Originally by: Verone

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Roleplay in Eve. What went wrong?

Simple :

Too many people failed to serperate in character arguments from real life and subsequently we now have several groups in the RP community who refuse to really co-operate with eachother properly.

Because of this, every wardec between them is branded as being due to "OOC malice/jealousy/dislike" and the whole situation kicks off again in an endless circle of bitterness over things that happened a long time ago.

This is coupled with the fact that too many people have developed elitist RP attitudes and basically brand certain RP organisations in game as a waste of time, or insult them claiming their RP is "wrong" or "sub standard".

This removes a lot of the fun from those who are content with RPing someone who's content with their existance and not set on world domination. Again this causes large rifts in the community.

Then there are more ingredients. Allegations of fixed events were thrown in the air, and a lack of completion of Vital ingame storyline ARCs that have effectively hit a brick wall (amarr sucession? a cure for VITOC?) Then there's the lack of in character news.

It's all well and good reporting on the fact someone on 0.0 lost a Nyx this week, or a Titan that week, but it gives RPers no real material to work with. Eve needs a living, breathing, political climate and a world with things happening.

It's great that players create our own backstory, and our own conflicts between egger entities but there's severe issues with the involvement of NPC entities and organsations that really shoud be stepping up to the plate to chime in.

What's going on in the Federation? Does the Senate have any views on recent Federal Loyalist agression against the APEX Conglomerate? Is the lack of an Emperor causing unrest among the houses in the Empire? What about the Mandate and the Republic? Are the Caldari Navy speaking with CONCORD regarding the breach of border by the Federation Navy during the Kassiganien incident? Has the CEP answered the calls of the SOE after they found the state that Caldari childen were being kept in? Whatever happened to Jirai Laitanen after he got podded?

Even small IC news articles about random stuff that relates to a new patch, or maybe random IC news adds depth to Eve's history and makes for material to work with.

The issue isn't "What went wrong?", the issue is "How can we put things right?".

For starters the elitist crap has to stop. "Your RP isn't good enough for me." has to be ditched if we want to develop a stronger and more intricate RP community.

Coupled with that there needs to be support from CCP with enough ingame prime fiction based news and current affairs to keep people knowledgeable about what's going on.

The RP community certainly isn't "dead". There's a lot of potential there, it just needs to be fed the right mix of material by CCP and work together to assert and strengthen itself a lot more.

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