Explanation: Canon vs Non-Canon Roleplay; Cloak Roleplay Etiquette

[Antonio]

So my question to you is this - official factions or those wanting to roleplay governments, with rational and logical role play and transparency/communication with appropriate devs, can player roleplay get to a point where it CAN influence story? Understandably, extraordinary story events should require extraordinary role play and time taboot. A Liberty invasion of Bretonia or Coalition systems is simply too extraordinary to happen but in your example of Red Hessians having a falling out with Coalition, if the reasoning is correct and both sides agree to it (if there are a both sides), can we see player interaction and involvement influence story events, infocards, factions relations etc?

As of now (at least within my circles), players don't feel like we are in control of our own destiny even as official factions. If this has always been the case (but jenky devs behaved differently), that would be nice to know. If this isn't the case or once was the case but is no longer, what can be done so that players CAN feel like we have some control of our own destiny?

Either via development requests here, the dev lounge chat on the main discord, or by PMing one of the story developers. We have processed sensible development requests, and the current dev team is pretty approachable now when it comes to discussing canon story decisions. It's however not the lack of story ideas that is the bottleneck, but rather lack of manpower. We only have two story devs - Jammi and Erremnart - and Jammi is trying to chill with too much story work at the moment to avoid burnout.

Bring back ''roleplay for the sake of roleplay'' without it being weaponized against a rival ID or for the specific benefit of your own. Normalize the fact that RP without a goal is not a waste of your time. Yes we are adults now, but you can still write stuff without expecting something in return. When there is nothing ''on the line'' for doing or not doing it.

I am sorry, I do not remember the name who mentioned this before, but disco RP for a long time now has been following the trent of AAA video game industry where every single game is a product for a monetary goal, rather than a passion project.
Might be that Disco has become so condensed that the people who do RP are vets who just want to one-up one another in RP quality or consequences, while missing the point of an RP server and community entirely. You are RPing with other people, you are not RPing against them.

Same as the examples you mentioned, roleplay also got devoured by the same trend. Ulterior motive-driven roleplay, main character syndrome, roleplaying to "win", or any other similar term, are unfortunately not going away anytime soon. Not until we get a large influx of new players to make the community large enough where even if you wanted to be "the protagonist", there's too many people to notice you. Roleplaying a no name person just living their ordinary life is some of the most fun roleplay I've personally had on Discovery.

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