Erah'sae

if you do, make sure to add it here: http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=15

As interesting as it would be for RP, there are a lot of mechanics in FFXIV that are in game time sensitive. Mob spawns and gathering nodes come to mind off the top of my head. Some of these have logical ties into the day night cycle (certain fish only being active in the mornings). A nifty stand that might work a bit simpler would be to be able to control the weather time of day in gpose or some such? We could also probably slap together a webpage that uses this to say "This is the time it is now in Eorzea" Maybe icam a few settings over a day/night cycle run to use as backdrops to make it pretty? That way we could have the 1:1 Eorzea / Real time reference?

Sounds like a good time to start an Open RP linkshell over there?

Thanks Lydia. I'll admit I got a bit hacked off reading the post I replied to, you put it far more eloquently. edit: clarity

Ye bloody gods.... *kicks his soapbox back over and climbs up. To be fair, yes, yes my enjoyment of the game does come first. That's more or less as it should be. This is 'entertainment'. A 'game'. A 'hobby'. Something I pay money to enjoy. To be exact my 'enjoyment priorities' are: - my family - my friends - my community - mine - Everyone else This is more or less how I -except- everyone else's to be. If you need me to explain why this hierarchy is important, I'll be more then happy to go through at length back channel. To expect people to altruistically bail on family, friends, and community is laughable. Do you bail on your friends and family to just randomly go say "Hay, I'm moving to (insert other dis-paring city of choice) because said city needs some quality people?" Ye gods.... we're already pointing people in your direction. Some are even running events for you. (*waves to Leggerless* He's running a grindstone over there.) Advice on how to make things stick. Advertising for you. If this level of entitlement where the norm, (which thankfully it's not) I'd just distance myself from it and start warning people away. Edit, since I got distracted by Nefzen: One of the big reasons we're not all over there setting things up for you beyond giving advice, is your community needs to learn to walk before it can run. In fact it needs to learn to stand on it's own two legs. We -can't- do that for you, because when we go back, we -won't- be there. PS: Nefzen wants me to link this in case you need more tips and tricks for setting up an event: http://ffxiv-roleplayers.com/showthread.php?tid=16358 PPS: yes, she's fixing the images. Blasted old tumblr image links.

Unfortunately it seems the ones they were in more or less fell apart, it was one of their reasons for leaving the game. I guess what you might want to do is go hop in Ul'dah or Limsa and give a shout or two asking in there?

I know it's written for "that other game", but Sullivan's RP Survival Guide has been my go to of introducing people to roleplaying. http://rpmadesimple.com/the-rp-survival-guide/ A lot of the stuff under the "RP Survival Guide" drop down still applies in general. It's a little archaic since it's based around a mid set of how roleplay was viewed when 'that other game' launched and, well, MMO's hit a different demographic now as compared to before, but a lot of the suggestions still work.

I think I saw Ixion in there. This pleases me.

Eh, the $18 wall is a mixed bag. Yes, there was(/is/will be?) an additional barrier of entry to Balmung. Yes for a number of people I know it sucked and required re-prioritization to get past it. (Sometimes even taking a month or so off of the game to allocate that subscription money towards the transfer fee.) It's also one of the reasons I actually broke down and moved to Balmung. I can actually turn tells on in Balmung where as on a few other servers (my old home of Cactaur being one) the gil seller spam started about about 30 seconds logged in time and drowned out any meaningful use of the system (unless you broke TOS and installed something to hook into the chat stream and apply a reg-ex spam filter. Got banned for that one once) There is effort and cost to create anonymous harassment alts that just vanish after their job is done here. There's a sense of permanence to reputation instead of the 'throw away alt' problem that many other servers / games have. So yeah, it's an interesting topic. Yes it puts a barrier of 'economic privilege' to the server, but it also prevents a lot of abuse. Granted if SE would actually get off it's backside and do something about the problems (implement an in game spam filter like Blizzard did for instance) half of this would be a moot point.

Eh, the $18 wall is a mixed bag. Yes, there was(/is/will be?) an additional barrier of entry to Balmung. Yes for a number of people I know it sucked and required re-prioritization to get past it. (Sometimes even taking a month or so off of the game to allocate that money towards the transfer fee.) It's also one of the reasons I actually broke down and moved to Balmung. I can actually turn tells on in Balmung where as on a few other servers (my old home of cactaur being one) the gil seller spam started about about 30 seconds logged in time and drowned out any meaningful use of the system (unless you broke TOS and installed something to hook into the chat stream and apply a reg-ex spam filter. Got banned for that one once) It's -effort- to create anonymous harassment alts that just vanish after their job is done here. There's a sense of permanence to reputation instead of the 'throw away alt' problem that many other servers / games have. So yeah, it's an interesting topic. My SO refused to go to any server that isn't transfer locked unless SE steps up and fixes the spam problems.

I got asked to start putting these over here as well, since some folks don't want to look at tumblr for them and I don't do the daily blasts over here, so stuff falls through the cracks on my posts for mid week updated. So anyway: Additions: 06/07/2017 - Poetry Night at Dragon Tree Lounge 06/07/2017 - Loyal Roast Cafe (https://goo.gl/r3Ch2q) 06/09/2017 - The Keeper’s Kiss: Open Cabaret (https://goo.gl/1n9q5g) 06/11/2017 - Town of Allag (https://goo.gl/jmkuTM) Updates: 06/10/2017 - Sable Bazaar (now with a URL: https://goo.gl/EHJPEF) Removals: 06/22/2017 - Tonberry Tavern Night - Tall Tales (Removed for this month, will resume on 7/27) 07/01/2017 - Garden of Words - Open RP (On hiatus until sometime after SB launch) Edit: proper server tagging

I'll do some digging tonight and see if I can turn up something. I have a couple of RL friends who played on Courel. I'll see if they remember anything.

I really hope they take this to heart. I really really do. Those upstarts, those "movers and shakers" of the community are vital. Beyond just bodies you need the event makers, the social collaborators, and your supporting infrastructure. (Lore keepers, folks to help new folks out, etc) and they need to be redundant and diverse instead of beholden to one or two groups. That's what makes a community self sufficient and lets it grow beyond it's inception. All the 'upstarts' that ArmachiA mentions. The ones that do it because they can, not because someone needed them to. I'm not going anywhere, but I hope those that do end up with the best community they can have. Now to the original post. (It's been a -day- so I'm indulging myself with answering a rant.) Read post I quoted. It's important. Find those upstarts and get them together. There are incoming and returning people in droves that don't have the ties the active player base does. Go hit them up. Find the ones with a spark to create something grand and use that. Don't complain about people not wanting to move. That is their choice, not yours, to make. Complaining about someone else's choice tends to make them want to dig in their heels. Here is my suggestion to you, OP. Go out and create instead of complain. Put the elbow grease in and deal with the slow times. Good faith, quality effort is often rewarded with results. Sometimes it sucks and you look at the few people that showed up, but that's how things start. You keep at it; you keep your feet on the ground; you keep soldiering forward. Most importantly though, don't compare yourselves to Balmung. Compare yourselves to Mateus of yesterday. Is it better today then yesterday? If yes, AWESOME! Keep going. If not, find a way to positively improve what you can. Keep going.

Just to throw in a few non "get rid of the character" two bits.... If you don't want to write off the character, you can orchestrate something to cause change. This can even be done in the background instead of making other people privy to it directly. (And it gives RP opportunities when they figure it out.) If the echo ability is at its core, and it's part of what makes him the 'centerpiece' of all the stories easily, orchestrate a way to lose it. Again, do this off screen. Have him deal with the initial blacklash of it offscreen as these are scene stealing style moments, and you're trying to get him away from being the center of the spotlight. Losing his 'special' echo power would be a rather humbling thing. With this being the centerpoint of everything combat wise, if I'm reading right, removing this means you've effectively crippled him and he's got to learn to deal with being 'normal' (whatever that is). Aetheric burnout is a 'thing' that we've seen discussed in the MSQ and certain class quests, so you can use that as to why it's gone. Having him effectively knocked down a few pegs might be satisfying to the others. You can probably expect them to take out their frustrations a bit on him as the shoe is now on the other foot.

To be honest, I only know of one person who was actually advocating for it and the FFXIV subreddit had a pretty bad backlash against them for it. To be fair, most RP related stuff that hits the the main reddit gets a lot of backlash. If it's the one guy I'm thinking of, who posted tried pushing it on reddit a year or so ago, well, he tried to match scorn with scorn and that escalation never goes well. The Mateus post was interesting. It dipped hard into the negatives when it came out, then someone gilded it and it swung back to positive. Most of it was the OP's persistence, infectious enthusiasm, and he was constantly positive despite the hate he initially got. Cactaur was my home server for a good while. It had a decent but casual / quiet RP community while I was still there a year or so ago. There were probably around 200-400 characters split across three linkshells, and a bunch of PVE folks that would dabble during hunts / etc. It's not closed, but it's not empty either. I still have a character there, but the SO and a bunch of RL friends play on Balmung, so... it is what it is. It's a larger server, yes, but it's one of those questions. Do you want your PvE structure / support there already, or do you want to build it more or less from scratch? A gathering / crafting economy that's busier or less busy. There are good arguments to either answer on any of these and it's really up to the reader to determine what they're looking for. It certainly won't get the bonuses for leveling on a low pop server though.

Honestly, I think it'll do absolutely nothing, regardless of what gets flagged an "official" RP server. It's not like the server flag will actually do much. There are already TOS entries for inappropriate/trademarked names and any other name can be explained away as an 'alias'. Disruptive behavior is already against the TOS as well. The community already knows Balmung is an "unofficial" RP server and they haven't run off anyway. Even if another server got flagged, Balmung is already the "unofficial" RP server and I doubt you'd see any sort of exodus. There's too much Balmung centric baggage. I also doubt another server will get flaged as an 'official rp server' without Balmung also getting tagged because at that point you're giving the community's already existing efforts the finger more or less.

There are a few links up top in the 'free companies' and 'linkshells' section that may give you a general idea. Another suggestion might be to hit up the Making Connections forum here (link) and putting a post up about what you're looking to play and what you're looking for out of a linkshell/FC/etc and see who bites?

You're not wrong. Beyond the drama there are some benefits to the small town style RP community. It's easier to become a more significant part of said community. You can really get a 'Cheers' esque feel to it where 'everyone knows your name'. I think some of the conflict might be that people fear, losing that? Also there is probably some fear that the current 'movers and shakers' are just going to get swallowed up by an external influx that already has some ties to each other? I don't know. There's a lot to be said in both directions for both the Balmung and the Mateus community styles. It'll be interesting to watch how things shake out in either case.

I'll let you know if it happens again. To check the logs on who does what (inviting things, changing others names, etc) you can go to Server Settings -> Audit Log. There'd be something like "such an such invited Balmung RP Event Bot". It's also got a list of when people forced nickname changes, mess with channel names, and the like. Discords come a long way on the auditing side, it's kinda awesome. Really for now the bot has no place on non-Balmung discords until it has multi-server support added, so if it's there, feel free to kick it. If I get multi server support in, there'll probably be a variation of the bot with a different less-server centric name. (Or I might spawn more server specific bots just to be able to better allocate bandwith / processing time) I feel you for the exhaustion of managing a community. I did that for -far- too long in too many other places. It's a thankless job and a royal pain in the backside, but it's a necessary evil. Someone has to do it for a community to thrive.

There are a lot of options as far as which server to join. Mataeus seems to be the 'popular' destination of choice. There are also communities that I've interacted with on Faerie, Lich, and Cactaur with others out there I haven't interacted with yet. Take your time, find a group that you socially mesh with, and enjoy yourself in the game. I think you'll find FFXIV in general (RPer and non-rper alike) a lot friendlier of a place then Tera was when I was still involved in it's RP community.

There was a big push by a few people early based on polls that existed for less then 48 hours after the lock down announcement. And a lot of shouting at other opinions that amounted to "if you're not with us, you shouldn't say anything." There are a lot of other communities that exist out there on somewhat more populated servers where an influx won't cause near as much disruption as it would on Mataes.

Hey foxfirestorm, speaking of the Mateus discord and what not. Can you make sure it's not either of the official discord groups that occasionally invites the Balmung RP Event Bot, spams balmung hate at it and then kicks it? The server name has Mateus RP Hub in it, but I don't know if it's yours or someone spoofing it for giggles. I'm going to probably start blacklisting the internal discord user and server ID's soon and turning over the internal logs to Discord's abuse line, so the problem will solve itself. But on the off chance things really take off, and I turn it into a multi-server bot, I'd hate to see these... users... cause problems for everyone else. Edit: Just for clarifications: the bot's internal logs store everything by discord's internal ID's (which is how the bot sees the servers anyway, not hte names). There's no way for people to actually successfully spoof anything or get anyone else in trouble with this.

Have an event you want to put on the Calendar? Submit it here or send us an email. This Week's Events: Monday - 6/5/2017 4:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT - Matron's Reach: Weekly Open Hours - Goblet, Ward 12, Apartment 30 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT - Gridania Story-Go-Round - Amphitheater, Old Gridania 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT - Lominsan Fight Club - Lominsan Lominsa Lower Decks (x9, y15) 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT - Miko-to-Neko Cat Cafe - Lavender Beds Ward 4 - Plot 16 - Room 27 9:00 PM to 12:00 AM EDT - Orchid 317 Open Mic Night - Mists Ward 12 Plot 40 Tuesday - 6/6/2017 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT - Wayward Star Bar - Mist Ward 6, Plot 1 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT - Halonic Vigil of Martyrs - Ishgarde: Pillars - The Hoplon 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT - Menphina's Bosom Bar and Lounge - The Goblet Ward 8 Plot 58 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT - The Seventh Hell Lounge - The Goblet Ward 12, Sultana’s Breath Apt. 81 Wednesday - 6/7/2017 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT - Stellazzio Pizzeria - Goblet Ward 11, Plot 27 7:30 PM to 11:30 PM EDT - Last Bell Bar - Mist Ward 9, Plot 31 9:00 PM to 12:00 AM EDT - Saika Doman & Oriental Restraunt - Lavender Beds Ward 11 Plot 15 Thursday - 6/8/2017 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT - Lominsan Fight Club - Lominsan Lominsa Lower Decks (x9, y15) 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT - Black Cat Café - Goblet Ward 11, Plot 39 6:30 PM to 10:00 PM EDT - The Magitek Princess Cafe - Goblet Ward 9 Plot 7 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT - 12 Oaks Book Club - LB Ward 8, Plot 7, Room 3 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT - Soul of the Dragon Restraunt - Mists Ward 5 Plot 32 Friday - 6/9/2017 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT - Grand Tournament Closing Charity Ball - Ishgard: Pillars - Hoplon 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT - The Happy Raven Café - Lavender Beds Ward 8 Plot 44 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT - Realmsward Tournament - Behemoths Domain, Central Highlands 8:00 PM to 12:00 AM EDT - The Pleasure Dome - The Goblet Ward 2, Plot 30 9:00 PM to 12:00 AM EDT - Celestine Tavern - The Goblet, Ward 3, Plot 58 9:00 PM to 12:00 AM EDT - Coeurl's Whisker Open RP - Goblet Ward 9, Plot 8 10:00 PM to 12:00 AM EDT - Spellguard Tourney - Mist Ward 6, Seagaze Markets Saturday - 6/10/2017 8:00 PM to 3:00 AM EDT - Sable Bazaar - Western Thanalan, X:16, Y:29.6 9:00 PM to 1:00 AM EDT - Club Crescent - Goblet Ward 4 Plot 42 10:00 PM to 12:00 AM EDT - Grindstone Tournament - Cen. Thanalan (21, 25) Sunday - 6/11/2017 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT - Drunken Moogle Open RP - Lavender Beds Ward 4, Plot 8 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT - Bandee Pakshee's Sagolii Summertime - Southern Thanalan X:14 Y:29 8:00 PM to 1:00 AM EDT - Lace & Steel Fight Night - The Goblet Ward 8 Plot 38 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT - Mystic Runestone - Cen. Thanalan (21, 25) 9:00 PM to 12:00 AM EDT - Qalli Circle - Lavender Beds Ward 11, Plot 45 9:00 PM to 12:00 AM EDT - The Sultana's Cup - Goblet Ward 10, Plot 54 Missed an event? Want to catch up on what has happened in the last week? Check out The Crystal Chronicle. Grab the iCal feed [/url]here. Looking for a RP Hotspot to drop in on? Check HERE! #BalmungRPcalendar Support the RP Event Calendar on Patreon.

Added this to the calendar. I hope you don't mind.

I helped run/moderate three different server community sites during my long history in WoW, and I can say the "rp policing" you see on occasion here is a fresh breath of air to some of the BS that went on over on US WoW servers. There's a solid reason Earthen Ring went from one of the higher pop servers to one of lowest populations over the experience of two expansions. I guess you were one of the lucky ones not to get caught up with it. Anyway, back on topic.... I'm assuming you mean "what's the most effective way". The best way to get server populations down is to give some solid material gain for being on a lower populated server. Maybe an "open world" echo bonus or a bonus to tombstone accumulation. Bonus to FC points earned might work as well. Assuming you let an FC move with it's airship and current rank intact. Hell they could even just add a special housing item for people that transfer over and folks might jump to it. That will help get some of the non-RP groups to move off in anticipation of more stuff / faster progression. It might even help with some of the RPers as well. Gilgamesh pretty close to Balmung's as far as large active go and some of the JP servers are (slowly) closing the gap. Really just some tangible incentive to get there other then "you can bring some of your stuff".