ArmachiA

I'm in the Mateus Discord but I never really post, I just like to see how the server is doing and... hooboy I have a Discord for my guild (Who doesn't?) but we still have a forum for more permanent things like Events, Character Journals, Timelines, Summaries, etc etc. The Mateus Discord tries way too hard to be a forum. There's a million chatrooms, all of them beep at you when someone posts (I've had to mute all of them, but more seem to pop up every few weeks), the FC and Character section is pretty much a mess. While the FC section is BETTER, the "Here's my character" section of it is really hard to navigate and if you don't put it out there in peak time it's easy to get lost. The discussions are really only for people online at the time and if you don't have a lot of time on your hands, or don't say anything unless it's important, you're going to get lost in the shuffle. I help clarify lore sometimes, but my words easily get lost in there. Discord is super useful, but Forums are still better for a permanent information base. I don't think Tumblr is that great considering how hard it is to shift things around. A lot of those things on the Mateus discord would be much, much better suited for a forum. On in-fighting - That happens, I've seen it happen on the Mateus Discord. It happens on Tumblr almost hourly it seems like. I wouldn't let that stop anyone from joining. Drama is inevitable, I mean... look at the drama we get in game. It's actually pretty sparse here, it's just discussions people can get blunt (Nothing wrong with that). I hope Mateus does consider coming here, this was never a Balmung only forum. It just ended up that way because Gilgamesh died.

making it so the item is destroyed is actually really smart from a developer point of view. 1. The game doesn't have any money sinks aside from crafting and housing, one of which hardly anyone has access to. Making it so glamour gear is destroyed will make the gil sink better, as in FFXIV thinks aren't soulbound unless you fight, so people can always sell back their glamour piece when they don't like it anymore (I know I've done that multiple times). With gil being so easy to get for people - judging by how easy it was for people to get large houses - this is a pretty necessary change. The glamour outfit market may skyrocket, but I still feel like this is needed to keep gil out of the economy. 2. It makes the game more "playable" Once you get to cap and you see a piece that drops, do you use it for glamour or do you keep it for actual gear? Do you save it for an alt job or do you use it for glamour? This will make people want two copies of one outfit, making content last longer during that downtime right before the next patch. Farming for glamour pieces will probably become more prominent too, since all those clothes won't take up inventory space anymore. I LOVE the glamour system in WoW so I'm super excited about this.

I DM a lot of stories and honestly I have no idea. I feel bad if a story lasts a couple weeks because it's too short, but I also feel bad if it's a few months because it's too long. I think I try to have a story that feels like it could be over in a month but because of scheduling to make sure it fits around players schedules, I plan for three. Any longer and I start thinking I'm boring people.

Way back in the Late-90s when I was in high school (I'm old) there was a thing called Vampire: The Masquerade that was pretty popular in the circle of high school where the goth kids hang out. I wasn't a goth kid (Yet, give me a year) but I was a Drama kid and a lot of the Goth kids were involved with the Drama club backstage. I became friends with them just by happenstance and they asked me if I wanted to try V:TM and explained what it was. I didn't get it at first, but they told me it was just playing a character you make up and the the character has stats. I was really into vampires back then so I agreed to give it a go. I explained it to my parents later and my dad was super excited, saying he's been playing Dungeons & Dragons for YEARS and it sounded just like D&D and I'll think its fun and I'm just like him. My friends had no idea how to DM a game on their own, so my first experience was a giant mess - but I really liked the idea of playing characters, dungeon crawls, and political intrigue. I had a lot of fun playing a Malkavian with a split personality - one which was weak and one which was basically OP (I was 16, gimme a pass) - and wanted to keep playing but my friends were used to older, more experienced people DMing so after that I picked up a copy of the book and started DMing for anyone in school who wanted to do it. I had one campaign that had 23 people, from popular kids to gothy kids in it (This wasn't because my school was so passed cliques, just that Drama club had a lot of different kinds of people in it and my sister was also very, very popular and played a Ventrue). That was my life till about 19 when everyone graduated and moved away, including myself. Still it stayed with me, and I'd run various WoD games on the internet with my friends who also had the internet - which actually wasn't a lot of them in the early 2000's. When I was 22, I picked up FFXI as my first MMO and just kinda assumed everyone RPed in MMO's and even when I was corrected I just never stopped.

^ haha good insight. Since we do dark RP, I can see how people who like lighter stuff wouldn't want to join. I just wish people who say they like Dark RP wouldn't go "Nvm, bar rp is for me!" then complain to me my stories are too dark (Not saying this is everyone, I'm just venting at this point). My last derail - I wish there was some kind of universal rules for DMing in MMO's. There's universal rules for RPing in MMO's (Metagaming, powergaming, etc etc) but it's not like that for DMing. I'm top of that, while RP and character development and being a player is constantly talked about on forums like this, being a DM - getting starting, what to be aware of, discussions and rants - doesn't really have the same kind of resource. When you're doing it, you feel like you're figuring this whole thing out of your own, so it's easy to make mistakes or cross a line you didn't even know was there. Makes it hard for people to want to try, cuz there's no real guidance.

This is a huge issue for me, as well. I'm basically a DM in this game, since I've been a DM in tabletop games since I was 16 it just feels more comfortable for me to run things. I like when people join (Even outside of FC but I do tend to keep it contained to FC for obvious reasons) but I get "I had to be there for the beginning so I don't wanna" or "I'm not sure I can see it to the end so I don't wanna" a lot. It's not something I've really been able to solve, but I do what you do, self contained events with an over arching narrative so if they just go to one or two they won't be lost in anyway and if they feel like joining the big picture they can. I don't know, maybe people are scared? It's hard for me to get into the player mindset. I took down our recruitment while we readjust what we actually want to do, but for those recruiting you have to be -really- careful with that because it could look like your guild poaching, and the last thing you want is to look bad in another FCs eyes during this time. DMing is really really hard. The hardest thing is you have to learn to take criticism, even if it's not constructive. Someone in your story, or outside of it, isn't going to like what you do. Someone is going to call you out for something you think is fine. Here's a small list of things I've dealt with, sometimes at the same time - ~ This storyline is too light ~ This storyline is too dark ~ Your character is too involved ~ your character isn't involved enough ~ your villians are OP/This puzzle is too hard/ ~ ~ This storyline is too big ~ This storyline is too small ~ This storyline is bad for There aren't many people who will address it, decide if it's worth changing, then let it go. Negative attention can keep many many people from attempting anything like that, which is a shame because your going to get Negative attention -anytime- you stick your neck out. To people who tend to internalize things like that, it can be very damaging. I wish I could tell people to stop being so negative or for DMs to grow a backbone, but both of those things aren't realistic. On top of putting a ton of work into events and the story? It's a tough job. I know why people don't do it.

Balmung, the last vestige of no one wanting to leave.

I wouldn't say it -can-, I would say it is because it has too. There wouldn't be a lock in the first place if it could do it comfortably.

First off, it's not really a good idea to compared this game to FFXI in the sense of what can or should happen. This game is completely different in regards to UI, gameplay, and allocation of server resources, and comparisons like that are part of what caused 1.0 to flop. They tried to make it too much like FFXI, and the UI was a dying system that making improvements to was creating more problems than fixing them. ARR was an overhaul, and thus should be handled differently. I think such a drastic measure requires even -more- careful consideration now than ever before because, now, you're not just affecting players' communities, but you're affecting their FCs, their housing, all the money they put into the house/apartment they have, all the money they put into the private chamber they'd be losing by being separated from their FC. Sure, you can reimburse them, but you can't guarantee they'll get a house on the new server either. It's a more complex system than FFXI was. To my knowledge, you didn't have whole housing communities, just Moghouses. You didn't have FCs, just Linkshells, which were little more than private channels anyway. You didn't have a community you actively contributed to and were rewarded for, other than simply playing the game with others. A splitting of servers was more feasible in FFXI, but not so much for FFXIV. I CANNOT for the life of me remember which game it was, it's been to long, but FCs actually got to be made early and FCs got to pick which server they'd be placed on before launch (I think it was TOR? Gonna say TOR), if SE could do something like that, where people who care choose which server to go on ahead of time and people who don't care just get thrown on whatever server it would be pretty feasible. Just like TOR though, there would be a cap of how many people could do that. I remember the rush to get to the website when it opened because Bioware said there would be a cap. If the RPers got word they were all going to a certain server, a bunch of PvE's who are convinced Balmung was ruined by them would go to the opposite. Housing is really the only difficult thing in this scenario. I'm going to keep an eye out for how they fix it in 4.2 and maybe whatever they do will make people feel more comfortable leaving.

The truthiest truth to ever truth. This really has nothing to do with the thread, just agreeing that's something I've noticed a whole lot in 4 years.

Wouldn't people quitting Balmung be exactly what SE wants to happen before they open up the server again? It seems awfully unlikely that the vast majority of RPers would quit RPing on Balmung, but continue logging into it in such high numbers doing other activities that the server would remain locked. Or we could assume that if the case is that non-RPers on Balmung have a large enough population to keep the server locked, that people would then transfer to other RP servers. I don't think we're in any danger of FFXIV losing some large amount of RPers. They may shuffle around on different servers, but that was already happening. And the same would happen if they were all on the same server as well. --- I think that's dependent on a few factors. A bunch of RPers could quit but PVE wouldn't and the server would stay locked, or visa versa. It's not just an RPer problem, as much as reddit likes to think it is. If, for arguments sake I'm not saying this will happen, a bunch of RPers decided to quit/transfer to Mateus/stop rping/whatever while the PvE community never moved - the server would stay locked and RP would die. So I think context is super important for that discussion and we don't have context yet because Balmung isn't in dire straights right now. My what-ifs are just as valid as your what-ifs which makes that hard to gauge. I'm not saying it's a problem -right now-, but I also understand the people who are worried about the future. Both arguments are valid, some try to live in the present and make the most of it, some think of the future and what they can do to fix a problem that hasn't happened yet. Both is fine.

"New Blood" is basically how things don't stagnant in general, in video games or in real life. Countries grow and change based on the younger generation becoming the older generation and lots of countries are worried over their low birth rates that will eventually lead to a stagnation and a dead end stop on growth unless they do something. Same is true for MMO servers really. It's not bad now, we're only seeing a little bit of stopping due to the server being shut down for six months, but Balmung is 100% relying on people to never quit the game, never stop doing content on the server and never stop RPing. For arguments sake, a lot of RPers could just, I dunno, get bored of RPing one day and there would be no "New Blood" to come in from behind with their eagerness for RP to fill in the hole left by ex-RPers. As people quit (And people will quit, the game is on it's 4th year) there's no new people to take their place, to keep the communities alive and vibrant. Right now, we're all comfortable. One wouldn't notice a change at all if they aren't looking or, more likely, their circle hasn't really gotten any smaller. But 100% relying on the old guard to stick around because the new guard aren't allowed to play has already had an impact on the server. Not a terrible one, mind. It's small things. FC recruitment has slowed, people have to make more of an effort to combine already established circles (Which could be a good thing in the end), there's this weird ouroboros of rumors of the same people because no one new is coming in to make people stop caring about them. Not that I disagree with the idea of locking the server. I thought, and still think, it was necessary. However, I do think at this point, 6 months in, that SE needs to be looking at other options. Everyone who wanted to leave has left, and the server is still locked. It's time to split the server imo. For me personally, it's actually frustrated people from outside the server can't come to play yet. My guild had to roll an alt guild on a different server for people who want to play with us but can't. Luckily people had no problem rolling an alt to hang with those people but it's still annoying.

There's no tropes I can think of that will get you barred from any RP because it's too "common", if that's what you're afraid of. If you want to know what's super common in the community for reference sake though...

Balmung's economy is a buyers market. Which is great for people buying, but not really for people making or gathering up the goods. Markets crash pretty much over night once people get wind of the new that's needed for whatever. THAT BEING SAID, that doesn't mean you can't make money on Balmung. I mean... look at all the people who bought large personal homes, they have to be getting money from somewhere. It's harder though and if you don't have the time, it's near impossible. I wouldn't say the community is getting stale. I WOULD say FC recruitment has slowed down for a lot of people - including mine. Talking to other FC leads, it's harder to get fresh blood into their FC because a. People are already in an FC they like or B. They've heard of you and already know you aren't for them, but there aren't new people coming in who you are for. I don't think it's impossible, it will just make FCs either grow with the new changes or disappear somewhere. Overall stagnation though? I don't think we're at that point yet.

Oh! Everyone was telling me differently, good to know. Honestly, this makes me rethink the availability of Mediums. They're tempting for FCs and for Individual homes, because there right in that window of being just big enough for both.