NEW + OPEN DISCUSSION

[tripled_mods]

Hey everyone! First of all, I've got some great news! We finally have a PREMISE PAGE! This will help all members, new and current, to describe what the game is about. Enabling will be easier and figuring out just what we do here will as well. (I know that was something a lot of people asked when first thinking about joining the game-- I get asked it all the time, so hopefully this will help everyone out!)

SECONDLY and very important, the moderators would like to launch an open discussion about methods to help make the game more accessible, bring in new players, and improve the game overall. Anon comments will be enabled so long as there is no harassment of other players. Please use this post to give suggestions, things you would like to see in the game, current problems with the game itself that you would like to bring up, or anything else you can think of related to these purposes. Bear in mind that this is for constructive purposes! If you have a comment, make sure to provide a possible solution or improvement that you would like to see.

THIS DISCUSSION IS OPEN TO ANY WHO WISH TO PARTICIPATE: MEMBERS AND POTENTIAL MEMBERS ALIKE.

( A Note: This is not a complaint, love, or HMD post for specific players, as usual please use the suggestions/complaints page or wait until the next HMD if you have a situation that you need to bring up with another player. )

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

We've never had an overall plot because in the past players generated ones that everyone could react to or get in on if they wanted. There was Edgeworth and Phoenix's community justice effort that actually had a trial go down. When a bunch of villains were living together on Creeper Island, they plotted evil stuff and blew up the White House which you can imagine caused other characters to react against them.

I'd like to see that, players working across canons to pull off crazy stuff. It's not hard, people just have to be willing to actually take advantage of the game instead of passively doing everything according to canon or only teaming up with castmates.

[notmynature]

:) That actually does sound really awesome.

[(Anonymous)]

instead of passively doing everything according to canon...

This.



Though the anon with concerns about darker or more serious things also said something that I think is related to your comment; back when the Creeper Island crew blew up the white house and Edgeworth tried to have Claire arrested in his own world and was tortured as revenge, characters reacted to evil characters being evil, but for the last few years everyone is fairly live and let live even when it's questionably IC for so many heroic characters to let some of the things they do slide by. One obvious solution is to give crit, but I don't know how comfortable I am giving crit for people not getting involved in potentially violent or dark plots, either.

I don't think this is anything the mod team can (or should) do anything about, and a lot of characters really would just sit back and popcorn.gif at much of what goes down. For better or worse we have a very different player base right now, and it seems to be a lot of new RPers who may not be as comfortable diverging from canon as, for another nostalgic example, the ATLA cast was.

[bag_has_snapped]

I think a major problem with this isn't that we're acting passively. I think the problem here is that people are doing what TV Tropes calls "Stations of the Canon" - where, no matter what happens, X event HAS to happen this way. This is particularly bad with lone canon muns, who are probably afraid of altering their canon too much as to alienate potential players and at the same time, trying to alter things too much may make things too hard to keep going. I used to play Sonic and, for awhile, had canon paused by outside interference and trying to get things back on track proved impossible BECAUSE of it, so I ended up dropping him.

At this point, trying to react to events is tough because bad guys ARE appible and trying to have others stop them when they aren't in the game is impossible because of the rule, so...

[(Anonymous)]

As one of the Frequently Canon Updating magical girls you may be reading some of these comments as a critique of you guys; I don't necessarily read it like that. I'm of the same ilk as the 'new' players who won't risk canon warping, even though I've been here a while. One of my characters is canon frozen perpetually because any change would require the detailed reaction of 10~ major canon characters. In a sense you could even say I'm forcing NPC inaction by having them stuck at one canon point indefinitely while aware of normal time passing in the community sense. While the mods have approved and even done these kind of broad canon alterations themselves in the past (Iddy/Azula-mod and the ATLA cast are a good example) it requires a lot of thought and is more likely to be doable with most cast members in-game agreeing to it. It'd be tougher on lone canon warriors, like you said. It means any cast mates who do join and don't want to be in the DDD!altered AU, who prefer the more familiar canon, will end up being from a different world and timeline, too.

For arguably solid reasons, current players don't want to plan something that complex (not to say they're lazy, but it'd basically be writing fanfiction since NPCs are not someone you're playing with) or take those risks. With the game in the slump it is in right now, mods may even hesitate to approve of the canon changes like this for fear of alienating new players.

My personal solution is to play slice of life in between viruses or player plots or events that facilitate different types of play. For some people Slice of Life is the bane of their existence. Those who hate Slice of Life (and there are many) must be in a tight spot, but I wonder if DDD is the place for people who hate Slice of Life.

In summary, I don't think there's much that can be done but see where our newer playerbase takes the game. It might never be the type of game it used to be. I think, for what *I* want the game to be, that there need to be more slice of life posts that anybody could tag to form a base off of for player plots to develop. The anon below mentioning normals or more subtle characters seems as if they have tried and ultimately been frustrated with a lack of results. I've been frustrated myself with a few tries. I can't think of any other practicable solution, however. Plot post to help people meet up their normals is about all the mods can do, but they've been around forever. I understand how pre-planned CR doesn't usually work or can feel stilted so I don't see this as anyone's "fault."

Maybe try throwing characters at each other in memes; if it clicks, canon it, if it doesn't, it's less frustrating to tag a meme post and come up dry than it is to make your own hooks and tag other's posts and get nowhere. The memes are on the "crack" community but how crackishly you run with a prompt is entirely up to you.

[bag_has_snapped]

First of all, I wanna say, no, I don't see this a critique. I see it as more "Whoops, we've made a mistake." A few of us have decided to tone it down, though.

I DO think that a plotting post would be helpful, though. I also think more bad guys would be helpful. Seriously, the last bad guy we had just dropped (Bowser) and even then, he was more laid back and not willing.

...y'know, that's a good idea... I might actually take that idea somewhere.

[mightletyouknowme]

...Without seeing this comment, I kind of posted the same thing. I love sap but conflict is also important in a story and it's interesting to have a dynamic conflict outside of canon.

[touchofgenius]

I'm mostly just creeping in here (HAH) to say that I'm really touched that people in this game still actually remember the shit that went down on Creeper Island. That seriously made my day.

And on a more suggestion type of vein, I 100% agree. That is what made this game fun and made it my favorite RP for a pretty solid three years. To maybe help facilitate more things like that, maybe you guys could do a cross-canon CR meme on adddictions or something along those lines? Maybe even something like a canon-diverging meme?

Like, when I first started playing Birkin - many, many moons ago - literally the first thing I did (no for real, it was in my first post) was change canon. Our old Wesker even had a "Here's what we changed" post up in her journal so we could induct new canonmates if they wanted to be privy to those changes.

While I understand that DDD is really fun because it allows people to keep their characters in their canon settings so it's different from all the other jamjars, it's also not nearly as fun to do that as it is to warp the canon into something else, for better or for worse. For a personal example, playing Desmond while sticking to the timeline of the Assassin's Creed series after playing Birkin and having him screw with Resident Evil's canon was incredibly dull in comparison. Just some food for thought.

SO YEAH, take all that as you will, new players who I am pretty sure I don't know.