RP Town Hall Round Up - 29 SEP 2019

[UrsulaMejor]

Howdy, crew!

Today at 12pm PST the Discord server had a roleplayer town-hall where we aired out our various issues, criticisms, and suggestions for the RP server.

The purpose of the town hall was to be "an open forum for discussion about issues you think the rp server is facing and what could be done to fix it."

Slacker Magician wrote up the following summary as the conversation took place, although some stuff may have been missed as the town hall took place over the course of two and a half hours and was rather fast.

///BIG WARNING NOTE: THIS ONLY LIGHTLY SUMMARIZES IT, AND DOES NOT FULLY REPRESENT ALL SIDES OF THE COMMUNITY AS IT IS MAINLY OBSERVATIONS, THANK YOU//

RPer setting summary:
-Other (Possibly) players arent taking the RP seriously enough and, at the most extreme, are treating the RP server as a test server.
-Admin response time seems to be slow, so problem players tend to still cause problems for longer
-Problem players are causing severe burnout for the dedicated RPers, which leads to declining player numbers
-Complaints/etc seem to be going nowhere.
-Low population is making it difficult to progress, or having to do jobs you never signed up for.
- A large lack of game-assisted direction/drive leads to round stagnation and placing a large emphasis on players to attempt to involve everyone

Administrator Summary:
-Problem players are being dealt with, as all ahelps go are logged, however it is impossible to be in multiple places at once
-Largely, it is boring to administrate the RP server over the Normal server, due to less happening overall, mostly due to the nature of the increased rules and extended round durations can make it unappealing to administrate, plus requiring a much much larger commitment timewise than popping on for a few 30-50 minute rounds.
-Constant barrages of complaints can prove taxing, and coming up with a solution can be an extremely duanting task, especially with this taxation.

"Less-Dedicated player" side summary:
-Players are taking RP *far too* seriously to the point where it becomes dreadful and boring despite it being advertised LRP server. Such examples include trivial things such as paperwork/etc.
-Often times (i've overhead this a few times) players who arent in the dedicated group can be left out or ignored, and then can get villified by the more dedicated players for not being as involved, causing further friction.
-Problem players are just as bad to the other players aswell, however decreased interaction can lead to them being jumbled up with the problem players.
-Increased rulings and overal reading of the rules leads to just "doing your job" creating a dead-zone of overly being careful not to break them.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:
Dedicated "RP admins", Largely this would be a kind of band-aid solution, but it could possibly lead to quicker decisive action towards problem players.

Increasing the Server-style to MRP:
It'll lead to a overall decrese in playercount, but the more extensive rules listing would allow a bit more of what it seems the more dedicated RP players are expecting.

Possibly a Dedicated "Roleplay" gamemode?
Something to focus on for the crew, possibly a "Scenario mode" or something that would provide a crew-wide goal to work towards.
This would require a large amount of time to produce, but, ultimately it would serve a good purpose to fix it

Heavy interest was shown into the concept of the Artemis/More focus on a co-operative experience

Overall, it seems that there were four major complaints:

1. Low Player Count
   
2. Low Quality of Interactions
   
3. Lack of Direction
   
4. Seeming Lack of Admin Presence
   

Obviously, we are not going to be able to fix all of these issues with a town hall, but hopefully an extended discussion of issues will help.

I would very much like it if the town hall continued onto the forums and if we continued to discuss these issues, and potential solutions, in this thread.

It is okay if the thread strays a bit from the original topic, but be respectful. Towards each other, towards the administration, and towards the server. Do not shitpost in this thread.

Thank You,

Urs <3

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Some ancillary topics that came up (in no particular order, as I remember them):

1. Good RP vs. Bad RP; is this bad language? There was a general consensus that these could be better clarified, and less intimidating, if we used the words "Good faith RP and Bad faith RP, as actual level of RP skill isn't as important as intent.
   
2. Should respawn be enabled on the RP server?
   
3. Would Crew/Department/Station objectives being expanded help?
   
4. There is a large amount of pressure on players to create the entire story of the round whole-cloth, by themselves, which puts a lot of pressure on the players to take initiative and make things happen. This is what is meant by "lack of direction". How/can we give players more direction to allow those less comfortable with "driving" the round still have good experiences?
   
5. People using our server as a test server feel like a constant issue.
   

[Comrade f191]

While I do not actively play the RP Server, and thus cannot fully speak of it, I can certainly confirm that one of the few things that keeps the RP Server active is the extra players that move to Goon1 on the 13th and the day or two following.

My suggestion for Goon 1 would be the hosting of either more events on Goon2 that push people onto Goon1 to avoid it, or the hosting of RP-Orientated Events on Goon1.

[Ravenmeister]

All of those summaries seems about accurate to me, best and easiest to fix is Number One, lack of direction is probably tied in with 1, and 4, and 2 happens when you have *extremely* low player counts like we do.

[Sundance]

Not an RP goer myself, but something I found on the RP server is that it's trying to be Player V Environment without much Environment to contend against and as such players make their own stories. Unfortunately, players can only be so creative over the course of a 2 hour round and it inevitably leads back to PvP. But it's a tentative PvP, with a soft touch that doesn't encourage interaction. This post pretty much confirms this suspicion.

I'd say lack of direction is the biggest offender here, but to put an optimistic twist on it, Manta is a very good map to showcase what sort of direction we should take. In the literal sense - it's moving. I feel for the RP server to work, it needs to be heavily invested in this FTL-esque interactions. This means the server pop actually wouldn't make that much of an issue as you're constantly engaged with the environment.

Someone had a vary salient point on Reddit regarding Goon on how rounds play out. We lack RnD so as the round progresses, the station/ship goes to shit and while there may be home improvements here and there, it's inevitably fire and piss everywhere. While not exactly in direct contrast, other servers such as TG have a noticeable improvement to tech as the round progresses.

This was where my suggestion for a "DM" style admin where a trusted individual effectively controls a narrative kind of falls in. This doesn't essentially require an admin, but rather the DM acts as Nanotrasen officials, sending information via the bridge and altering the map by spawning various things as the ship arrives. This would require a special menu of sorts, I would think.

An alternative would be to not have this role and to concentrate on randomly generated environments. But I fear that this randomly generated environments may be restrictive - there's only so many times one can enter a derelict room with dead bodies and some flavortext items thrown in before it becomes repetitive.

Both of these seem a colossal pain to code.

What's Artemis, I've heard it being mentioned before?

[Surimi]

I used to play on the RP server a lot, but I feel like it was a very different server 6-9 months ago. Broadly speaking I feel more sympathetic to the "less dedicated player" side, in that while I prefer being in an RP environment, I feel like the RP has always worked best for me when it's fairly lighthearted. While everyone is theoretically supposed to be doing their job on a space station, it's a weird, surreal space station, and I feel like it works best when players are permitted to act accordingly.

On the other hand, of the rounds I've played on the RP server recently a significant proportion have been ruined by one person testing their powergaming skills, so that's definitely a problem too.

Other than my personal RP related opinions, think the major problem with the RP server is that it is just Goon with stricter RP rules. I've noticed a lot of people on Goon (including myself) are clearly LRPing even though it's not an RP server, so it's not like there's no appetite for RP in the community. Instead, I think people are put off GoonRP by the lack of players, lack of action and worries about cliquishness and following RP requirements. I think the way to revive the RP server isn't necessarily to tighten RP requirements, but to give it things like dedicated game modes or just a different pace.

For example, I remember when the RP server mostly ran extended, a lot of people seemed to be playing there primarily because they liked extended. I'm definately not saying go back to running full-time extended, but something to make playing on GoonRP different might help to prevent people from just gravitating to the most populated server.

[Superlagg]

I think RP would be greatly improved with the addition of some sort of endless mode, and not just cus its one of the wildly impractical, massive undertakings of ideas I keep harping on about. I think we can trust the RP crowd to make fun use of a multi-day-long shift. Course I don't mean they'd have to be there for days on end, they ain't *that* big of turbonerds, but I think that some persistence of a station and, by extension, characters and storylines and jobs and shit might prove to be a fun RP thing.

[Ion Mage]

To add for reasons to have an 'endless' (or very extended) round, I often find that I'm often unwilling to really commit to an RP idea/scenario if I know the end of the round is coming soon.  Furthermore, even when I have an idea for a medsci experiment (typically genetics/non-antag pathology) to build a small rp scenario around, I have to basically beeline to whatever research is needed for it in order to implement said scenario, because if I don't get it ASAP, then we'll have all of 10 minutes or so to actually play around with it.  A longer round would alleviate this pressure greatly, meaning I would be both more willing to RP at round start, and/or we would actually have time to play around with it. 

Of course, now theres the issue that often people will blow up the ship mid-round and the shuttle will get called early anyways, which would make the default round length irrelevant.