Thread Closed
As others have said, the Golden Gala is not really a good example to gauge how easy it is to meet people at events. The chat scroll is awful. If you look away from your screen for five seconds, you can miss a post entirely, and the barrage of text is a lot to take in, so to spare their time and their eyes, rather than reading through every emote, most people just skim for the name(s) of the person/people their character is already talking to and read their posts and theirs alone, therefore they can miss a post from a person who unexpectedly walks up to them.
An hour is not a long time to try to find interaction when you're swapping from character to character, at least not in a place where so many people may miss your posts, or may take a few minutes to notice your character is standing next to their character targeting them and ask if you posted and scroll up to find your post. Others may be RPing with the people around them in /party or a LS to avoid the chat scroll, and may not even be watching /say and /em at all.
If you want to try to approach people at spammy events like the Gala, I recommend standing right next to them in clear view with them targeted, using their character's entire name in your post (i.e. "She walks up to Faye Covington," rather than "She walks up to the white-haired Midlander"), and perhaps sending them a /tell OOC to let them know you posted at them.
It's also important to remember that purely IC interactions aren't the only way to meet people. I was only at the Gala for a couple hours last night, and while there RPing of course with my RP partner, I also had two semi-planned walk-ups from two of my FC members, a walk up from someone I'd first met OOC via a shared linkshell and later began to RP with a few times, a walk up from an event worker offering drinks and food, and a walk up from someone I'd befriended OOC but hadn't yet had the pleasure of RPing with and whose character pickpocketed from my character, which led to an altercation after/outside of the Gala where my character had a few interactions with some more people both old and new. Barring perhaps my FC members, none of us run in the same usual social circles, so it was not the fortune of having a "clique" that brought me these interactions, but rather having pre-established OOC connections.
So on that note, on someone who does also know you OOC... make use of your pre-existing OOC connections. Even if you're looking for new people specifically rather than just RP in general, if you hang around people, you tend to meet their friends IC and OOC who may be strangers to you. Even as someone who knows you, I haven't really had any extensive interaction with you in the past year or so, especially not IC, nor have any of my close friends to my knowledge, even though you met some of them back during your time in HoD--that's not a complaint or anything or even a suggestion, just evidence that I don't think you've exhausted reaching out to every corner of the community here.
Jumping characters doesn't necessarily help find RP. If you constantly fantasia/namechange/retcon or alt-hop, people can forget or lose track of who you are. I'm not sure I even know your character name anymore, and probably haven't for a while. It can make the people you have built connections with feel like they're unimportant, or like they're wasting their time by interacting with someone who doesn't spend much time on the character they met or who will ultimately retcon everything. People who've enjoyed RPing with you and would like to again may not recognize your new character name and therefore may not walk up to you as they would have otherwise. And as for forging new connections, you'd be surprised how many people will approach you because they recognize your character name from your RPC posts or wiki, or because they've seen you around in the past and decided you were someone they wanted to meet.
Building up your name is a better way of meeting people than constantly building new characters to try to appeal to people. Play the character(s) you want to play and stick with them! A character that has more time put into them for past interactions and development will be more interesting than a new character created as an attention grab. This is a large RP community, so if you want significant interaction, you'll have to make your character appealing. (Also not sure if this is the case here, but I've seen people bail/alt-hop so quickly others didn't even have the time to reply to them or approach them if they'd even wanted to, so patience is key.)
And as my usual note--being here since launch, I've never had any problem finding RP, have never felt particularly ignored or outcast by the community as a whole, and have also never felt like a usual member of any sort of static clique (at least as far as RP goes). I think a lack of RP is a problem that requires introspection rather than pointing fingers at the community, as I wouldn't consider it a normal experience. If a sassy, socially awkward wallflower and subpar role-player like myself can never feel lacking for RP, then anyone can find RP.
An hour is not a long time to try to find interaction when you're swapping from character to character, at least not in a place where so many people may miss your posts, or may take a few minutes to notice your character is standing next to their character targeting them and ask if you posted and scroll up to find your post. Others may be RPing with the people around them in /party or a LS to avoid the chat scroll, and may not even be watching /say and /em at all.
If you want to try to approach people at spammy events like the Gala, I recommend standing right next to them in clear view with them targeted, using their character's entire name in your post (i.e. "She walks up to Faye Covington," rather than "She walks up to the white-haired Midlander"), and perhaps sending them a /tell OOC to let them know you posted at them.
It's also important to remember that purely IC interactions aren't the only way to meet people. I was only at the Gala for a couple hours last night, and while there RPing of course with my RP partner, I also had two semi-planned walk-ups from two of my FC members, a walk up from someone I'd first met OOC via a shared linkshell and later began to RP with a few times, a walk up from an event worker offering drinks and food, and a walk up from someone I'd befriended OOC but hadn't yet had the pleasure of RPing with and whose character pickpocketed from my character, which led to an altercation after/outside of the Gala where my character had a few interactions with some more people both old and new. Barring perhaps my FC members, none of us run in the same usual social circles, so it was not the fortune of having a "clique" that brought me these interactions, but rather having pre-established OOC connections.
So on that note, on someone who does also know you OOC... make use of your pre-existing OOC connections. Even if you're looking for new people specifically rather than just RP in general, if you hang around people, you tend to meet their friends IC and OOC who may be strangers to you. Even as someone who knows you, I haven't really had any extensive interaction with you in the past year or so, especially not IC, nor have any of my close friends to my knowledge, even though you met some of them back during your time in HoD--that's not a complaint or anything or even a suggestion, just evidence that I don't think you've exhausted reaching out to every corner of the community here.
Jumping characters doesn't necessarily help find RP. If you constantly fantasia/namechange/retcon or alt-hop, people can forget or lose track of who you are. I'm not sure I even know your character name anymore, and probably haven't for a while. It can make the people you have built connections with feel like they're unimportant, or like they're wasting their time by interacting with someone who doesn't spend much time on the character they met or who will ultimately retcon everything. People who've enjoyed RPing with you and would like to again may not recognize your new character name and therefore may not walk up to you as they would have otherwise. And as for forging new connections, you'd be surprised how many people will approach you because they recognize your character name from your RPC posts or wiki, or because they've seen you around in the past and decided you were someone they wanted to meet.
Building up your name is a better way of meeting people than constantly building new characters to try to appeal to people. Play the character(s) you want to play and stick with them! A character that has more time put into them for past interactions and development will be more interesting than a new character created as an attention grab. This is a large RP community, so if you want significant interaction, you'll have to make your character appealing. (Also not sure if this is the case here, but I've seen people bail/alt-hop so quickly others didn't even have the time to reply to them or approach them if they'd even wanted to, so patience is key.)
And as my usual note--being here since launch, I've never had any problem finding RP, have never felt particularly ignored or outcast by the community as a whole, and have also never felt like a usual member of any sort of static clique (at least as far as RP goes). I think a lack of RP is a problem that requires introspection rather than pointing fingers at the community, as I wouldn't consider it a normal experience. If a sassy, socially awkward wallflower and subpar role-player like myself can never feel lacking for RP, then anyone can find RP.
![[Image: NCtCate.png]](http://i.imgur.com/NCtCate.png)