Story Railroading.

[Markam]

Going to wade into this a little despite my best instincts saying not to.

For the most part the overall point Saronsen is making is not a bad one. Story interaction with the playerbase is poor, and sure it feels like railroading due to lack of communication.

However, the screenshots he showed of myself trying to, back in October, encourage the Liberty player base to interact with the movement happening in Penny was an attempt to hint at where story is moving, so they could interact with it. I was told to uh, well, I was not welcome. There is a little more to the conversation where even more colourful language is used, but its honestly tame for Saronsen.

I am sure however the main gripe is not being able to direct story as players. Unfortunately, this cannot happen in the way perhaps Saronsen desires. The story department must absolutely dictate where story is heading, that is their job. We have attempted in the past to do player written story through a discord group, and the results were frankly appalling. It was nothing but a mess of arguing, lobbying purely for ones own faction, and Story "developments" which were nothing more than singular changes that did not fit into any proper narrative and were very short sighted. I know its ideal that players can help decide everything and we can have a super interactive story, but people are generally only invested in their own given faction, which creates very poor story development.

Instead, what we are trying to do is have a general story decided with a start, middle and end largely set out, and have player roleplay intertwined within this story, and some events that change the bells and whistles.

In relation to the story to player interaction issue, and the story influencing power of official factions (re; veterans), story has been hard at work over the last few months to develop a Story to Player interface system that works within RP, where players can make their suggestions to Story within the confines of roleplay (no discord) and Story can hand out direction and orders in roleplay.

I am sure this won't make Saronsen any less mad, but I do not know what would. Hopefully we can have this released sooner rather than later, but we want to make a good start to remove the stigma that is story.

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Markam is evil