trans_pilgrims | Preliminary Game Discussion Post

A particularly notable problem that has cropped up recently is that a number of newbie players have found it hard to develop their initial CR, making it difficult for their characters to remain active in the game. Many have attempted to tag around, but still find it difficult to develop their CR, especially if they are not in a well-represented canon in-game.

What possible ways of doing things can we use to rectify this?

Many older players mention that the reason they don't tag out to many new players is because they don't have the energy or time to develop new CR. What about ways of making initial CR between characters easier to develop?

Currently, the game has no mandatory HMD requirement, and people are free to do them (or not) as they wish. However, even though we still don't intend on making HMD posts mandatory, the mod team feels it might be useful to have possibly a single post where people can link their own HMD posts or perhaps even have regular voluntary HMD memes. Remember, this would be completely voluntary, as we don't believe forcing people to do HMD posts is necessary.

How would everyone feel about something like this? Or, if they have another idea about this, please suggest it here.

I think the problem with linking ones people have is as people join and drop, that page would get out of date.

Voluntary periodica HMDs would be nice though.

What about some kind of IC welcoming committee? Characters could be assigned to new arrivals to help them get acquainted with everything. It'd require IC signups, but it could work for some people.

That might be one thing we could use, and I think it could be very effective. However, I see that as mostly just helping the situation for those with more sociable characters, so we ought to have something else to supplement it for players with other character types.

What if we also had small open plots that can work for just about any type of characters more often? Like little plot-in-a-can type things that could be run several at a time alongside other plots, that would give new players more opportunities to have their characters meet other people and develop CR for just about any type of character.

Blue brought this up on plurk and during the discussion we kind of figured out part of the clash of things.

Personally, I think there's a clash between the fact that newbies need CR and the fact that a lot of players are kind of sold on the fact that it's a slower, working-people's game, where you don't have to tag around a whole lot and can kinda limit your tagging to what you can manage with your life.

And that's a problem because newbies should be made to feel more welcome, but it's not entirely unfair to want to just tag at the rates you're capable, which might only be enough to maintain a small group of CR you've got.

I think we need to try to tag around more. I think the ideas some people have with newbie helpers and all are a good start. Trans' game culture is very dependent on just prodding other people to play and having a person welcome newbies goes a long way towards getting them comfortable enough to reach out when they need to to meet the older players halfway.

I also think changing the podpop a little to get the infodump out of the way via maybe an IC comm file that'd autoplay and the welcoming committee posts being FIRST would lead to more social tagging on the part of older players since they wouldn't be rehashing stuff. More channelposts and people making more of a habit of watching the channel would also help get past some rehashey introductory stuff and hopefully make people apt to tagging around more.

That said, I think though that there are other underlying problems contributing to this, and one of them is the size of the game.

For what the game was intended to be, for what I've heard some older players say they want to game to be, we have gotten too big for our britches. It's getting harder and harder for newbies to find their niche because there's less niches to carve out, less roles in the IC infrastructure (which provide at least some shortcuts to CR). I also still maintain that it's hard to balance the CR you've got with tagging around when you've been in a game a long time, most of your CR is still around (people often play in this game for months and years), and when logging takes so long, and that it's not unreasonable to want to focus on what you've got. It's just a want that clashes with other people's wants.

So I think besides the other solutions we should also, to fix the problem, focus on game size. It contributes to issues with plotting, and I think it also contributes to the game being so big and disconnected that it leads to newbies getting lost and flaily.

But it's a whole separate beast and I'm not sure how to get into that.

Yeah, that's probably a big contributing factor to the problem. The only problem is I can't really think of any reasonable solution that could mitigate this.

The only ways I know of curtailing the effects of game size are upping activity requirements (which would certainly not help our older players) or seriously limit incoming apps (which I don't think would help our newbies adjust, as they would have a smaller number of newbies to work with to build up CR).

I'm just not really sure how we could work on this side of the issue effectively. :|a

Frankly I think it might be time to just close apps, at least for a while. Even on invite only we have a constant trickle of newbies coming in. That or we need to be a bit more strict, somehow, about invites and who gets them.

What about limiting the invites players can give out? I don't think completely closing newbie apps at this point is necessary, but limiting the number of players coming in might help things a bit.

Even if, theoretically, limiting players to only give out one invite per app period could still double the game size, in practice I think it would substantially reduce incoming apps, as there are only a certain number of players that actually go out and give out invites, typically to several people at a time.

I think it's something to consider, at least.

Maybe it's time to start closing off more? Originally when we switched to invites, it was actually supposed to be more just...castmates and people that folks REALLY wanted to see and it still feels like people (myself included, so taking some of the blame here too) still just hit cool looking characters whose specs fit. Unless people are bouncing off the walls wanting to tag the people they invite in, I'm not sure if we should be as liberal with the invites as we have been. Being exclusionary never feels good, but the game has always suffered for getting bigger. There's always been an upside of getting great people in, but the downsides are weighing more and more heavily on actual gameplay and plotting.

I don't think limiting newbs would make things worse. If anything, less newbs means each newb gets MORE tags because there's less newbies TO tag. We'd likely get less people apping in overall if it was just castmates or something. Which means tag city for them because the people who do tag around don't have to spread their tags out as much. If ten players can managed to tag two characters each and there's five new characters a podpop, they are getting way more tags than if there was thirty characters that podpop.

IDK. None of the solutions are fun but I do think we should at least have a discussion on game size and the problems it causes and maybe how to fix them? Possibly a separate thread?

I like the plot-in-a-can idea ~~plus the imagery~~. It'd be neat to see little tasks run by either mods/mod helpers that can be easy going and not require a lot of thought so that newer players could interact and get some CR in the process.

Maybe excursions into the City to keep mapping it out, maybe gather supplies and explore. Or maybe pest control, I mean, Stacy must have some parasites running around! As well as that old idea about her getting an itch and such.

Stuff like that's simple that all you'd really need is one person running it and it'd be relaxed ^^

I don't really know about game size =/ I mean I know this game is not only well known and established, but rather intense as far as premise goes. But sometimes it feels like it's more of a background type game?

I don't know if I'm making sense here >.< But what I mean is that there's a rather large number of characters on board the ship, but I'd say less than 50% are actively posting open logs and such? Just going through the cast list in the wiki (Which might or might not be outdated.) makes me go, "Wait, we have that person here?" or "I've never even seen them post... huh."

Again, at that, I don't know if they just have the set CR they want, or they are just not interested anymore, but maybe if older players could use their less used muses to tag newbies, they might get a new breath of life to their characters AND make someone feel good cause they received a tag.

I also don't think invites should be closed? But limited sounds like a good idea. I mean, a lot of times, even when people do tag newbies and try to build up cr, the game just doesn't click and they end up dropping, and then the crew ends up with one less. And then people get discouraged, specially if it might have been a castmate they really really wanted.

I'm sure we can get to a good balance here. Everyone's regularly well intentioned and work together to make things happen!

Adding to the Trans_Channel thing. As I suggested in said plurk, I thought that maybe having some fun little things happen in the comm channel would make people tag there more and interact, including newbies.

Things like, but not limited to:

- Running newspaper with important information about the ship and crew.

- Ads by the different establishments on board, and the departments. I know we're not always working and someone might want to trade for some services! And advertisement for the places that the crew can use for morale boosts and just to clear their minds and relax, like; Kang's Drunken Dragon tevern, the Ship's Bathhouse, Hydroponics, Splicer's club/arcade Hunter's Pad, etc.

- A gossip column! Those are usually fun and can stir up some cr or interaction frenzies!

- Text based game? Or one that could be uploaded to the comm network. Challenge crew members against each other for top scores.

Just simple things like that can go a long way. And I wouldn't mind contributing and I've always said I'm willing to help in anything that is needed ^^

I agree, I have one in my personal journal and it's always open for anyone and everyone ^^ I'm sure it helps with things before they get taken to more unpleasant locations!

TBH, I think the fact that so many just kinda lurk in the background is actually a sign of the game being so large and hard to get involved in.

The game's never been perfect, and we've had to feel things out as we went, but for those of us that've been here longer, when it was smaller, it was easier for more people to get involved, it was easier to notice who was struggling, it was easier to pile on to people who weren't getting lots of tags because there weren't that many of them.

I think the people not really playing is a sign that many of them are kind of discouraged and aimless, not sure how to really get involved more.

If you think about it, we have like over three hundred characters and one hundred players. Part of why I think closing down apps somewhat (like maybe limiting to castmates only) would help is because we wouldn't keep adding new people to try to accommodate. We could focus on the ones already here and already struggling, and on branching out to who's already in the game, since many need CR help. Adding more and more people that need that help and need the tags and need the CR just means...more people that need help and tags and CR--and a lot of them tend to fade to the background or get lost easily or feel disenfranchised because it's hard to find a niche.

True, I just think dusting off unused muses might make tagging newer players maybe a bit more exciting? For old and new I mean. I don't know just thinking out loud here XD

Also, with that in mind, it'd be nice to have IC memes instead of so many ooc memes. Sometimes the randomness and freedom of a meme makes it easy to tag, so why not come up with an IC meme that players could tag into. I guess it's kinda like making a random shipwide small plot >.>

You mean more events? We could use more event-like plots I think, yeah. Like the old mistletoe one we had with GLaDoS ages ago.

Just as someone who does have some muses that I use to tag around more widely and others that I like to focus more on a small niche, I don't think it's as simple as just saying that people should bring those lesser-used muses out more often? Everyone tags for their own reasons after all, and it's not like you can can actually make bringing out unused muses more a requirement. (Well, I suppose you could, but that would mean making AC something that required threads from each character, which does conflict with the current laid-back game atmosphere)

IC memes on the comms does sound fun though :P

Yeah, simple stuff like that :3 The beach party was pretty fun and active. I think it gave a bit opportunity for people to tag and make cr ^^ Just fun stuff that's easy to tag to, following the premise of a meme and such.

Well, not force O.o I don't like the idea of making people do anything. Just you know, suggesting it? I don't know if I'm making myself clear XD I tend to derp around a lot >.>

What I meant was that maybe it'd be fun for both the old player and new player. Maybe the old muse hasn't been too inspiring and they just need someone new to throw it at them. Or launch and catapult, whathaveyou! XD

Hah, that's alright XD But I guess I just mean that when you have such a large game, it can be hard to guess the the reason for why someone might be tagging or not tagging a particular way, you know? Like, some of those guys might be floundering, or might have lost the inspiration, or they might just be happy with just playing them every now and again.

Yeah ^^ Maybe the newbies can inspire them! \o/

But if they're happy the way they are, then that's good too~

When I get it up and running, hopefully this is something the Friendship Department ~~or whatever it ends up being called for real~~ can be used to help with. Since the basic idea is that it's a group of people on the ship who regularly organise social events - the way I figure it, if every person in the group organises some kind of social event every once in a while, we can get a decent number of regular events all up without the burden being on any one person too much. ~~It won't help for things like the mistletoe event though XD~~

Edited 2011-09-01 08:33 (UTC)

That would be actually pretty awesome! And I'm sure it would be nice for people who have places that could be used as gatherings for the Friendship Department (Awesome name! ^^) Like Kang's tavern and Splicer's club.

He'd (Splicer) actually love to see something like that and lend his club for activities and such!

Well, as much as I love the idea of it being The Friendship Department, it probably won't be called that on account of the fact that it...can't actually be a Department XD. But things can be hosted all around the ship - in the sensoriums, in random buildings in the city, Hydroponics (who says we can't have a garden party?). Also little things could count too, like maybe a card game playing night or whatever.

Mostly, it's just getting it organised which is the tricky part. Uni's been rather busy for me, but I'm hoping I can get the ball rolling on it soon. A few peeps have mentioned that they'd be willing to help organise it oocly though, so that should help me out a bit in getting things going XD

Preliminary Game Discussion Post

Newbie CR Problem

Voluntary HMD Posts?

Re: Voluntary HMD Posts?

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