for certain players and "their RP stories" from the player base or fears that what ever actions they did would now be cannon and cause issues down the line when more of the backstory of the world was released officially. I wish the player base would have been more respectable to those that didn't want to be all super serious RP all the time, and instead just wanted to come try out the game and mine or fight monsters and whatnot.
but hey, thats jsut me rambling again.
