I can see at least one case in which not rezzing someone would be acceptable (and yes I agree that everyone can disagree with me on this): if it is not asked for. Example: last time my character got a rez I was trying to death-port. I truly believe the player who rezzed me acted out of friendship or humanity or respect or... and he had me lose a few important minutes getting killed one more time.
I will never consider this player a whatever name I've read in this thread even if I'm sure someone nitpicking could consider it as "forcing me to play his way" by denying me to use deathport. And I'd still respect him and his way of playing even if I were unable to understand them and to find any reason for his acts.

If I can see one case maybe there are other ones.


And as for Crick's initial question: I've seen some hostility in forums against someone vaguely defined as "the hard-RPer". It hurts a bit since I consider myself in character all the time.
But I've never met personally with hostility from other players in game be them RPers or not. At least once I had talked to them. (My character has met with hostility from other characters but it's another story entirely)

Death porting isn't RP related (actually would love an RP story about why deathporting is good or even considered something normal for homins to do). But when deathporting it's always best to announce it in around chat or something since ppl can't see if you are deathporting or just got killed.

Most homins (who are not rping) would like a rez (and I have been rezzed by a homin who was my enemy - she is very nice - will not name but she also steals bosses under RP licence)

One night, a member of my guild has slipped into the herb and died. Kamiste raised him. A kamiste who raises someone with as guild emblem "Antekami" !!! After that, I kill my brother, to wash the offense. And I kill them, again, and again, to be sure he has purified. Please, be kindly : if you are kamist, just fight. Not resurrect. Or abjure your faith.


Maybe I am this rolist that you don't like. I 'm a "bad guy." The character is evil; the person playing it, alas, is not much. I would sometimes be 100% RP, but I also know that we are here in a game, and some things are not funny, not "a game".

I can insult you in surroundings; but privately, I can ask you if all is well. If I feel that you don't want to RP, I became a neutral guy ... Probably I don't play long time with you, too.

If you are one of my friends, and I know we can "hate" ourselves, yes, I can send you torbaks and let die, and laughing on your body; but if during a walk, clumsiness, my torbaks fall on a unknown people, I spend OOC, I ask in tell if the person wants a revive, I ask forgiveness. Only OOC, eh! Never do Fakuang would help someone else. If a player that I have helped in this way speak publicly, I blacklist him ! (good luck for help after that, so).

I prefer ignore the revive demands ... I am not a Ranger. However, if the person who needs it is next to me ... Ok, OOC also : care, and goodbye dude.

The Charter is clear: we can not hide behind the RP to insult, harass. Until today, all people seem okay with me. It is possible to play a very bad boy in toon, while fairplay as a player. These are two different things. Do not ask me to be cute and join a hunting with Kamists: this is not what I want to play. However, if you like to play kami-kara-marauders together ... go ahead, it will deprive myself of anything except your company time this reunion guilty ^^

I agree with Xtarsia.

People should simply respect each other, as long as the CoC / charter is followed. No point sending "hate tells" to people in different factions teamed together. If you're against it, just don't play with them. Or react in RP or whatever.

But same thing. No point feeling personally offended if someone doesn't rez you or attacks you because they feel justified by their RP to do so. It's their right to do so and they enjoy playing Ryzom for the RP.

At the end of the day it's just a game. Be it OOC or IC. =P

i just want to add, that on leanon rpers were - w/o exception very friendly and every one or most of - especially non-rpers faced them with respect and even "newbs" like it was me 2006 , who thought rp is ...just bullshi... were starting to find it cool. Becouse our rpers never "forced" other players, were always nice and in-character and the most important: they accepted everyone they made their thing and left others, too. with their noble actions and their help to everyone they attracted more players to rp than a missionaries could!

so the rpers who are aggressive now, they do not understand that they arr doing more harm to the game abd the rp at all then some "childish" troublemakers.

I disagree Purg. RP is playing a role. Be it good guy or bad guy. No one ever said a RP persona need to be always nice and love everyone. In fact at the core of all stories and script writing is conflict. Without that stories are boring.

I'm sorry to hear that you have been treated with condemnations, Crick :(
But this can happen to RPers in any large MMORPG, even on "RP-servers", especially with new players who do not really understand what "roleplaying" is supposed to be.
It's really sad that the whole of Ryzom's RP-community has gotten this kind of reputation nowadays because of a few griefers abusing every kind of absurd "reasoning" (like "this is RP") to camoflage their bullying.

Well, that, and way too "tolerant" GMs as well as Event-Team-Managers who support griefing by looking the other way, even if it happens right under their noses (sorry guys and ladies; you should really start to face the truth after all the years that players have been driven away one by one by similar circumstances).

I have to point out that there is an important difference between "saying this is RP" and actual roleplaying.

Sure, some of these people in fact fancy themselves as great roleplayers
* even if they also like to do emote-spams regularly,
* even if they "coincidently" only flame players from certain groups like specific language-communities, although some of the characters they flame are in fact reputable members of the same nation as the flamers,
* and / or if they will occasionally drag aggro onto members of guilds that they hate (although these guilds are of the same faction and have often been fighting alongside their own characters)...

These are actual examples.

RP you call that?
Yeah right. And Armas can fly.

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Like Salazar (and unlike Purg) I too remember the bad old times on Leanon when large-scale-PvP started and suddenly a lot of players phrased "RP"-hate-speeches in the chats like: "We pwn u Karas, lol!". What's "roleplaying" got to do with that? Still, some believed it was RP, because they just didn't know any better :( This is happening again today as we can see; and every time at least a few people will actually be hoodwinked.

Why do we not experience behavior like that within the German-speaking community on this now merged server anymore? Simple: players like that have systematically driven each other out of the game. And eventually when griefers can't find enough targets to grief any more, they themselves will then go search for better hunting-grounds elsewhere. Also there are always some players sticking together and continually motivating each other, mostly guilds, which makes them survive in the long run. Well, and some stubborn single individuals who just won't give up no matter what :)

This happened to what is now left from the German-speaking Leanon-community. We are the survivors. Plus those who joined us respectively joined Ryzom after the griefer-wave, and who then have been welcomed with kind, helping, open arms, so they are still with us - or will at least occasionally drop by from time to time.

We German-speaking roleplayers have learned our lessons from the disasters we have survived. We now prefer peaceful "let's all be friends and work together"-roleplaying mostly because we just don't want to see any more Ryzom-players leaving this game. Some think of it as the responsible-grown-up-way to act and look at things. Which is not breaking any roleplay-"rules" nor "logic"! And if we fight or engage in IC-discussions, it's usually in a moderate tone too. Well, OOC might be a different matter though, but you know how all forums can be like...

As a side note I'd like to mention that a good deal of the German-speaking roleplayers of today also are / have been pen & paper-RPers for years. Pen & paper RP belongs to the very few kinds of social games where you don't have to play against each other, but as a team versus the environment. Not even the game-master who fills the environment and NPCs with life verbally is playing "against" but instead "for" the players :) That also has an impact on our online-roleplaying-style I think.

So in my opinion that's why most of the German-speaking roleplayers you can find on Atys today are friendly people with mostly friendly characters. And most of us can read/write English too, even if not perfect ;)

------------------------

Someone once said "you can't mix up OOC and IC when you're talking OOC from player to player". In fact I believe you absolutely CAN go too far with mixing IC and OOC in RL, when for example:

* you as a human being in front of your computer really, really believe that a specific faction/group in a game you're playing is made of "the good guys"; so the motives of their NPCs and/or members cannot possibly be any other than altruistic and for the salvation of the world - everyone saying/believing otherwise must be an idiot
* you go to lengths to explain in details how things are on our RL-earth today (or have been in medieval times) and insist that all of this has to be the fundamental everyday-knowledge of all characters on a game-world where monsters, respawn, magic, teleport, immortality and magical healing is/are common...
* you insult, threaten and/or intimidate players OOC merely for the fact that they have chosen a specific game-faction, -race etc. to play, because this makes them a horrible RL-person in your eyes
* you flirt away just imagining (without even asking) that players look and "are" just like their game-avatars (especially gender-wise), and you verbally abuse them after realizing your assumptions have been wrong
* you start a brawl at an RL-meeting with people whose MMORPG-characters/toons belong to an "enemy"-guild
* you make a SWAT-team storm the house of a player after losing a PvP-battle or the like against them

These are actual examples of unhealthy things that have happened and are still happening.

The underlying fundamental problem might be just the same when players are griefing others and driving them out of the game using "RP"-methods and are justifying their behavior / words per "RP-reasons". Like by insulting players they meet for the first time by using formally correct IC-sentences addressed to characters/toons (assuming that this alone will make it "roleplaying"), depending on whatever little they believe to "know" about their targets. Now and again going wrong by that.

Mind that just "not receiving resurrection" usually is not a problem in itself, but the verbal abuse that comes with it or as an afterwards-excuse is - whether this comes camouflaged in an "RP"-style or not.

--------------------------------------------

It has already been mentioned in this thread: the Lore REALLY does not make Kami-diciples and Karavan-followers mortal enemies, nor Matis and Fyros (there are peace treaties in effect).

So your characters are not "forced" in any way to hate others who do not share the same beliefs or birth. It is not "bad RP" to be friendly, au contraire! For some of us it would be "bad RP" to IC hate members of other nations and factions after knowing and experiencing how all nations and both factions plus neutrals have been working together very often in the past for the purpose of saving all homins.

Marauders... well, maybe Marauders truly are mortal enemies of all the other homins. ;) Still the ones who insult others "RP-Style-like", who treat others badly or who pull every kind of trick to force others to behave similarly unsocial towards specific players/player-guilds are most often not playing Marauders, but are either playing fanatic Kami-disciples, fanatic Karavan-followers or fanatic nationalist.

Sorry to say, but in nearly all cases I have heard of or experienced myself it was PvP-lovers who chose to "roleplay" hatred even if they didn't have to, sometimes even though RP-logic would have demanded of their characters to act tolerant or even nice. Still they willingly chose to be insulting instead and to behave in griefing ways, hiding behind so-called "RP-reasons".

I have reasons to suspect that the majority of the players behaving in griefing ways absolutely deliberately intend/s to bully and hurt other players, that all they want is to "rule others" and feel great because of that, that a number of them purposefully aim at driving (at least some of) their targets out of the game, that they are fully aware of making up false flimsy excuses, merely trying to avoid punishment by falsely claiming that they "keep true to the logic/rules of roleplaying"...

Still, there's the "benefit of the doubt". Civilized people don't punish the innocent.

That's what "officials" always have to consider. So whenever someone is not clearly breaking the code of conduct, the griefer will get away just fine by claiming "it was because of RP" - and GMs won't even give them a warning. Nor explain anything to them, nor ask them to be nicer since Ryzom needs every paying player. No matter how many players will leave the game because of stuff like that. Well, Atys is by far not the only online-game-world affected by such sneaky griefers, but as Ryzom has a small - and still dwindling - player-community by now, the wounds are quite large in comparison.

It's understandable that GMs don't want to kick players out of the game, precisely because the community is already small enough - but if you don't get rid of griefers pronto, then these are the ones who will drive 10 or 100 times more players away... In my opinion it is high time to at least pull the "RP-reasoning"-rug out from under griefer's feet to make them stop. Love and peace on Atys anyone (except for Marauders)? ;)

--------------------------------------------------------

TL;DR:
Griefers claiming "RP-reasons" for verbal abuses are actually most often not even roleplayers or really bad ones, so don't fall for their tricks; and most German-speaking roleplayers are nice people, so come and meet with us - and let's change the world :)

Hey, I'm not stubborn! I'm ... persistent. =)

This, by and large, would represent my prior experience in healthy RP communities. :-)




There is truth in this, too -- albeit with a caveat, namely:


"Good" RP, IMHO, addresses both letters in "RP":

R = You speak and act "in character" mostly, thus adding to what the game's code and artwork do to create a phantasy.

P = You realize playing with others comes with a responsibility to let them have their fun, too, and definitely not to spoil it intentionally. (good German word here would be "Spielverderber" ;-)


A story might fit here: In one mud with a very healthy RP community, there was this bad-ass character played as a public enemy # 1 villain with such style and flair that the transcripts the player published on the web made really good reads. They were quite hilarious. Everybody benefited from his PvP play and those who engaged him, including those who stayed on the sidelines. As a young character and noob to the game, I ran into him once as he was on one of his romps. He didn't so much as touch my character, and - I don't remember clearly now - I think he gave me fair warning and a little advice at that. The characters who died to his were those who chose to hunt him or ally with the hunters. All in all, he provided so much fun and excitement with great IC style, and yet did it so responsibly in OOC terms, that he was much appreciated.

But then, he disappeared for a few years, and when he came back, he had changed (or perhaps someone else had taken over the account?) and butchered indiscriminately and cowardly, essentially griefing other players (or so I was told). He then was no longer appreciated.

The morale of the story: when you rp responsibly and with style, everybody benefits. This takes both, IC (R) and OOC (P) aspects of play into consideration.




Indeed!


Same here. This might explain why perhaps older communities on RPG systems had less trouble to ease into good roleplay than the younger folks today who probably mostly come from video games.


That's why I stay away from pure "PvP servers" nowadays. PvP (or "PK" as it used to be called) adds to realism and thrill, but it must be handled responsibly, which can mean policing through NPCs or PCs or GMs or a combination. In the MUD I spoke of, I felt that this had been accomplished well. In an MMO, I have yet to see that. It is one of the ways in which MMO designers fail to program for RP even as they lose ground to social media. Oh, well...


Nice discussion. :-)

I strongly believe that conflicts are the spice in every nice roleplay. Be it personal or political conflicts. I play a character who strongly dislikes conflicts and represents the Tryker-version of a serene, fun-driven, hippie-style beach-boy with world peace visions. And of course he dislikes religious fanatics. But that doesn't mean I as a player dislike the fanatic characters, in contrary I think a world like ryzom needs them.
But I think there is a communication problem of the "hardliners" towards those who only do some RP from time to time or to the non-RPers. Telling other players that they should hate everyone from the other faction, that they shouldn't rez or shouldn't hunt / train / work together in any way with the opposite faction will give RP a bad reputation, drives players away from it and gives RPers the fame of malevolent, hateful people - unless they show some empathy for the non-RPers and make clear that this is just the opinion of their character and not the one of them as players. It's not an easy process to be hard in character but communicate soflty in ooc with others, but the ideal case would be a parallel ooc communication with the confronted player explaining that it is all the opinion of the character only.
This isn't done very often and the result is this bad reputation of roleplayers with more extreme characters. You always have to remember that roleplay newbies can't discern between ic and ooc yet. So they all will take fanatic RPers for assholes. If you don't like that then it's your job to build a bridge towards them with parallel friendly and welcoming ooc communication.

In addition to this I often have the impression that a non-fanatic or non-conflict RP isn't considered as RP at all but is labeled as ignorance towards the lore and chosing the "easy way".
You need this nice, peaceful and not-so-strict RP to keep the community together and to build bridges between the hardcore RPers and the non-RPers. You need those yubo cuddlers, flower pickers and let's-do-it-together guys to invite people who are curious about RP to have a soft introduction into the world of roleplay. You can't confront them with interdictions and "kill them where ever you see them" RP - if you do, you don't get good RPers but you get rude people using RP as an excuse for bad behavior.

In my eyes, rp-driven ingame conflicts are really (adapting a german sentence) "the salt in the soup" but if there is no soup left at all and just salt, the soup tastes awful and is no fun to eat.

I got to be honest I never was griefed/agro dragged/not healed/... by german RP'ers alot of them are good except those that sended messages to my guildies saying they had to kick me from guild or they would be banned from RP meetings as a guild and so on.
The reason why GoS went from Zorai aligned to Tryker aligend guild was 100% because of the so called good german RP'ers doing everything in their power to anoy us (with the help of their event/RP team).
Why GoS went from tryker to trytonist has more deeper roots but yes our first transition was because of those pen and paper rp'ers supported by their dungeon leaders. 
YES YOU ARE BULLIES, you don't do it by killing somebody in the open but you bullie ppl so much if they don't do what you say they have to do. Some of us left game disgusted and others actually took the time to regrind guildfame on a guild (with 50+ member guilds it is alot of work) so not to have to run into those friendly pen and paper RPers aymore

(not all are bad I know that but there are rotten eggs, alot of them you can recognize by their custom event team given titles)

Sorry, Suboxide, but I won't buy that.

A. is this about political RP-meetings that your (former?) guild Guardians of Shadows has rarely ever attended? Are you saying that GoS-members / -leaders have been warned that they would be banned from RP-Assemblies if they did not kick your character - an openly professed Marauder (a group of enemies of all nations that they plan to overthrow)? Then it cannot possibly have been German-speaking roleplayers who sent you messages like that.

1. only Zorai would even care if GoS attended Zorai-meetings. But there are only two German-speaking political representatives for the Zorai: Sartyrica and myself. Our small guilds are made of members who are not politically active other than sometimes sitting around silently take notes (chatlogs) at Assemblies for us. As I know for sure that I did not send any PMs like that, this would leave only Sartyrica.

Aside from the fact that the player of Sartyrica has never stated his/her opinion round the back but always openly (like here about GoS leaving the Theocracy http://app.ryzom.com/app_forum/index.php?page=topic/view/20537 ), we all know that GoS would not be banned from any official Zorai-Assemblies just for housing a Marauder. Only the "leaders" of the Zorai, the Sages (played by the Event-Team) actually have the power to decide about this, we players have no saying in this matter. So a warning would make no sense.

2. also we already had Marauders peacefully attending German-speaking Assemblies at a couple of occasions. Of course our talks were mostly provocations being uttered by the Marauders staying true to their RP-roles, and distrust uttered by the representatives of the nations in return. However we didn't kill each other and the Marauders weren't kicked from the Assemblies.

The only characters ever being sent away from RP-Assemblies have been those who were clearly doing their best to disrupt the Assemblies by either throwing insults, by spamming or loudly performing PvP-battles close to the RP-event. And even that was done only very reluctantly after tolerating the trouble-makers for a long time...

B. but maybe you're talking about RP-meetings of Kami-aligned guilds who engage in PvP fighting for outposts? I do not even know if there are any meetings like that or not, but it seems possible. In that case the message might have been written by someone who is not even calling themselves a roleplayer...

C. speaking of German roleplayers "doing everything in their power to annoy you"? By what kind of action or words, pray tell?

By talking to (Awakened) Astarth or (Awakened) Fitis during RP-Assemblies to initiate new political projects together perhaps? Or by sending open letters via forums about political RP addressed to Min-Cho and asking for your opinion IC maybe? Seems likely, because that's what I did and got only silence in return from your whole guild for months and months :(

I did not even think of it as an "annoyance" when GoS - while still being a Zorai-loyal guild - proudly boasted that they had killed Zorai-guards in the Great Outback. Instead I as a player was happy to being offered one of the rare opportunities of being able to talk IC with GoS again. http://app.ryzom.com/app_forum/index.php?page=topic/view/20232

Well, of course you cannot expect an Zorai-Awakened to jump for joy and praise you for actions like these against Zorai-guards, right? Still I believe all replies were really moderate, while RP-correct, and in no way "annoying". And most certainly not "bullying". Even though I will admit that I have certainly made a bunch of mistakes, I do not remember ever having bullied anyone.

D. funny that you should mention "custom-made titles" given by the event-team, because no German-speaking player has ever gotten one of those.

Except if you should perhaps be hinting to event-titles (like for Easter-hunts) or political titles (that are not "custom-made" but have certain fame-preconditions plus some RP-qualifications you have to meet. You can look them all up in your own "player-infos" ingame, as everyone meeting the conditions can get them).

P.S.: just like not everyone from the former Arispotle-community is actually British, so we usually refrain from calling it the "English" community, it's the same with the "German" community. I myself am Austrian for example :)

P.S.S.: sorry Crick for getting so off-topic! I'll try my best to get back to topic next time, I promise :)

You mean you were that much annoyed by one single German player (I think there are and were two German Zorai RP players at most) and a German event team I'd really like to meet (for I'm getting tired to having my brains non-stop translating from and into English) that you went to a country which actually has most of the German players collected?

In a strange way, that annoys - or rather irritates me. ^^

P.S.: Drats! Zhoi was faster than me. But also more verbose. ;)

P.P.S.: I want a custom-made title!

True, most of the German-speaking RPers can be found in Aeden Aqueous, the majority of them belonging to the famous religion-neutral Tryker-guild "Free souls", led by Taliar Chanchey Breggan. These homins have become the glue holding the German-speaking RP-community together, if not the whole German-speaking community of today...

And that's also the reason why Atys has the "Chanchey-system"!

Well, even though Chanchey said that he himself OOC approves of "conflict-RP" and of "fanatic" homins as well, I think that does not reflect the opinion of the majority of the German-speaking players. In fact there are only few left who enjoy RP-conflicts.

We already have experienced a lot of that, and let's face it: it totally did not work out most of the times, and in the end it usually made players leave the game who were fed up with it :( I for my part do not enjoy that any longer as well.

The latest example being the differences of Icus and his bunch with Salazar, Daomei and me, that have started off as diplomatic conflicts and could have been fun if they had only stayed purely IC. But instead things have turned into a real mess, and many former participants have left Ryzom for good instead of feeling entertained. Sadly this is the typical road to hell that "conflict-RP" has taken so very often :(

By now I am already wondering if "conflict-RP" can ever really work out for long, and under which conditions.

Does anyone know?

Oh, and please don't just muse about mere theories that "should" work if they were ever tested, but please give me actual examples of "conflict-RP" that has been and stayed "fun" for players for a long time. If there are any?!
Go ask the French event-team. They have handed out all kinds of individual titles to their own community before (like "Royal Botanist" and the like), but nowadays they will also give them to others. We Zorai even have a "Dynastic Scribe" now (someone from the English-speaking community)!

Back on Leanon we went through harsh times when a bunch of homins angrily left the circles of the Zorai because the Sages (aka event-team) refused to give any political titles to them. Our representatives weren't granted any titles for a really long time, even after political titles (Akenak, Taliar, Nobles) had been given to the representatives of all the other countries :(

Well, I cannot be one to complain, because I actually talked the Leanon event-team into giving me something kinda like a German "custom title" (being "Honorary Initiate") back in those times when I was left as the only active political representative of the Zorai after everyone else had either quit or would only ever show up extremely rarely (like Sartyrica).

It was not intended to stay a title for only one homin of course, but instead I made them invent this title so others would also join political RP without having to leave their guilds and become a "real" (game-system-wise) Zorai initiate. It just never happened, even though a number of players had shown interest initially.

Actually this title still exists (and now in all languages), although my characters does not use it any longer after having become an Awakened. However: if anyone should be interested, it's merely sleeping and waiting to be resurrected ;)