Increasing Player Activity / Density

[Zelknolf]

Much of me rebels at the notion of writing this post. Windy public posts are generally a bad way to make things change. I will try to structure this one differently, and hope that I get different results.

But we get these monthly-to-quarterly windy posts asking ALFA to restructure itself, and my response is always the same: read the post; parse the activity logs; look for similar things we've done in the past; decide whether it's worth the invested time. The answer is usually no, and I thus really don't want to have people trying to make me do it. Or the answer is that I don't care enough to comment more complexly than to say how possible it is.

Now I admit that there's some assumptions in there, but I hope that people can at least understand my angle. Yes, I assume that people who play more are happier with the game, and that's not necessarily the case. Plenty of emotions can prompt people to play-- but I'm hopefully not too far out of line to say that greater activity, in aggregate, is happier people, in aggregate, even though individual circumstances may be significantly different. I also hope that I'm not too far out of line to say that happier people is a more-successful game.


And so I'm left with some broad statements that I can make-- if you don't care about policy, this section is skippable. I finish this with things that normal folk can just do.

Things We've Tried That Don't Work
I can be more confident in these statements than the others; it's true that correlation doesn't imply causation, but the absence of correlation does imply the absence of causation.

Making the Game More "Pure" -- yeah, either nobody cares enough to change their behavior or they do and the change is a ragequit. Our repository is full of examples of us fixing things that are just not in NWN2 what PnP does, and went in service of the Charter's mission statement (a persistent world o' D&D in Forgotten Realms). Activity patterns seem to not change. Banning stuff tends to be unpopular. Lethality tends to be popular in design and unpopular in practice. And yes, you can find many examples of me doing this a few years ago. It didn't work; that's why I stopped. Sorry about that.

Relaxing Travel Rules / Trying to Give People More Options to Gather -- this includes our multiple PCs rule. It doesn't seem to make people play any more (or, if it does, it's trivial compared to the other forces that make our population fluctuate). I can't find any evidence that it hurts any thing, either, to be fair; I'd guess (of course, put a little [citation needed] here, this part is conjecture) that it's because making travel easier and giving people more PCs also makes it easier to scatter.

Giving People More Rewards -- I have to distinguish this from giving people more content: this is more about taking existing content and/or events and just giving more loot and XP for them. We've had DMs get allowances to fart truly sickening quantities of XP on players before, so we have a pretty-wide range of trends and players to look at, which we can't really parse numbers from. Folk playing with Wynna or HEEGZ as DMs tend to play a lot. Folk playing with me or Xanthea as DMs don't. We wouldn't expect these patterns if XP/loot was a noticeable motivator.

Cutting Space -- disclaimer, of course, is that only one of our servers has undergone significant pruning during a time when we have worthwhile logs to measure outcomes-- that'd be TSM. That incident didn't do anything. Maybe we could do it again and better to get better results.



Things That Seem To Have Worked Before
That "seem" is important. I can guess at mechanisms of causation, but we don't have the resources or population necessary to do some proper double-blind evaluation that could actually demonstrate those mechanisms. I'm mostly interested, of course, in things we've tried more than once. Once might be a fluke; several times is probably (but not necessarily) something more.

Advertisement -- seems obvious, right? The largest and sharpest incline in our activity came from us posting about our world on other forums. We saw clear and pretty-immediate results from just emailing old members. These aren't very longlived boosts, of course (to be fair, nothing is; managing a game is a constant fight against attrition), and I'm sure there's some point at which promotion will result in exhaustion in our potential audience. I'd let people who are more familiar with advertisement talk about that. I'm much more familiar with watching game metrics to study how game changes make people use the game differently.

Adding Content -- our most-sustained increase in activity, and also our highest level of activity, was associated with BG acquiring its more-diverse herb spawns, its hide drops, its mail quests, goblin ear bounties, and its billion isolated fetch quests. There's plenty to criticize in the design of these quests, of course, but they did a few things really well (namely, they required that people be at least minimally aware of their surroundings and kept pointing them in opposite directions down the same road). This does have to contrast with some other instances of content-- like TSM has a lot of content. More than BG did during its peak, I'd estimate, but most of the additions of that content don't seem to be associated with differences in activity (asterisk here, see two points down). My guess is because it has a lot of nodes and doesn't seem to be very good at putting random players in the same areas.

Building Player Groups -- ALFA's also seen really successful pockets of activity coming from players who are just good at making player groups. The most successful iterations have a builder and a recruiter in their membership (sometimes they're the same person; doesn't have to be). I can draw some parallels to the previous point as to some probably-effective mechanisms here, but I haven't actually been in a successful player group here, so this is an indirect observation: but player groups usually settle on a place as "home" and tend to return there after adventure, leaving them with an obvious place to find other people.

Plots With Out-Of-Session Elements -- while not as strong an effect as advertisement, we have seen abrupt and measurable increases in people just being on and doing stuff when DMs run plots and then leave things that have to do with their plots (and impact their plots) just... out there... for anyone to deal with. Some examples would be Wynna's Dean's Quest plots (which actually gives us two discernible data points, because she did it, went inactive, and then came back and did it again) or HEEGZ's demon gnoll plot and its reprise.



Stuff You Can Do
Recommend ALFA -- ... presumably you would? Folk are here playing. There must be a reason. Just telling people about the things you like potentially introduces them to an enjoyable hobby, and probably reminds you of the things you like about this place. It's easy to get too deep in the problems, because they demand more of our attention.

Foster Player Groups -- making a new character? Ask to attach to an established character, or to an established group, or both. Got an existing character? Welcome those new characters. Builder for a player group? Make sure you've got enough space for new players to show up.

Include Non-Session Elements in Your Plots and Invite Everyone -- is your plot about some brutal invasion? Maybe a lieutenant is camped somewhere on the server, and he's going to make a mess of things next session if nobody does anything about that. Or maybe the backdrop of the session just happens to include an infestation, and its server coverage determines how difficult you make the fights during the session. Is your plot a mystery? Maybe there's consistently a clue to find between sessions (though you might need to cheese a hint to the session-attending group if someone they don't normally talk to finds it -- that's probably good for the health of the world, though; it's players interacting with players while you're off doing other stuff). You probably also want these things to have a noticeable impact on your plot; we're a bit short on datapoints for this one (reference back to BG's static content: zero narrative value, so it seems to be weird that the narrative value of this would matter while it doesn't with herbs and mailbags)-- we did have a brief time when BG just had a new infestation every time one was defeated because why not. They seemed to be losing credibility toward the end.

Avoid Plots that Seal or Isolate Player Groups -- it's good writing, I know, to have a dangerous and unmovable army on a major road down the middle of a server, but you make a dramatic cut to the number of potential interactions on a server if players can't reach each other (which would count "certain death on the way" as "can't" -- and noting with the point above, that the dropoff seems to be between "can get there" and "can't get there." "Quick to get there" and "tedious to get there" doesn't seem to get us any results)-- and those interactions seem to be good for play.

Make Content That Pushes People Toward Few Nodes and Common Paths -- This is probably best to reference with example. The Trade Way on BG (especially between Baldur's Gate and Beregost) and the choke point on the road in front of the Silver Spires. Pick a spot and make people cross it often. If the narrative of your quest requires people to disperse, make them return to a hub at points along the way. I've had mixed results with using the content to also get metaphorical "common paths" (e.g. encourage people to make compatible characters); it doesn't seem to do any harm, at least, so I guess whatevs? Faction or alignment restrict if it makes sense?

Make Content That Includes Social Challenges -- Hard for me to pick the right header for this. I don't mean to just sprinkle diplomacy checks on your static content. That can cause there to be a social challenge, if built well (how does the 6 charisma orc get through a thing that requires talking?)-- so the idea is that there are mechanical challenges ("This enemy has 18 AC, 90 HP, +10 to hit, and does 2d8+5 damage. It has the same speed as me and only has a melee attack. I'd like to kill it, but will settle for surviving.") which have mechanical solution ("If I'm at least level 5, with average wealth for my level, I can get my armor class up to 30. Though this will reduce my ability to hit, this enemy is relatively easy to hit and will just take a long time to kill. If I'm not, it has average speed and I have a potion of Expeditious Retreat."). There are also social challenges ("I need to lift this very-heavy rock to reveal a target that must be struck with magical frost. I can't just move it out of the way because the walls serve like a kind of track. Even if I'm a powerful spellcaster, I'll need to concentrate on levitating that rock, and so a second person has to shoot the target.") with social solutions ("I'm a pretty big guy. I think I can pick up that rock. I need a bard or rogue with a wand or a wizard with a cantrip.") -- D&D makes this something of a pain ("I'm a high-level wizard. I disintegrate the rock and then ray of frost the target. I then grab my crotch and flip off the builder.") but you can still build for the common solutions and then let the corner cases be less than ideal.

[HEEGZ]

I enjoyed reading this. Please allow me a rambling response.

For me, I find there are administrative rules built in that are a bit of a hindrance. However, the single biggest factor for me is that I don't have the free time I used to.

I enjoy using the tools you have created Zelk, and they have made DMing a much more powerful and enjoyable experience. It seems that we can scrape up more players if there is some decent DM coverage for more than a week or two. I always noticed more people logged in when I was logging in to DM regularly.

I would speculate that training people how to use our DM tools, well, and getting people to pick up the wand somewhere would go a long ways towards keeping people logged in, more than anything else.

After that, consolidating our player base into 1 or 2 servers seems to be the next best thing, though a non-starter.

I am in a slump regarding how much time to devote to the game, so I can only offer my own side of things, as you have yours. I do miss the days of the infestations and placed encounters... even though I got as much flak for them as I did praise. There is nothing preventing someone else from DMing and running the same sorts of scenarios.

If I could have two changes enacted that would cause me to log in more, it would be to consolidate players to two servers and allow those players to DM where they play. I know that people have mega trust issues and it is unlikely to ever be allowed here, but at this point it is likely the only thing that would keep me here much longer.

In any case, this post, plus the last few by Duck have been a nice time of introspection. I hope ALFA keeps going and keeps improving, it has a unique and special place in my life.

[Ithildur]

I would echo what Heegz said as far as main reason. It's a matter of time/priority for me more than anything else; I've enjoyed stretches in the past where I had a lot of free time but currently I have to prioritize other things. Sure, there are some other factors which sometimes cause the decision-meter to tip towards not logging in when I do have time available and am considering logging in, and some items that have been brought up in the OP, Duck's posts, etc would have impact on nudging the meter more towards 'log in' here and there, but not that much probably.

A context (DM plot or not) where PCs' actions have consequences that matter, leave a mark in the gameworld, stakes that matter are involved, characters (whether PCs or NPCs) and their stories that leave a mark/impact, that's what hooks me... and players/DMs that are enjoyable to interact with ooc, that mesh and work together well.

Grinding static content if anything to me has a negative impact on the former, leaving a sense of 'PCs can kill every nasty boss that Marshall Joe asks to deal with a hundred times over and really, it doesn't matter much, no one notices, the world goes on as if nothing noteworthy happened, here's your 10 gp'. It makes ALFA feel like just another PW, BGTSCC but not as good at what they offer. It's simply not that compelling. If anything, at times it's embarrassing; it's like someone who has very striking talents/looks that are not the conventional Hollywood prototype trying hard to impress by featuring the weakest part of their game. My preference is that we either look for a new paradigm for static quests (doesn't have to be complex coding, more the story of where the static quest goes/how it ends, perhaps time/cycle the availability, etc) where the result of a successful completion DOES result in something that feels like a somewhat significant add to the narrative... or we don't focus on static quests much at all.

Simply put, every suggestion that I see that sounds like 'make ALFA better in areas that are really better featured on other PWs' to me sounds less than productive. Instead, focus on what ALFA can offer that BGTSCC cannot, and ZERO IN on those areas to make them even more prominent. Smaller numbers actually can have advantages. I mean, it's about priorities and focus; sure we can spend time/energy on improving numbers via things that other PWs do, but is that the best place to focus? Prioritize and maximize what we can offer that most places cannot, and are really the reasons why we're here and not elsewhere. This is especially important when resources are relatively low; you can't afford to squander them, you have to focus, zero in on what's important, and go after those things.

Two currently running games within ALFA that are being well received have been mentioned: Wynna's and HEEGZ's (I'm sure there are others; I quite enjoyed a lot of things about Xan's 2 adventures though it may not be everyone's cup of tea). Find out what makes them well received, and go after ways to facilitate/enhance/encourage/automate those things. I'm pretty sure it's not because of static content, but hey if we have to be fixated on static content, at least maybe make static content feel more like what they're doing well.

TL;DR version: ALFA's got striking looks and special talents that aren't Hollywood prototype. A little make up is well and good; however focusing on what she's good at rocking the house with should be a much higher priority than trying to look more Hollywood.

People will come, and STAY, if we can do that. People might come if ALFA focuses on 'more Hollywood', but they'll eventually drift to some place/media that's better at Hollywood. Folks have commented that ALFA doesn't know what it wants to be at times; being like a teenager trying to fit in just to be more popular and forgetting who s/he really is is not a recipe for success.

[shad0wfax]

This is an excellent post, Zelknolf; it gives me an idea on where to start both at the builder and LA level. Thank you.

[Zelknolf]

So, I get that my post was something of a tl;dr to many folk, Ith, but it might be worth giving it another pass, based on these comments you've made. I do talk about what makes static content still make people play more, even when the static content is pretty awful, and what sorts of elements distinguish the styles of a Wynna or a HEEGZ from a Xan or a Zelknolf (at least in terms of net activity; this isn't necessarily good in the eyes of any individual; see OP's introduction). The things to chew on there are how the world prompts interaction, particularly with other players, and the things that anyone can do to get more people around, and to increase interaction with the people who are around, if things are a little too empty/lonely for any given person.

I pointedly don't say that we should go all in on anything. I hope I'm talking enough sense when I say that would be stupid. We don't have enough DMs to cover ALFA. We can't possibly write enough static content (especially not entertaining static content) to keep people entertained at the rate they play. We're not a pervy enough community to just build a kinky dungeon and have everyone's characters in emote in a sweaty pile (or whatever social servers do when they're not marketed with sex; I've never seen one). The point is that things that have worked in the past aren't policy, or bending toward extremes. They're entertainment, novelty, and interaction.

[Heero]

Nice post, Zelk. Good points there.

[Duck One]

A lot to respond to there, so let me take it in pieces:

I would love to get my hands on your data, as I told you, because data analytics is a big part of what I do professionally. I would urge caution in drawing conclusions as you did from the data. For instance, you examined playing time following a policy change and then drew conclusions by examining the change in player time invested following the change. This may seem to be logical analysis, but it may be flawed.

For instance, reducing travel time and increasing the number of allowed PC’s didn’t seem to cause any change in player time. However making those changes didn’t change the number of hours in the week, or the percentage of those hours the people have free to devote to gaming. If I have 8 hours a week to game, and I am presently spending all those hours in ALFA, giving me a second PC and reducing the percentage of those hours I spend travelling in game isn’t going to change my total available time, and I will still be spending my available 8 hours in ALFA, which of course means your analysis is going to show no change.

However making those changes might have in impact on my in-game experience during those 8 hours. Before the policy change, I might have been spending 4 of those 8 hours alone waiting to link up with another player and/or traveling to get to another player or adventure. After the policy change, with 2 PC’s and easier travel, I might spend 7 of those 8 hours in a party and on a quest. My overall time in game doesn’t change, but the quality of that time changes significantly, which may have impacts on player satisfaction and engagement.

A better analysis of the policy might be survey results to query player satisfaction taken before and after the change in policy, with targeted questions that relate to the points of the ALFA experience that the policy was meant to address.Truth be told, however, meaningful data analytics on ALFA might be challenging at best given the population, or at the very least, will have to have a massive caveat next to results.

Making the Game More "Pure" -- yeah, either nobody cares enough to change their behavior or they do and the change is a ragequit. Our repository is full of examples of us fixing things that are just not in NWN2 what PnP does, and went in service of the Charter's mission statement (a persistent world o' D&D in Forgotten Realms). Activity patterns seem to not change. Banning stuff tends to be unpopular. Lethality tends to be popular in design and unpopular in practice. And yes, you can find many examples of me doing this a few years ago. It didn't work; that's why I stopped. Sorry about that.

D&D source books are called “references” and not “rule books”. Gary Gygax, creator of D&D, wrote in the original forward of the Dungeon Master’s Guide to not get too caught up on the rules; that players should feel free to adapt or throw out rules entirely as they see fit. The point is to have a good adventure and not get dragged down by tedium and debates. As such, there is no such animal as “pure D&D.”

NWN is a computer engine meant to approximate D&D, and it does a fair job but has obvious limitations and can’t help but to have some flaws. ALFA has adapted it to make it fit into its vision, and it too is not going to be perfect. That is fine. Let’s just agree to accept it for what it is, and focus instead on the adventure and good times.

I would urge the tech team to ignore any pleas for purity as an unnecessary expenditure of time, and focus on making the product as stable and manageable as possible. I know how much of a pain in the butt it is to code that thing, and that you’re volunteering your time, so use it for the things that really matter.

Relaxing Travel Rules / Trying to Give People More Options to Gather -- this includes our multiple PCs rule. It doesn't seem to make people play any more (or, if it does, it's trivial compared to the other forces that make our population fluctuate). I can't find any evidence that it hurts any thing, either, to be fair; I'd guess (of course, put a little [citation needed] here, this part is conjecture) that it's because making travel easier and giving people more PCs also makes it easier to scatter.

I picked this one in my opening comments to respond to the analytical component, but let me also respond to the policy matter itself. Let me illustrate with a recent example:

Saturday morning a group had prearranged to meet and explore new content added by Wynna way up at Fourthpeak. My PC had to be escorted through dangerous territory to reach, so an older PC logged in from another server with the specific goal of helping those of us trapped in Silverymoon reach it. The walk itself took about 45 minutes with combat mixed in. Unfortunately two other players (Kid and Mick) logged in later, each opting to log out instead of making the dangerous and time consuming journey.

Thankfully Wynna was there for the last half of it, and was able to port those of us wanting to return to Silvy to save us a lot of time. However, one player decided to log out in Fourthpeak thinking his next chance would be in a week at our regularly scheduled time. Turns out he found some extra time later that night, but being cut off, nobody could reach him, and another chance for a party and adventure was lost.

That’s a lot of time used without adventure and missed opportunities, with 1 player basically volunteering to baby sit, and 3 other players missing chances to participate. When you consider the effort and risk in traveling between the 4 servers, this kind of situation is not that uncommon.

Things That Seem To Have Worked Before …Stuff You Can Do

These is merit in each of these, and thanks for taking the time to point them out and elaborate on them. As I said above, I would urge caution about deriving meaning from the analysis of total game hours played as a metric tied to any one policy. The sample size in ALFA is small, and the stat itself is subject to a lot of interpretation. People are likely either playing or not, and investing as much or as little free time as they have when they can get it. People are also having their play time adjusted due to factors in their real life which may or may not be coincidental to a policy change.

I would look to longer term trends: players acquired versus players lost, and seek to find the key factors that drive each. Analyzing ALFA is not too different than analyzing a business, if you consider the game experience as the product and participants as customers. The data points I’d be seeking are the ones then that point to customer satisfaction in the product:

What is it you like about ALFA? Why?

What is it you don’t like about ALFA? Why not?

If you maximize the elements that drive customer satisfaction and minimize the elements that are dissatisfiers, you can assume that you are doing the things within your span of control that drive participation. Change these qualitative factors, and the quantitative factors (user add & play hours) will typically follow.

[Zelknolf]

I discussed the assumptions I made in my post-- there are, for instance, players who don't regard travel time as wasted (and, indeed, players who don't regard time when they have to sit around talking because they're wounded or out of spells as wasted). We can go on about how well-spent the time is, of course, but how do we measure that, and how do we compare it to other things? Are the opinions of people who say a lot more valuable than the opinions of people who only say a few words? Something of a trouble there; people who are happy don't generally feel the need to post long Boombrakh-esque posts; happy people generally won't even bother to respond to a survey.

This is why I find it most useful to ask "What gets people in game, and what makes them play more?" One doesn't have to try to parse through who is noisiest or who is best at communicating. I don't and can't know everyone's rich inner lives. I can reasonably assume that one's there, but trying to measure it is doomed to failure.

Though, of course, as I say initially and repeatedly-- correlation doesn't imply causation, even though the absence of correlation does imply the absence of causation. It's much easier to say "This didn't work." than "This worked," and so there are necessary grains of salt that I keep pointing to. I can be way more confident saying "This advice isn't harmful" than saying "This advice is helpful" just by the nature of what measurements actually mean.

[oldgrayrogue]

Nice post Zelk.

IMO the two best ways to get people playing regularly, as pointed out by Zelk are:

1. Organize a player group. Being a part of Sword's Edge was my single most rewarding gaming experience ever. I tried to start up a much "looser" group on BG recently, and although my PCs keep dying (can you say level 3 curse?) it has pretty much guaranteed me regular gaming even without a DM.

2. Give players an overarching server wide antagonist to deal with ala Heegz. This need not be a campaign or have a whole lot of story to it. Heegz basically had some demons ginning up the gnolls around the tradeway. What it does is provide CONTEXT for PERSISTENT gameplay. This includes opportunities for adventure (lets go scout/kill/find/help/rescue folk from the gnolls!) and social interation (My gods have you heard the latest about the gnolls! Well let me tell you what me and my group did to some gnolls the other day). What is BEST about this style is that it is NOT insular to a single group of players. Everyone can get involved if they want to. According to Heegz, its also something that is fairly easy to do from the DM side. It does not prevent other campaigns or plots going on simultaneously either. Stuff like this has been done before, and based on my purely anecdotal "evidence" it has resulted in player activity spikes -- JLM did it on TSM with his undead invasion way back when and I tried to do it on TSM with my Sons of Obould orc war. The failures of the orc war were more due to my time limitations as a DM. It certainly got folk logging in and playing.

I love these two very practical suggestions by Zelk because they are indeed something we as Players can do, whether as a PC or a DM, without a ton of effort. So players, go out and form or join an existing group (WARNING! This may require you to roll a new PC!). DMs, come up with a "server wide antagonist" and set some area infestations and make some forum posts. I bet if we ran an experiment on a sever with a DM setting a new infestation antagonist every 30 to 60 days we would see a rise in both player activity and density as a result.

As to Zelk's conclusions from the data, and Ducks comments on them, the only thing I would like to add is that removing prohibitions to travel and grouping, two PCs and some of the other changes does in my personal experience increase the QUALITY of the game time by providing more OPTIONS. Just this past weekend I had the CHOICE of playing alone on BG or logging in with my alt on TSM and joining in on a Wynna session. I much preferred teh Wynna. And appreciated having that option.

TL/DR: Bottom line on all of this discussion folks want something fun and exciting to do and other folks to do it with.

[orangetree]

I don't know if my input would be worth anything, but here's my experience after 24 hours on alfa after a very long hiatus and relatively new characters. (one being fresh newly rolled). I hope it does not cause any offense of course, it's just my own experiences and it could just be limited to 'me'.

1) A player OOCly wanted to play with me but I couldn't move to them as it was night time... and they assumed I only wanted to do quests for xp anyway and probably not RP (Dunno how it might have gone had we actually met of course.)

2) I encountered one PC but they were 'semi-afk' as they were only interested in doing a quest and so I couldn't exist as a character for that.

3) I encountered one PC who was ICly quite unfriendly and had no interest in RP with my character. (I am not judging the player on this mind, just accepting the character had no wish to interact)

4) I encountered one PC who didn't notice me at first, and it took a while for them to register my presence or take my emotes as an invitation to RP, but we eventually got it sorted out and had a rather fun little play through.

Anyway... not too sure what to draw from these experiences. I kind of feel players want to RP but feel they can't as it wouldn't be IC? At least that would be the optimistic view. A nice welcome group makes the most sense to sort this out, to be an anchor or source of inspiration to work on with.

.. and hello again if you missed me.

[kid]

The failures of the orc war were more due to my time limitations as a DM. It certainly got folk logging in and playing.

Not quite related but I gotta say I loved the orc wars.
Never thought of it as a failure despite some unfortunate deaths, server becoming overly (some say) deadly, and some heated OOC scuffles. It was a great arc that allowed some great character development that still has an impact on a few characters and their relationships. It felt very "real" to me.

[SCI-kick]

Nice post Zelk.

TL/DR: Bottom line on all of this discussion folks want something fun and exciting to do and other folks to do it with.

Okay, I'll just come out and say my blunt opinion. . . There's absolutely nothing fun or exciting about Forgotten Realms, period. In all it's vastness, there's nothing mysterious about it at all. There's no unknown lands, no fallen lands of ancient empires to explore, etc. Just all mapped out with borders and various factions and pantheons controlling this part or that.

I think ALFA has always done a superb job of making the best of it, but honestly, FR kinda sucks. I think all of the builders, scripters, DMs, players . . . everyone basically, would be better off with a more "open ended" type world that evolves with time. Something on the edge of civilization or fallen kingdoms of old . . . A city or two , and some towns separated by vast wilds / unknown territory / evil badlands / ruined empires.... "You want to visit the dwarf blacksmith in the town over the hills? Well, you better make a strong party to survive the journey!"

Alas, I know my little rant is far too late and irrelevant to apply to ALFA, and is in no way a complaint , I do enjoy playing here quite a bit. ... I sometimes just think the collective imagination of this whole ALFA gaming community is kinda squandered by trying to keep on the Forgotten Realms template.

SCI

[ImStrokerAce]

In contrast to Sci-kick; most of the reason Im here is because ALFA is based in the Forgotten Realms. The amount of thought, time and energy that has went into building this universe is amazing and I feel it helps build a more vivid world in which to play.

[Xanthea]

No kidding. FR is a bland, incoherent mess with no mystery in it whatsoever. Everyone knows everything about it and there's no room for anyone to do anything interesting with the setting.

[Ithildur]

Whether we love or hate FR is really a sidenote to the topic unless some people truly hate it to the point where they're willing to put their money where their mouths are and build non FR servers AND convince us that ALFA adopts those instead of our 4 existing servers.


Yeah, thought so.


Zelk, my posts probably should've been framed a bit better or perhaps even posted in Duck's threads rather than this one; I wasn't so much responding to specific points you brought up in the OP as much as attempting to generally/broadly respond to this latest round of 'viva revolution' posts

1. some of us are less active for reasons that aren't about ALFA being broken/worse/better.
2. changing a bunch of things out of desperate drive to attempt to get more numbers is often not a good policy in RL or any endeavor
3. change that is consistent with why most of us actually drink the ALFA kool aid in the first place and make the kool aid more accessible/affordable/desirable/visible is what we ought to aim for

Or something like that; sorry, just got back home from being out of town for a few days, responding off the top of my head.