English

In this post, I would like to address the active hostility directed at roleplayers (well, at myself at any rate) which I have often perceived in the few weeks I have so far lived on Ryzom and which has made me question my decision to try this game, as well as the rumors about its friendly player base. I suspect this hostility - which I by now can no longer easily interpret as an unlucky chain of chance encounters - has four main sources which I submit for contemplation:

(1) Ignorance of RP. There is only one cure: If you haven't tried RP yourself, please try to recognize the difference from abstract games like Chess and give it a try. Something must have driven you to try a game like this. There is a good possibility a roleplayer is locked up within you and trying to get out. You won't know how much you are missing until you release him or her. Dismissing RP and roleplayers as weird and considering RP to be some off-the-wall option when you are playing a game which is in the MMO"RPG" category honestly strikes me as disingenuous. It is also unfair towards committed roleplyers who have a valid reason to be playing an MMORPG (Ryzom). I would even go so far as saying they have a considerably more valid reason than you do as long as you categorically brush aside the "RPG" part of "MMORPG" without so much as having tried RP. You shouldn't force yourself to play another's version of RP, either, of course. See what charms you about Atys and find your own RP, the one that maximizes this charm and will make Ryzom so much richer for you than an abstract game of Chess. If you grind like mad, ask yourself: what will be left to you when you have maxed everything? Leaving for another game as so many do, never to find fulfillment as you chase after it yet fail to go for it when it is within easy reach? Make a new character and repeat the grind all over having learned nothing, never stopping to smell the roses? A well made RPG is much more than just a game. It's a world to escape to, an opportunity to live your dreams and find happiness and fulfillment often denied to us in real life. As one roleplayer (or rather a character) once said: "Game? What game? I live here!" You really should try it, even if you have only seen bad or unappealing examples of RP so far. Make a better example. You may surprise everybody, including yourself. I often hear the arguments that many people are just not into roleplay, that they don't know what it is, or that it could be tiring (not more so than grinding, I promise you!). Those are really no valid excuses for not trying. Playing a role playing game and pointedly abstaining from role playing, honestly, to me is like visiting an amusement park or a fascinating country blindfolded. ;-p Naturally, you will meet players who are into a different kind of roleplay than you (say, blood feuds and vendettas, romantic or sexual RP, sexism, insanity...). That's normal and no different from the Real World (RW). Just don't associate any more with them than you must. Problem solved. Please never think that their RP is all the RP there is any more than on Earth other people's lifestyles are necessarily yours. Hopefully, only you decide who you are on Atys. *

(2) The occasional creepy cyber stalker who has entered Ryzom to lure underage kids or other targets into offline relationships or perform similar OOC-motivated acts which creep out honest gamers. Maybe Ryzom has seen a painfully high share of those. Sexy avatars in modern MMORPGs may perhaps attract them too much. Please don't be such a creep, and - for the love of all that is good - don't constantly suspect and accuse every roleplayer you come across, every sociable player who makes conversation or offers coop play in what is after all a multi-player game, or every character who injects levity and subtle humor into a conversation of being such a creep. To do this, ruins the game for all of us, just because of a few bad apples who made you paranoid. That's just not right.

(3) The many transgender characters. Most people fail miserably playing such a character credibly and healthily, and there is the awkwardness of deception when IC and OOC lives overlap, as they often do sooner or later to some degree. The first outcome (not being able to play this character well) harms RP directly, and the latter (the deception and awkwardness) has a chilling effect on it, even for people who don't plan on including romance in their character's life on Atys. Please consider making a new, more appropriate character you can really "be". If not, at least be upfront with everybody about your choice, but also realize that you are diluting the pool of roleplayers in this - a roleplaying - game. I am not demanding this. I don't have that power or right. I am appealing to your better nature.

(4) Clashing generations. Ryzom can't vet player ages, and I doubt it should. We have old people wanting to feel young again, young kids wanting to feel grownup and test grownup ways but not necessarily being quite ready for it all -- as well as kids who are just kids -- and everything in between. I recommend you either share your age category as much and as often as is necessary, useful, and safe(!) (and comfortable to do so), or that you simply limit contact with characters whose way of being doesn't mesh well with your level of maturity (or in fact your play stile or objectives or any other preferences). You don't have to be embarrassed or rude about it or call for "help" from others all the time. Remember, people don't see or know you-the-earthling. They only see the avatar you made and the signals it sends. You can simply refrain from answering tells, politely tell someone you're too busy to talk, tell them you are not into this or that, etc. How much information you share about your Real Life self with anyone is up to you, and less is often more in this regard. In fact, I think that it is better for underage players not to announce their age, so as not to attract pedophiles. Breaking and limiting contact is neither difficult, nor need it be rude. Unless Ryzom's player community is in a worse state than I have seen so far, most people will get the message and respect your choice. And if someone fails to get the message, just add that character to your Ignore list. I can imagine few situations where this won't suffice.

I left out another big reason, namely that Ryzom - like all MMORPGs I have seen so far - has not been coded to properly support and encourage RP, to bring it more easily to life. This is not under our (the players') control. Hence I relegate it here to a mere honorable mention. ;-p

Let's all have fun as best we can. :-)


* You can read my attempt of explaining RP and RPGs in my post titled: What is a roleplaying game?



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Note: I will soon be traveling for over six weeks and don't know if - or how often - I may get on the Internet or have a chance to log into Ryzom. Please don't think I am snubbing anyone or hiding from them if I may be scarce or unable to participate in any discussion which might build around this post. In addition, I must admit, posting about a game rather than playing it is not common for me. So, after this weekend's posts there may not be any for a long time.

Crick --

You neglected to mention one possibility: That you are coming off as intimidating or condescending in your approach to RP. From your words here I can tell that you are passionate about it, and I do not sense condescension, but that could be different in real time interaction, especially for new players, or players who have had bad experiences in the past.

As for the rest of your question, I would say that a lot of the "light roleplay" people here in Atys, by which I mean those who have only a small amount of (or no) investment in deep character development and backstory, have been bitten badly by the consequences of some of the "serious" roleplay that has been done here. This leaves them leery of further involvement on the "serious" level even if they are perfectly willing to continue to play on a "light" level and discuss the doings on Atys, the change of the seasons, etc.

Just my two cents.
-- Mac'Od Bittty ("light" with respect to some and "serious" with respect to others.)

Hey Crick, and welcome!

Not entirely sure what your experiences have been, but I've been playing Ryzom for some years now. I think I would categorize Ryzom players in terms of RP more or less like this:

1) 100% IC: The hardcore guys who are IC all the time in "around" chat. Those are the rarest. But still quite a few around. Some of them speak mostly French though. Others also speak English. Seems to be what you're looking for here.

2) IC when "activated": These guys hang out mostly in OOC mode, until someone starts RP'ing with them, then they respond back IC. Or during official RP events, etc. I think you'll find more of this than "1".

3) Casual RP: Mostly OOC, with some RP thrown in here and there for spice, humor, etc. They won't be strictly IC though. But will play along in their own way.

4) No RP: And then ofc there's the people who do not RP, are never IC, and do not care for it.

I'm a RPer and have always been for as long as I played Ryzom (although I would consider myself type '2') and I was never met with hostility by anyone. But then again, I never tried to engage in RP with people I notice are strictly OOC. So that might be the reason.

I guess your best bet for finding other RPers is looking at the Roleplay and Event forums. Look at all the recent threads there. Notice who's posting, what they're saying, what the ongoing RP events are. And then attend the events. Check out the event calendar and show up. You'll meet other RPers there.

Oh, about the virtual-sexual-stalking thing. I don't think that's an issue at all here in Ryzom. =P
At least I never ran into anything of the sort in all my years here. But then again I don't play a female toon, so who knows lol. But I heard about games like The Secret World and how that's a huge issue in the RP there. So I don't think it's the same here at all.

Good luck Crick! ^^

I will just say the biggest issue for me with 'roleplayers' in this game is the contempt they treat 'non-roleplayers' with. (I am not referring to all roleplayers- but a good proportion of them that I have met).

Roleplayers create the hostility by making up rules- the classic one we see is 'You can't team/trade/ally with X and Y because you are Z'. Firstly- no where in the entire lore does it say this- and the lore is open to interpretation. Simply by disagreeing with these 'rules' you are branded a non-roleplayer and someone who is killing the game. For many of these 'role-players' they have created a black and white world and will never see the shade of grey.

If you are asking why roleplayers are met with hostility- that would be the number one reason.

I agree Virg....

I replied to your other post who looks alot the same.

In Rikutatis list I would have said I was 2-3 on aristople but since server merge and ppl trying to force us to RP and setting up stupid rules like you can't talk to that person you knew for years since he's kami and you are mara i'm now stricktly number 4 and sometimes 3 with friends.

Same for my guild we where always a loose guild on aristople for the last years we allowed RP and went to meetings and such. Now these days we are officially trytonists (I think we change now and then when RPers start bugging us to much) and have mara/kami/neutrals/rangers/... in the guild that are just here to have fun and a good time.

For the rest check my reply on your other post.

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Well, Riku said most what's important, I guess.

When you play a kind of over-sexed character - and those do exist IG - it's always helpful to clear that up with the characters you interact that way. Saves you the accusation of harrassment. It does not save you the possibility of a harsh rebuke, though - as in RL. Anyway, it should not be a matter of what gender the actual player is; probably there are guys who are not very good at playing gals, but then there are probably guys who are not very good at playing guys. If, however, you can't stand the quality of someone's RP, stayout of his (or her) way. In that, the virtual World is really like the real World. If you can't do that, adapt - after all, you take Trykers and Bodocs and Flyners for real, so why worrying about a player's gender?

I do have to make a small comment about this:

Until my character''s retirement as an Ambassador, he was very heavily involved in political RP. Let me tell you - that has a lot in common with chess. ;)

Interesting post :)

1)Nothing to add here

2)That can be a problem, yes (though i saw it only once while playing for 4+ years, so it's not that common). But it's more a matter of "don't be a creep on the internet" and "don't let young kids alone on the internet", not really specific to ryzom, every online community (with or without a game behind) has this problem i think (except maybe scrabble online addict ?)

3)I haven't had that much of an issue with it (but i mostly saw fyros transgender character, which is definitively the nation where the gender separation is the more blurry) ; part of it because except maybe for the matis, nobody really cares about your gender in Ryzom (just read the lore, there is a tons of female/male hero, the current leader of the marauder / tryker is a female ...)

4)I don't agree, i actually played very few with people around my age (but most of the people i play with don't know my real age ...), without issues. There is asshole everywhere no matter what the age, really. I don't even know how old are most of the people i played with.

In the end, for me the real issue is 1), and the fact that ryzom code is not exactly the best for roleplaying ; other issues aren't really big and happens to a minority of people (not saying they shouldn't be treated !).

Wow! I half expected my two posts to gather dust unread, and I am pleasantly surprised by the lively response. I want to thank everyone for their thoughtful comments (well, except perhaps for the one person who apparently didn't really read my post and continues spreading baseless accusations such as those which drove me to start this thread in the first place). Thanks to these helpful comments, I now understand better what is going on here. :-)

To clarify, I don't play an over-sexed character as Riku speculates. I have, however found Crick (or even me) to be labeled this way simply for his casually mentioning in conversation that he appreciates women to be in one's company. Anybody acting or speaking like Crick on Earth wouldn't raise an eyebrow in any public setting save perhaps a monastery. Those who have found umbrage were responding to voices in their own heads, not anything I had done or said. I do suspect that their expectation that all conversations be OOC may have something to do with these odd reactions as the content seemed out of context for them therefore. For a person playing chess, any mention of women may seem out of context and suspicious. To people meeting and talking in a world inhabited by people rather than chess pieces, it isn't, unless certain tensions exist.

I also don't think I come across as intimidating or condescending in my real time interactions as Bitttymacod rightly suggests as a possibility, while bad experiences other players have had in the past may however color their perception. I wrote this post because of my bafflement over not only encountering the on MMORPGs nowadays customary lack of, unfamiliarity with, and dismissiveness about RP among players but over repeatedly finding myself mislabeled or even baselessly accused of creepy behavior for nothing more than making harmless in character conversation -- conversation in which I gathered information about guilds or sought to simply introduce myself (mutually consenting conversation, I should mention - for at the first sign that it's not well received I, for my part, stop, except for defending myself against false accusations perhaps). In these situations the sequence seemed to go like this:

(1) I ask for information using "in character" wordings like "I noticed you wearing a guild badge I haven't seen before. If it's OK, would you tell me a little about your guild?" as opposed to "Hey. I am new to this game. Are guilds good for grinding stats? I haven't come across your guild before, the name of which floats above your head. What sort of guild is it?"
(2) As the conversation continues, me speaking in IC fashion and the other player not so much, the other player decides that my way of talking is weird (simply because I talk like any inhabitant of any world would as opposed to a player of a game (see the example above)). Since humans tend to fear what they don't understand (or perhaps because of prior bad experiences with other players) this then seems to lead to a suspicion about ominous ulterior motives on my part because suddenly the accusations of creepiness (or even "stalking") start. My opening post was intended to gather thoughts on why this happens since I can speculate all I want, but many heads often know better than one (especially a newcomer's one).

The mentioned cases are the extreme ones, which perhaps happened to me only about twice. Still, they were chilling and truly baffling to me, and last night I seriously thought about making myself some generic greeting macros which are very explicitly IC in nature, use exclusively those macros when I run into strangers, and then actually talk only to people who respond to them in an encouraging way since I have come to suspect many purely-OOC gamers here of carrying some huge chip on their shoulder and being easily set off over the most unpredictable things. Perhaps the paranoia of others is rubbing off on me. :-p I am glad that many responses in this thread suggest that my experience is not necessarily typical. Perhaps I really did just happen to be unlucky in some of the people I ran into (and probably so were they in other people they ran into in the past).

I was astonished by Virg's report of essentially experiencing a rude attitude from the other side (from roleplayers). He (or she?) is of course right that (s)he can choose not to RP. Contempt in either direction is inexcusable, IMHO. Cooperative play, even without RP, does indeed have its merits (even if I think one gets more out of an RPG by at least mixing in some RP, but that's just my personal belief and not a judgment of any kind). To each his own.

So, then, it could very well be, as Suboxide says, that the merger of three servers which had considerably different established gaming cultures (and, as it appears to me, the devs' attempting to turn Ryzome into a kind of World of Warcraft PvP server, maybe hoping that this is where the money lies) may have caused frictions and tensions among established player camps which give RP a bad name for the role a certain kind of RP plays in these tensions. A new player lands unsuspecting on this battlefield like between the proverbial rock and a hard place. This makes me think the world of Atys could use a little détente. (no hostilities over this now, please... I'm just saying ;-) RP doesn't have to be exclusively hostile. Hostility is only one of many things one can RP as are the ways in which one handles existing hostilities (yep, I did a lot of political RP in the past). For all my desire to RP and my many good experiences with it in the past, I currently am definitely leaning towards neutrality in this kara-kami-cult conflict which I don't understand very well (the karavan and kamis don't look to me like being at war) and about which I have been skeptical about all along since I saw what this kind of thing did on WOW's PvP servers. I have rarely liked PvP elsewhere.

I have learned from this discussion. Perhaps the most surprising for me was that RP is not only atrophied on Ryzom as on other RPGs, but that it may have become warped in some cases into something that is unkind to at least some players, thus giving the genre of RP a bad name here.

Once more, thank you all for your thoughtful and informative comments which were very helpful and at least somewhat encouraging. I was - and maybe still am - a bit shell shocked over people blowing up in my face not for something offensive I did or said but something they apparently heard in their heads (and about which some apparently still insist that it was real). Sadly I don't have the luxury of a flexible time schedule to attend 'events' or meetings whenever they happen (to me also another sad testimony over the state of RP these days when it has to be scheduled to once a month or so, at least until the few remaining roleplayers find another in them -- feels a little like a ghetto or refugee camp); but I am still encouraged.

I apologize for another long post and hope I didn't overly repeat myself in it. To those like Virg, I promise I won't hold you in contempt. Thanks again, everybody, and may you all manage to play and have fun. :-)

I have a question, btw, about "city bars":

I am in Aeden Aquaeus. I found a "bar" in Fairhaven early on and have stopped by several times. It is more like a small kiosk, no chairs to sit in, no drinks, no bards visiting to perform..., and - most importantly - no customers. Crick couldn't meet anyone there. And, yet, bars have been mentioned to me once before. What did I miss? Is Crick just in the wrong place? Thanks. :-)

I have not the slightest idea if you meet Trykers at the Fairhaven Bar - haven't been there in quite a while (I'm in New Matia). I remember a time there was a once-weekly Bar "event" in Pyr, but that was before the merge. Things like that became more complicated, with differing time zones, and various towns inhabited by different languages - so probably there is more life in Windermeer, Chrystabel, or Avendale. But I really don't know.

Well most of the times you'll find me at FH stables.
I'm not the best rper but if somebody rp's against me I'll most of the time try to addapt to it. I'm not loved by the rp community since i'm sitting there as a mara and I actually had the anti mara guards moved from there. (but thats another story :) )

Thanks again. I may have to try the bars at the other AA towns, I suppose. I am not sure which towns are for which RL language. And I have noticed the campfires at the stables and begun to ... intrude a little. ;-)

No, we can't sit in chairs: that's a game engine/animations limitation. There's no one in the bars because almost all the meet and greet is at the stables (sort of like the tendency that the party moves from the living room to the kitchen where all the snacks are). From time to time I have been known to hang out there, but my "place of power" is at the stables.

As for "I wasn't creepy but these people seem to think I was," if it happens more than once, you might consider modifying your behavior. You may not think your actions are "creepy", but if you are getting that reaction from more than one person, then possibly they are less innocent by local standards than you think. (This is purely a rational observation since I haven't met you.) "When in Rome ..."(*) as the saying goes.

-- Bittty

(*) "...shoot off Roman candles."