Improving the Role-Play experience in Rift

[Krunkatron]

As promised from my post in "Trion is neglecting roleplayers", I'm starting this thread in the hopes of getting our community together and improving the role-play of Rift.

To kick things off, I'll explain a bit of the method to my madness. While I love new vanity items, additional animations, and other great in game role play features, these are some big ticket items that require resources that are outside of my control. I'm not saying they will be impossible to obtain, all I'm saying right now is that I'd like to win some small victories that would immediately improve the community before I go for the big guns.

The sort of small victory I'm talking about would be something like, making these Role-play forums more useful to you. I've seen suggestions on how to improve the forums and I've checked out the other Rift RP sites, so are there specific aspects of those other sites that you would like to see here?

I've also seen the question "Which server is the best RP for rift?" asked a few times. I think it would be useful if within the Role-play forums we had a sticky/tracker that immediately detailed how active the RP community is within a specific server.

So lemme hear your ideas on some steps we can take to improve our community.

---Update---
This is a compiled list of your requests in regards to improving Role-play within Rift. As stated before, be sure to manage your expectations on what I can actually accomplish, as many of these items will require a lot of work and may be impossible to complete.

• Improve regulation of Role-play Terms of Service
• In game Profile Tab
• Reduce range of player /say and /emote - Live
• More variety/functionality of Wardrobes - Added visibility checkboxes to wardrobe slots
• Provide better tools for Role-players to connect
• Provide easier to access information on Role-playing in Rift - added RP guides to RP Forum
• Interactable Objects you can sit on
• Provide tools for continued character customization

[Jonalyn]

I agree with you completely. One of the most important things is an addon mod being made. This will allow us to all see eachothers profiles and will encourage roleplay strengthening the community. Otherwise, we will never find eachother. I am currently on Sunrest rp-pvp server however, I have no idea how many roleplayers are around. I have just started and have not found anything in the forums yet.

[Korzald]

One of the most important things to do first is to define what is "role play".

Prior to moving my guild to a RP server we found that within my guild we had 12 different ideas on what role play was.

We term our guild as RP-lite.

But it seems everyone has a different idea of what role play is and how much is enough or not enough. So defining some terms might be the best place to start.

[Fansalwen]

Some things I've heard from friends to make the game better are...

Making chairs and benches interactable so people can actually sit on them as if they're actually being sat on, rather than perched on or nearby if they're pushed against a table.

Fixing those bugs that change your clothing color, make your nose stretch out or suck into your character's head, or your character simply vanishes from your screen. I don't see it very often, but sometimes it does happen and some people probably get it more than others.

Some kind of add-on supported by the game where RPers can mark themselves as RPers. Better yet, places where descriptions can be displayed, a place for quirks, or something you can't get with the character creation. That way players don't have to repeatedly describe scars/piercings/jewelery/etc. The add-on itself can be player-made by those who know what they want and how to build it, the game just needs to support it.

Maybe more open buildings like in Fortune's Shore where people can RP. The say/emote radius is still annoyingly large, but at least by being indoors, RPers don't have to worry about being trampled or having random people standing right there without saying a thing. Just a little creepy and distracting, you know?

On that note, lots of people would love to have the say/emote range cut down so you don't end up with two or three groups that can't even see one another, but are still somehow listening in on conversations happening half a mile away. Sometimes it gets to be too much spam and some people end up not having fun and leave.

[Mythue]

I would love to see the public channels on the roleplaying shards set to roleplaying, used for roleplaying only.

Channels are created for roleplaying by the players, like riftroleplay, but shouldn't this be the other way around? All public channels, on roleplaying shards should be thought of and used as roleplaying channels, and channels that are created by the players should be for non-roleplaying.

It has never made sense to me, why roleplayers, on roleplaying shards need to sub-create other channels to do so.

[Hawkeyez]

Some kind of add-on supported by the game where RPers can mark themselves as RPers. Better yet, places where descriptions can be displayed, a place for quirks, or something you can't get with the character creation. That way players don't have to repeatedly describe scars/piercings/jewelery/etc. The add-on itself can be player-made by those who know what they want and how to build it, the game just needs to support it.

This would be good, for physical descriptions only. In role-play, personality, history, quirks, etc, should all be up in the air (so to speak) for people to discover and remember: just as IRL. But, a place to describe a characters facial quirks, twitches, oddities, so that the character doesn't have to keep repeating it would be nice. Have it as an option window when right-clicking on a character's portrait, and have that window display their current garb rather than the base "wardrobe"/armor the toon is equipped with.

I would love to see the public channels on the roleplaying shards set to roleplaying, used for roleplaying only.

Channels are created for roleplaying by the players, like riftroleplay, but shouldn't this be the other way around? All public channels, on roleplaying shards should be thought of and used as roleplaying channels, and channels that are created by the players should be for non-roleplaying.

It has never made sense to me, why roleplayers, on roleplaying shards need to sub-create other channels to do so.

This is a nice idea, but completely unrealistic. Think about it. Who's going to "police" it? What are the "punishments" for infractions? When two people can't really even agree on what role-play is, who's going to judge whether something said in public channels is "proper" role-play or not? This idea is nice, but completely unreachable.

[Talila]

Here are my suggestions (Wall of text incoming, sorry!):
- All suggestions are of equal importance, but I gave them numbers because.. Numbers are pretty.

1. The roleplay and lore section could do with an upgrade of their descriptions. To give you an example, the role-play section is described to be for IC topics only, but that is not what it's used for.
Perhaps you could make the role-play section to be for debating various aspects of roleplay, and make an IC subforum for those who likes to partake in forum-roleplay.

2. Either a section or a part of the site where you can post a little about your character, perhaps with an included screenshot, to give others a an idea of how many roleplayers there are where - this could go in link with your idea of pointing out the RP shards and how active they are - but also to give people a chance of letting other players get the basic feel of their characters.

2.1: As others mention, we need either an add-on or a feature that will let us flag ourselves as IC or OOC, so that others can see it. Typically in other games like WoW, addons with such a feature have been including a tab for description which other players can inspect, so you quickly can note details about characters around you. If it isn't possible to make an add-on like this right now, I'd suggest that it's made possible. This promotes the feel of an RP presence on the shards themselves.

3. A sort of mentor system where experienced roleplayers can sign up to help out newcomers, Rift is still quite young and most roleplayers that come here will have to do a lot of reading to catch up on the lore, and there might be things that change a bit from what they're used to from where they've played before. This could give the general RP community an open feel to it, and perhaps then it'll spark more interest in the rest of the rift community - or at least some kind of understanding.

4. We've at the moment not really got any stickies with guides or anything. I remember making a list of various guides that were posted here on these forums, but it was not allowed to be sticked because of some rule. Would it be possible to perhaps work out a way so that information like the guides are easily found, and if you can't use what the forum-goers have written for whatever reason that might be, perhaps you could write something yourself? (though I can imagine this would be timeconsuming in a degree you might not have time for D: )

5. Something that would be a big big victory for us if you could Decrease the Say-range (As you can see in my signature). It's probably the oldest suggestion the roleplay community has, and it's not been looked at - Which is funny, because the NPC's have a normal say range
Anyhow as it is now, the range of /say is around 70 meters. Needless to say it is way beyond what is realistic - I did an actual test with a friend once and I could barely SEE him in the distance, but I could still see what he was writing. It's confusing and it makes hosting larger events impossible because of chat-clutter.

6. You've got a recommended tag for shards with a low population, and you've got the individual tags (like PvE and PvP shard etc) - Could you possibly add a notice to people rolling on a Roleplay realm that explains just exactly what it is they're rolling on? Cause, as surprising at it is, I keep seeing people that roll on roleplay shards, but they have no clue what it is, and they certainly don't know that /say shouldn't be used for flashing epics and talking memespeak. We also still have a high amount of really, really stupid names on the shards that to some extend ruins the immersion.

7. Better information about the RP channels avaliable. Afaik the standard OOC channel for Roleplayers is /join Riftrp - but it's hardly known by anyone new. On Argent we have a few that spreads the word of the channel, but it isn't enough. I'd be against having an "autojoin" channel (like the level x-xx channels) because that would just let in a whole lot of people that couldnt care less about roleplayers, and with that, the trolls. Perhaps there could be a pop-up on the RP shards only where players can select to join channels for RP, explaining clearly what they are.
The problem with the user-run channels are that who-ever ends up with the OP tag can essentially kick and ban people to their hearts content - not many knows how to, bless that, but it could be severely abused one day and that's quite an icky risk.

A note to the idea of defining RP:
I will strongly advice against it at this point. It's true that right now we could use it, BUT I think we all know how much we can disagree as well. I think the biggest point where I have seen disagreements is when you try to mix RP-PvE and RP-PvP, there are colossal differences but when anyone points out the differences, people always disagree because they were "schooled" to believe that their way is the right way, and that is an attitude that can be very, very difficult to break.

Aaaand.. That's about what I can think of right now. I'll return if more springs to mind

[Earl Worcesterfingle]

I agree with many of the points made by Talila. The range of /say and /emote are, to my eyes, the largest bugbears. If my limited knowledge of programming serves me correctly, the range of something like that might even be stored in a single variable, which would be easy to modify.

Sittable chairs is one of the few things I miss about WoW. I would, in a perfect world, also wish for more armour items - however, there's enough to make a distinctive outfit so that's of secondary importance.

As for the RP sections on the website, I have no complaints. Thanks in advance.

[Tmuet]

I agree with the idea of being able to actually sit in chairs, benchs, and such.


I would also like to see a feature in the wardrobe were we can hide the Helmet, Shoulders, Gloves, and Boots, maybe even chest (for those that want to roleplay old time boxing) from that menu, instead of currently only being able to hide helm and shoulders, and we have to go through the interface for that.

I think this would open up the avenue for how people can try to be a little more unique within the game, by adjusting their outfits, just that much more.

[Quay]

Hmm, as far as the forums go, maybe a place we could post character sheets and then be able to link them in our signatures (I mean, we could do this now, but within riftgames.com). A maintained sticky for each RP server with active guilds and events would be nice too. Again the events could have links to IC/OOC write ups/descriptions. I know most RP guilds do these things on their private servers, but getting us to move them all to the "official" servers might help encourage each other and new players.

[Laeris]

As promised from my post in "Trion is neglecting roleplayers", I'm starting this thread in the hopes of getting our community together and improving the role-play of Rift.

To kick things off, I'll explain a bit of the method to my madness. While I love new vanity items, additional animations, and other great in game role play features, these are some big ticket items that require resources that are outside of my control. I'm not saying they will be impossible to obtain, all I'm saying right now is that I'd like to win some small victories that would immediately improve the community before I go for the big guns.

The sort of small victory I'm talking about would be something like, making these Role-play forums more useful to you. I've seen suggestions on how to improve the forums and I've checked out the other Rift RP sites, so are there specific aspects of those other sites that you would like to see here?

I've also seen the question "Which server is the best RP for rift?" asked a few times. I think it would be useful if within the Role-play forums we had a sticky/tracker that immediately detailed how active the RP community is within a specific server.

So lemme hear your ideas on some steps we can take to improve our community.

Vanity items, player housing, animations and faux-RP fluff does not improve the RP community. RPers, you see, make due with what we have. No game, whether it be an MMORPG or a table-top RPG game can provide enough content to satiate all types of creative minds. Adding content for RPers to play with does not improve upon the community. I'll explain.

RPers are free thinking creative people by and large; some more-so than others. Although RPers can use things like vanity items for muses and props, they don't really do anything for the community. That's because lots of RPers are just fine with pen and paper games that don't have any visual content whatsoever. RP content even in Rift is largely driven through imagination and acting on the creatively generated content of the RPers.

Now, if you want to -improve- the community, there's really only one thing you have to do. You do something about the plague of anti-RP sentiment on your RP-PvP servers and the problems anti-RPers also bring to your PvE-RP servers.

A community, you see, is defined as a group of individuals interacting with one another whilst performing a common task or endeavor. In reality, we have communities of disabled veterans, communities of loyal sports fans, neighborhood communities, and what not. An MMORPG's RP community is defined as a special interest community. It has a narrow focus. Unlike a neighborhood community that is comprised of teachers, businessmen, kids, elderly, and so on... an RP community is comprised of one segment: Individuals who enjoy watching and/or participating in roleplay activities.

Now, the RP servers in Rift are almost the worst example of a managed RP community that I have come across. The worst, by far is Age of Conan's mismanagement of its former RP community (which, they alienated and the RPers abandoned it in droves to the point AoC dropped all RP tags from their servers). Rift, on the other hand, is quickly going that direction.

Trion has to this point failed to uphold the RP ruleset the game director himself outlined. We have RP servers loaded with people with 1337sp34k names, names taken from sexual inuendos, and names used purposely to mock the RP community at large. What's more is that on the RP-PvP servers, RP is purposefully grieved and ridiculed to the point where most of us have moved to RP-PvE Faeblight in order to actually get a chance to RP.

RP-PvP servers like Harrow and Sunrest are overran with the game's 14 year old miscreants who want nothing more to do than to grieve roleplayers. It isn't the PvP either... it's usually Guardian vs. Guardian grief or Defiant on Defiant grief. The point here is that we members of the RP community know full well that RP is dead on these servers because of utter lack of Trion's community managers to monitor and discourage grief play. I've known quite a few like myself who spend the time to file reports of abusive behavior... but to this day for months now, I can't say I have ever seen any action taken on any of them. Why? Because they're still here. If you want to see what I mean... go to Sunrest and ask in 50 chat, "Anyone up for some RP?" If you don't get someone asking you to touch their private parts within 30 seconds of your question... then I'll quit Rift right now.

The way you improved the community is by creating an atmosphere that allows RP to thrive. The first thing you have to do is kick the rabbits out of the garden as it were. You can't have a strong, vibrant RP community when it is outnumbered by people who's primary missions in Rift are to 1) Draw attention to themselves and 2) Purposefully grieve RPers. To improve the community, Trion seriously needs to devote manpower and man hours to effectively cleansing the problem. Move them to PvE or PvP servers and let the RP community breathe.

Once you set and enforce a standard (again, I point towards Mr. Hartsman's RP server rules that he posted a few months ago), -THEN- you can start asking what RPers want. You can't very well design someone a new sofa if the house is burning down. You need to put out the fire first, rebuild the house, -THEN- worry about the sofa.

That is where I see things. Faeblight has a nice RP community... but it is only so because most of the game's RPers have been systematically ran off of the other RP servers. Even on Faeblight, we still catch grief every day from certain individuals or we're flooded with people who purposefully ignore the server's naming conventions or accepted norms on behavior (example: finding a bunch of roleplayers and using guildmates to stand on them with mounts and generally try to disrupt them).

If you want to see a population explosion on Rift... you make yourself known as being hard on anti-Rpers. You'll see RPers from LotRO, AoC, WoW, and elsewhere flood to your RP servers if they know Trion takes the RP playstyle seriously. RPers are usually an MMOs most ardent long-term supporters. If you want to improve this community, you create an environment that supports and welcomes RPers on the RP servers. You have to make an example of habitual offenders of the RP ruleset and make it well-known that anti-RP sentiment and blatant disregard for the RP server ruleset is not welcome.

Until Trion does this... No amount of vanity clothing or companion pets will help. While 1 person might like a new pair of costume pants... 100 people unsub because they can't play the game without being made fun of.

While most RPers are grown adults and we know how to ignore grievers... you have to draw the comparison to a nice neighborhood that has a paper mill nearby. It might looks nice, but the air smells horrible. That's your RP problem Trion.

[Rayner]

You ask for ideas that will be easy to implement, but since I'm stubborn and mean, and since there has been no official word regarding why it is that we do not have weapons in the wardrobe, I'm going to continue assuming it is easy to implement and suggest that.

While I'm at it, I suggest the removal of armor restriction in the wardrobe. That's just gotta be setting a boolean value, right? With costume items allowing for mages to "wear" plate-looking items and warriors to "wear" cloth-looking items, the last argument against this has been utterly destroyed.

I'm also going to assume that adding surnames would be as easy as adding another column in the player character database, so that's on my list, too.

An official, comprehensive timeline of Rift's lore would also be helpful. All I can find is a "history" loosely detailing four events. I would hope the game has more lore than that.

[Jonalyn]

A perfect example of roleplay is in wow to be honest. Moonguard is a server alive with it. Darnassus is filled with Night elf guilds that walk around true to the lore all socializing and bring the characters alive and all the major cities have roleplay at every turn.

Games I have roleplayed the best in were Everquest 2, Starwars Galaxies and World of warcraft. They have player profiles in the first two and mods to support it in wow that a large percent of the population found and used such as "My roleplay".

The profiles are key simply because you can identify other roleplayers even among those who DO NOT on a roleplay server. Otherwise, we chase each other around the forums and than eventually move on. Currently I am on Sunrest and I have seen no roleplay. I am going to attempt to search within Faeblight. I keep getting directed there.

[Krunkatron]

I've also noticed a lack of Sticky within the forums. Thankfully this is one of those small victories I was talking about. Seems like a thread that contains guides for RP would go a long way, but I need you all to do some leg work for me. Direct me to these threads/guides so that I can inlcude them in a post. Then I'll compile what you all have and put up a new thread in this section.

[the_real_seebs]

I know it's a big-ticket thing, but "ability to sit on chairs" would be a relatively big win, even though it's simple. Also reducing the hearing radius of /say.

Past that, making sure there's actual enforcement of the naming rules would help a lot. There was some drama about this a while back. General harassment policy, too. Really, the biggest problem (IMHO) is usually that people actively try to disrup RPers. This is what I remember being one of the biggest barriers in WoW, and it's similarly one of the biggest (though much less significant, thus far) here.

Bigger-ticket, maybe, but: First/last names, biography, descriptions. Some roleplayers don't like to display the bio, but having it is awesome. Go log into CoH, hang around in Wentworth's, and just examine everyone you see. (Do this on Virtue.) You'll see a lot of great stories. I suggest separating "bio" and "description", so that people who have a preference for one mode or the other can use it. This is extra UI work, but it's not huge extra UI work.

Yes, we could (in the future) probably do it with addons. Addons were a sucky solution to that problem; they were horrendously inefficient, and they had to put in extra work to communicate with each other, you had to know to get them -- it wasn't enough to just log in and read the help -- and so on.

It's not a huge feature, it might impose some additional GM work to deal with use of those fields to harass people or whatever, but it would be a GIGANTIC win for the RPers.