Alright, I will spare you the wall of text here. Recently I've been trying to get a friend of mine into Disco with very mixed success so far. (I am also totally NOT using the poor sod as a guinea pig for future tutorial stuff for nublets) The person at hand is a veteran Rper and a lover of pen and pencil stuff, but also enjoys scifi and has played FL in a distant past.
Needless to say, the first impressions on Disco for them were less than stellar. As they put it, you cannot spit in a random direction without being ejected out from any pretense of immersion as the server and forum RP is full of internet community references - pop culture, movies, memes and other. The biggest problem so far are names.
The culling of any sort of modern references and memes was a habit some of our older admins took to with a great gusto. Notable names being Virus and Laowai as well as Reverend Del. The later of the three would just .kill them while we would chill next to trade lanes on our Rogues.
Back in 84 risque or ''funny'' or ''ironic'' names were mostly reserved for the LR- player faction, but - sadly, became the norm. Especially for me. Though at the time I did not really think that it would matter much if I flew around with ships named LNS-You.What.Mate, LNS-Imrus or other stupidities. Well, it has gotten to the point that half of the character names ingame are references and memes. That is not even counting the amount of people using country tags, foreign names and other things.
The forum itself also has the same ''Xbox Live'' attitude with people embracing their anonimity and online personas. Say what you want about the RP quality in 84, the forums at least were a lot more serious and you could have a thread discussing perhaps even rather riskey material without being spammed with spiderman and other garbage.
So yeah, it is this thread again. It is stupid to expect people to change their attitude even if the admins suddenly decide to enforce the very rules that they have written regarding forum conduct and ingame behavour, but if that is the case, we might as well drop the, personally opinion, outright foolish pretense of a RP community and open the server for a much broader demographic. Most RP-loving people need a serious enviroment they can immerse themselves in, without a feeling that all of the community are sitting in the background, rolling their eyes at their RP posts. As the person mentioned, it seems that Discovery Freelancer is a "Ironic" portray of a Roleplay community. That we might as well drop the act. If anything, it will at least generate activity.
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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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That's actually a very good point raised. People started acting like stupidity is the new norm. Though, I haven't seen that many stupid names in game, I see way too many stupid things on forums. The meme wars in serious threads need to be stopped. I keep reporting them, but until someone gets nailed in public for it, people will continue doing it without a second thought.
I didn't see that much trolololo in game too, but dropping memes in serious threads is a no indeed. Like we're discussing something more or less important for someone and then some people drops a meme into it. Anyway, I doubt your post will change anything.
I think one of the main problems behind this is the inclusion of self-insert characters rather than the crafting of actual personalities to RP as. Oh sure people use "personas" on disco but it's never for the benefit of the RP; more often than not, it's for the benefit of themselves to get things they want with paper-thin excuses, then they can slap whatever name they want onto ships and just say "oh lol its what my character wanted"
It's been a while since I've had to make a new character but back when I was applying to factions left and right, I made ample use of character trait generators to get a basic feel for how that character would act regularly. Afterwards if the character would actually need to stay around or prove fun enough to keep RPing as, I'd run the basic idea I had of their personality through the Myers Briggs Type Indicator to help flesh out the idea even further. All of my Cross characters, my old IMG/SCRA/Hessian Indie, my Horus| captain, le LSF agent, and my IRG character have all been through this process in an attempt to better generate actual characters to use when interacting with others. It's not a perfect guideline but holy hell is it helpful.
My rant about characters lacking character aside, the name thing has got to stop; it just shows a complete lack of effort on the part of RP when stupid character names are more common than sensible ones. And this isn't just a few people doing this: I'm pretty sure I'm safe in saying we're all guilty of it to some degree, so lets just all collectively agree to ditch this and move on, shall we?
It's a RP server people. Act like it.
[ sci·am·ach ]
/sīˈamək/
A simple, angry man casually working his way through life on a personal quest to acquire copious amounts of street cred.
The funny thing is, I kinda had a discussion where the coulprit of this ingame stupidity stems from the fact that creating and renaming characters has been made to be not only possible, but easily accessable. Basically - that accessability is doing harm to Disco.
People were less common to do stupid things ingame, when creating a character involved no restarts or rephacks given to IDs, that you were invested in your character through the act of setting it up and the effort it took. That aside - renames were also impossible without buying a special certificate from a base and contacting an admin about it, the certificate itself cost around 200mil. So ''throwaway'' characters for lolz were much less common, though not unheard of obviously.
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PSA: If you have been having stutter/FPS lag on Disco where it does not run as smoothly as other games, please look at the fix here: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...pid2306502
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And the thing is removing restarts and renames wouldn't help as we're already very low with numbers.
Disco needs some adverts, maybe more tuts about PvP aspects, bringing the game closer to players and finally some more action happenining around. More events along with more videos on youtube could be a 'Hey! Look there, there's something happening, lets check it!'
(03-21-2016, 08:40 AM)Protégé Wrote: Removing restarts is a no. Renames should be more expensive though. 200mil for a rename wouldn't be that bad of an idea.
The problem comes true when you join a faction and have to rename your char
It is hard to help it unless introducing high culture and RP standards as an own mark, and only this way, by being an example, one can change the overall attitude.
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