Quote:It's small cliques of people doing their own little RP's away from everyone else that kill off the sense of community.This is hard to avoid, and from a leadership perspective even the best efforts will fall short at trying to conglomerate groups that simply don't mesh well together or don't want to. Cliques are a way of life, both in RL and in any sort of in-game social network. I spent much of my time in FFXI sort of bouncing between the cliques and never really falling into any one, and that was sort of my existence. It's easier to just sort of accept that it's going to happen, and not to burn any bridges unnecessarily.
As far as the rest of it goes, I did participate in Castiel's RP relating to the Archlich for 5-1 and that was a lot of fun. I had also run most of the CoP storyline in-character with a group of five other RPers. While the group had been established early on and there was really no opportunity after that point for outsiders to join, we were not what I would call 'exclusive' about what we were doing, and continued along with other missions for non-CoP participants in parallel, doing such things as Assaults and coffer keys and the usual gamut of what I guess could best be called 'midgame'. It worked for our purposes, and when it was done many of us made a push to try to get others through the missions, also in an in-character fashion.
I can't say this is definitely the best way, or worst way, of handling such mission-related RP. Every RPer has his or her own preferences. We did make an effort not to come off like we were 'snubbing' those who weren't participating with us though, and never RPed any spoilers or secrecy around those who weren't privy to the mission details. In short we weren't all like, "omg we know something you don't!!"
"One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others." Â ~ Lewis Carol
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Eva's Journals  |  Eva's Wiki Page (coming soon)  |  RP Handbook