Come together

[Duck One]

"This work I'm doing for my hobby will matter in three months" is, in practice, pretty terrible motivation. The smaller number of people who are on your server right now are an active audience who you know you can give stuff to, and you know they will use it. The larger number is vague, and in the eyes of dwindling motivation of an artist with no audience, it's easy to view it as that they just won't show up (which is a thing that will only get more severe with time; keep in mind that willpower, creativity, memory, and reasoning are the same exhaustible resource).

I'd probably point to our incomplete servers as evidence of this. If motivation was as you say-- and a few months of intense work to get a month of all of ALFA playing the stuff you made was plenty to keep people going-- we'd expect it to be really easy to get a server live. If a human could intensely focus on build and keep motivation up for three months, they'd be able to get a server to live in that time, and the burst of activity from basically all of ALFA and the sparkley-eyed wonder at the novelty of it lasts about a month. The reality, though, is that the overwhelming majority of servers die before they make it to beta, the ones that make it take much longer, and I have to assume that it's pretty rare for the reason to be that the builder(s) are physically incapable of continuing.

Now, clearly this won't describe everyone (some servers do get built, but there's two of us still here who have done that, being Teric and I) but how do we make sure we have those people and that they'll produce?

We worked for 3 years before the game came out, and after the game came out, to get the first servers live. We had to wait for the toolset, then build like mad for years. We had to adapt to changes in the ACR, and refine with rules adaptations. But the payoff was big, so it kept us going.

That said, we are not talking about building servers from scratch. We're talking about parking servers that are already built, and making some relatively minor changes to them to get them ready for an event. Some servers may not need much anything really built at all, just writing of the plots and the planning of how to manage them when the time comes.

[Arianna]

We worked for 3 years before the game came out, and after the game came out, to get the first servers live. We had to wait for the toolset, then build like mad for years. We had to adapt to changes in the ACR, and refine with rules adaptations. But the payoff was big, so it kept us going.

.

You also had 20x as many people to do that with ever so many years ago when the game was new and novel and the state of the art at the time. Now you have 4 builders of varying talents and capabilities.

[Zelknolf]

We worked for 3 years before the game came out, and after the game came out, to get the first servers live. We had to wait for the toolset, then build like mad for years. We had to adapt to changes in the ACR, and refine with rules adaptations. But the payoff was big, so it kept us going.

That said, we are not talking about building servers from scratch. We're talking about parking servers that are already built, and making some relatively minor changes to them to get them ready for an event. Some servers may not need much anything really built at all, just writing of the plots and the planning of how to manage them when the time comes.

And have a look at how long people lasted during that time. ALFA's still open source; you can see arcs of activity by just grepping for names.

Folk don't last three months. There are rare exceptions, yes, but they're exceptions and not rules.

[Duck One]

You also had 20x as many people to do that with ever so many years ago when the game was new and novel and the state of the art at the time. Now you have 4 builders of varying talents and capabilities.

Then perhaps those 4 builders should be on one server too. Are we a community who want to come together and share in adventure? Isn't that the point? With every decision, the bottom line should be, "does this bring people together, or separate them?"

After years of building, DMing, and working administratively to get this project off the ground, I proposed this very same idea to a much bigger group. And I didn't demand others shut down their servers so mine could thrive. I put mine on the chopping line first. I said I would park my module and migrate to another team in the interest of fostering density, if others would do the same. To me, it was a team effort, and we all needed to consider what was best for the community.

ALFA has always been too big for its membership. Back with we had hundreds of members, 9 servers was too many, and the lack of density drove people away. The only thing that managed to shut servers down was a lack of sponsoring teams to take it over. Over the years, the players drifted away faster than the servers died, and the density has been consistently thin. Any rational and honest assessment of the current situation would say the present player and DM numbers don't come close to justifying 2 servers, let alone 4.

If you want to insist on calling ALFA a persistent world, then you had best come to the table with a serious ideas on making it persist and thrive. Your decisions should reflect that priority, which no reasonable person could argue that 4 servers for this player base is anything that approaches a persistent world.

If ALFA is not a persistent world, and is more of a campaign setting, then the charter and bi-laws should reflect that. Let DM's build campaigns and manage players like the PnP days, with much more autonomy over the setting and the players. Don't bother with wealth rates, XP rates, and canon, and let the DM's reputations speak for themselves much as they do with PnP.

I have no personal preference over which model you follow. I just want to play.

[Zelknolf]

ALFA's ruleset does support campaigns.

There need be no rules or bylaws about them. We need no shared database or vault, because the campaigns are isolated. We need no admin rules over it, because the groups are self contained. People just host their game and play their game. They usually don't even tell ALFA at large that they're doing it (why would they? No empty seats to fill.)

If we truly become just that, then our persistent offerings will finally be inactive enough for us to bring them down, presumably.

[oldgrayrogue]

Duck, kudos to you for bringing up this issue. It has been discussed many times but is always worth another go round. One major issue ALFA has is the lack of a player hub. In my ideal ALFA we would keep all of our servers but one server would be the "hub" that all of ALFA logs into nightly. Players would log in and meet on that hub and then DMs (or groups of players without a DM) could decide to go find adventure on one of the other servers for a night or a week or whatever. Or a campaign could last months and span all servers with travel between them. This has been done successfully in ALFA recently with Ronan's Vilquari campaign, which I was lucky to become a part of along the way. IMO it was ALFA at its best, but could have been even better if more players were involved along the way. So to repeat, you log in to one "hub" server, but then can travel to any ALFA server from that hub for adventure. Boom proposed this "Hub and Spoke" idea a while ago, and I thought it was brilliant. Frankly, we could "span all of Faerun" with it by having builders just build "pieces of Faerun" and connect them to the hub. For example, if a builder wanted to build "undermountain" without building all of Waterdeep they could build it as an area and connect it.

There are a number of impediments to this "one server hub" idea, however, many of which have already been discussed on this thread. Two others -- which are the elephants in the room -- are the "No DM where you play rule" and the rules regarding a second PC not being on the same server as a "main" PC. IMO too many people in ALFA are strenuously opposed to relaxing those rules for them ever to change without us losing players. I think the rules are vestiges of a paranoid past where folks were worried about CvC and metagaming that, in our smaller community, is really no longer a valid concern. The simple fact is that most established members of ALFA have either played on every server, or DM'd or been an Uber access Admin along the way. We all have incredible amounts of meta information about the gameworld and each others PCs at this point. To me these rules seem to have lost their utility and frustrate play, or changes that could promote a better experience, but alas I think I am in the minority.

Another change that could promote better player density is to shrink the current servers somewhat. For example, making the walk from BG to Beregost cover only 3 shorter maps rather than the current number of longer maps. Hostile spawns on maps in between cities (rather than off in wilderness areas you can easily avoid) might force players to congregate in certain areas and then group up to travel. But to do that, I think there would have to be more to do in the city areas or other hubs. An alternative to the above that has been suggested is easier "portal" travel between populated areas. The caravan and boat system are nice, but frankly spending ten minutes inside of a box is not my idea of fun. Maybe in the context of an event where you could talk and plan it is, but just as a means of travel it is a drag. At least walking you can enjoy the scenery. Whenever I take the caravan I just go afk for 10 minutes and then come back -- a drag and waste of scarce gaming time. Caravan or boat travel should offer an option -- instantaneous portal travel or the longer version if you want to RP it. This is the simplest change that could be made that would have the greatest impact IMO. Frankly I don't see the resistance to it. IT IS CANON. The FRCS says that Fearun is literally filled with magical portals that permit instantaneous long range travel last time I checked. Making folks spend ten minutes of boredom in a box or on a boat is as bad as making them walk miles and miles (god forbid don't run -- even on a horse!) to meet up with others to play. DMs port players all the time to get them into game. Make it a feature and be done with it.

Related to the above is server to server travel. Simply remove all time restrictions. We can PRETEND the journey took days or weeks or months or whatever, it doesn't actually have to in real life. It is all a world of make believe after all. This goes for the wait time to move PCs from server to server too. Stupid rule that simply restricts opportunities for group play (which is what we are supposed to be about) for no valid reason IMO.

So to recap, some (possibly) more palatable changes that could address our density problem:

1. Designate one server the "Hub" server everyone logs onto. Just call it "ALFA" because you can seamlessly travel to all other servers from there. It will up our numbers on the pseudo gamespy board thing and maybe attract more players.

2. Shrink some of the long, boring travel areas on existing servers to make connections between players easier. Add hostile spawns to most areas so players are "forced" to congregate in "safe" hub areas and group up to travel. Add more content to hub areas so players are not constrained to tavern RP.

3. Alternatively, allow for instantaneous portalling between areas via canon magical portals. Maybe quests could even be written to "unlock" the ability to use said portals in each area. I have seen this very thing on other servers.

4. Eliminate all time restrictions on travel between servers or moving PCs between servers.

5. (Optional) Relax the DM where you play rule. With HDM consent allow a DM to run "events" on servers where they play or on the "hub" server with prior notice. As long as everyone involved consents what's the harm?

Any of the servers could serve as the Hub. BG probably makes the most sense, but the little used WHL server might actually be the best fit. Just add a portal to every server on the main travel map and make Soubar and Boerskayer bridge a bit more interesting with more stuff to do. hey there's a thought! How about making WHL -- a Faerunian "hub" into a "hub" server where everyone can mix and play and DM and travel from. Might not be ideal as a "player hub" but could work as a "server hub."

Anyway, good topic, changes would be nice.

[Duck One]

OGR, thanks for your thoughts. Some of the same thoughts occurred to me when considering the viability of Sword Coast Legends as an ALFA offering. Let me follow-through on some of the specific points you bring forward:

Hub and Spoke: This is very much the model that DDO uses. Their world is very intentionally compact with a city acting as the hub. There you can find inns, markets, shops, and the quest givers. The entire server of people not presently in an adventure can be found there. From there if you take a quest, you enter an instance (a spoke) which takes you far away, including some vastly open exploration areas. These instances are private to only your party.

Your other ideas all resonate with me as thoughts that have passed through my head. I’m all for reducing the tedium and getting to why we are here: good adventure. I think you probably underestimate how much commonality your suggestions have with the larger group.

[Adanu]

I feel like you want to make ALFA into MMO lite from everything discussed here.