I come from a small pop RP server in WoW. I played there for almost 10 years, and roleplayed there for over 8. Here's my 2p (more like £2... oops) on the challenges you need to be addressing and the things you need to consider moving forward if you (any of you) want to make a genuine, valid alternative community to Balmung.
Here is the shape I've seen small communities take. At the beginning, everyone is really excited about the opportunity to have a fresh start. There's a boom in RP guilds, events, and community get-togethers, there's some method of communication established like a chat channel or a forum or both. People usually think this is the hard part, because it takes a lot of effort and promotion and logging in every day and it is hard, no doubt about it. But by comparison, it is the easy part. The hard part comes a year later.
By this stage, the original person or people (usually a group of 5 people or less) who began the community have begun to burn out. When someone burns out, what happens is they pull back their operations and start mostly doing their in-game stuff, or their personal RP plots, or just stop logging in as much. And the thing is... there's nothing bad about this! It's a healthy, good reaction to burn-out. Pushing through burn-out without heed to your own mental limits is a recipe for shitty events and shitty relations, because you start to resent the hobby, and inevitably lash out at the people related to it. So pulling back and doing something else for a bit is absolutely the right answer. But here's what you need to recall. Who is going to provide roleplay for people in your stead when that happens?
Here's my key point: roleplay communities under a certain size are NOT SUSTAINABLE. Let's say you're the singular leader of the entire RP community on a given server. You will reach burn-out. Maybe this year, maybe next year, maybe next month. It's going to happen. What next? If your answer to "who is going to provide RP" is "one of my friends who's been helping me so far", that is not adequate. Your friend's probably been working just as hard as you! Maybe even harder, depending on the systems you're using and how easy they make it for non-leaders to do stuff like set calendar events. There's only so many friends in a friend group - and if you go through all of them without the first guy feeling like he wants to come back, then you're screwed. If your answer is "I don't know but I'm sure someone will step forward", I have a little spoiler for you: no one is going to take over. That won't happen. Sorry. This is my experience: during their leisure time, people naturally gravitate towards either leader or follower roles, because they will have a preference (either conscious or subconscious) for which one they enjoy performing more. If no one has made themself apparent as enjoying the leader role so far, it's a vanishingly small chance that they're suddenly going to leap forward and take it up. So, then... things fizzle out... or people start getting upset that there's "no roleplay any more", and turn on each other in blame.
What you need is another group who's been running RP separately but concurrently to you. Let's take three Balmung events I attend regularly, and which I know have no overlap in leadership: Matron's Reach on Mondays, Stellazio Pizzaria on Wednesdays, and Fight Club on Thursdays. What happens if the leader of, say, Matron's Reach burns out and doesn't want to lead it any more, and nobody steps forward? Then I suppose that event would stop running. But what happens to Stellazio Pizzaria and Thursday Fight Club? Absolutely nothing. And if someone wants healer-based RP after that? Then there are three free companies I can think of off the top of my head that could scratch that itch, also not dependent on the Matron's Reach in any fashion whatsoever. Because these RP outlets are concurrent and separate, the overall community is stable. One person dropping out won't kill the whole community, no matter who it is.
That is the thing you need to strive for, even in a small server. If one person or FC stops operating, the overall community needs to have the stability and breadth to continue without them (maybe in a different fashion, but still to continue). Because if it doesn't, then this starts happening:
I'm not trying to single you out. I'm using this quote because it is so accurate to what happened to my server's community, in another realm, on another game, 5+ years ago. My guild was in the position "your guild" is in. We were the pillar upon which the rest of the community depended to initiate RP. Then our leader burned out, and took a break from big RP events. His inner circle closed ranks around him... excluding most of the members of his actual guild, including me, despite the fact that I was far and away the second-most active in organising things next to him. That's the familiar part - the part that sounds like it's happening to you. Here's the rest of my cautionary tale about the original community on my small server.
You'll notice I said "original", so here's the thing. I have word from my friends that the community is actually doing fine these days, although I'm not part of it any more (so I can't personally verify). What changed? Server merges. It was merged with two other RP servers, and although there were initial hiccoughs of people being territorial, these days it's stabilised into a much more sustainable, larger community. People were introduced from a friendlier neighbour-server, and diluted the bitterness in the community. If one guy doesn't like you, it's no longer the end of the world. And if one guy quits, there are a half-dozen others you can seek RP from instead.
Here is what I think y'all need to do if you seriously, actually want to make a solid alternative to Balmung.
Pick one server and pool your efforts. Work together with other people who are currently running small alternative RP communities to bring your efforts together in one place. It seems like there are a good handful of you guys, all with 20-100 people each, who all had the initial thought of "why don't we go somewhere other than Balmung? I'll just pick any low-pop server/the server I initially happened to roll on". If you seriously want to make a valid, serious, stable alternative, then I think you need to start bringing yourselves together with one another. Set aside your pride, stump up the cash to move if you must, and create one, unified RP community on an otherwise low-population server. Do your own thing there! You don't necessarily need to be in communication and coordination with everyone on that server, so place the logistical fears out of your mind - in fact, if there's so many people that you can't, that's a healthy sign that you're on your way to sustainability. Just do it all in the same place so people know where to go.
That way, new players aren't looking at entering one of a number of single FCs or small clusters of FCs where if they don't like the OOC culture, or the stance on lore, the genre of RP, or one of the people there just plain ol' dislikes them, they have to move or reroll again. There should be a choice within a single World, both in terms of what content is on offer and what people are offering it. That would be forming the basis of a genuine Balmung alternative, where people who would otherwise have moved to Balmung will actually want to go.
My summarised opinion/advice to people who want to create a Balmung alternative: I really, really want to see you guys succeed in creating a valid alternative... but I really fear it's not possible to achieve that with single-leader communities. Single-leader communities are great. While they last. But there's no longevity there. You need to consolidate into a multi-leader playerbase if you're going to create something sustainable, that will survive in the long term, and provide a genuine alternative to Balmung. Contact leaders of other alternative communities, pool your efforts on one server, and go on from there.
Here is the shape I've seen small communities take. At the beginning, everyone is really excited about the opportunity to have a fresh start. There's a boom in RP guilds, events, and community get-togethers, there's some method of communication established like a chat channel or a forum or both. People usually think this is the hard part, because it takes a lot of effort and promotion and logging in every day and it is hard, no doubt about it. But by comparison, it is the easy part. The hard part comes a year later.
By this stage, the original person or people (usually a group of 5 people or less) who began the community have begun to burn out. When someone burns out, what happens is they pull back their operations and start mostly doing their in-game stuff, or their personal RP plots, or just stop logging in as much. And the thing is... there's nothing bad about this! It's a healthy, good reaction to burn-out. Pushing through burn-out without heed to your own mental limits is a recipe for shitty events and shitty relations, because you start to resent the hobby, and inevitably lash out at the people related to it. So pulling back and doing something else for a bit is absolutely the right answer. But here's what you need to recall. Who is going to provide roleplay for people in your stead when that happens?
Here's my key point: roleplay communities under a certain size are NOT SUSTAINABLE. Let's say you're the singular leader of the entire RP community on a given server. You will reach burn-out. Maybe this year, maybe next year, maybe next month. It's going to happen. What next? If your answer to "who is going to provide RP" is "one of my friends who's been helping me so far", that is not adequate. Your friend's probably been working just as hard as you! Maybe even harder, depending on the systems you're using and how easy they make it for non-leaders to do stuff like set calendar events. There's only so many friends in a friend group - and if you go through all of them without the first guy feeling like he wants to come back, then you're screwed. If your answer is "I don't know but I'm sure someone will step forward", I have a little spoiler for you: no one is going to take over. That won't happen. Sorry. This is my experience: during their leisure time, people naturally gravitate towards either leader or follower roles, because they will have a preference (either conscious or subconscious) for which one they enjoy performing more. If no one has made themself apparent as enjoying the leader role so far, it's a vanishingly small chance that they're suddenly going to leap forward and take it up. So, then... things fizzle out... or people start getting upset that there's "no roleplay any more", and turn on each other in blame.
What you need is another group who's been running RP separately but concurrently to you. Let's take three Balmung events I attend regularly, and which I know have no overlap in leadership: Matron's Reach on Mondays, Stellazio Pizzaria on Wednesdays, and Fight Club on Thursdays. What happens if the leader of, say, Matron's Reach burns out and doesn't want to lead it any more, and nobody steps forward? Then I suppose that event would stop running. But what happens to Stellazio Pizzaria and Thursday Fight Club? Absolutely nothing. And if someone wants healer-based RP after that? Then there are three free companies I can think of off the top of my head that could scratch that itch, also not dependent on the Matron's Reach in any fashion whatsoever. Because these RP outlets are concurrent and separate, the overall community is stable. One person dropping out won't kill the whole community, no matter who it is.
That is the thing you need to strive for, even in a small server. If one person or FC stops operating, the overall community needs to have the stability and breadth to continue without them (maybe in a different fashion, but still to continue). Because if it doesn't, then this starts happening:
foxfirestorm Wrote:Mateus has a great deal of potential to become something AMAZING. We do have an active community here, but as of recent times (and why I went on my vacation), we have an issue where this... Large group of individuals (Not going to say names) are very entwined into their own little spot and due to the small nature of the RP community right now, this is effecting those that are not in this circle.
As the one in charge, I voice time and time again that my officers need to do more world RP and actually go out and do things, however, they seem very convinced to remain in that circle and some of my own officers have been pulled into this little group-- which makes matters WORSE.
I'm not trying to single you out. I'm using this quote because it is so accurate to what happened to my server's community, in another realm, on another game, 5+ years ago. My guild was in the position "your guild" is in. We were the pillar upon which the rest of the community depended to initiate RP. Then our leader burned out, and took a break from big RP events. His inner circle closed ranks around him... excluding most of the members of his actual guild, including me, despite the fact that I was far and away the second-most active in organising things next to him. That's the familiar part - the part that sounds like it's happening to you. Here's the rest of my cautionary tale about the original community on my small server.
You'll notice I said "original", so here's the thing. I have word from my friends that the community is actually doing fine these days, although I'm not part of it any more (so I can't personally verify). What changed? Server merges. It was merged with two other RP servers, and although there were initial hiccoughs of people being territorial, these days it's stabilised into a much more sustainable, larger community. People were introduced from a friendlier neighbour-server, and diluted the bitterness in the community. If one guy doesn't like you, it's no longer the end of the world. And if one guy quits, there are a half-dozen others you can seek RP from instead.
Here is what I think y'all need to do if you seriously, actually want to make a solid alternative to Balmung.
Pick one server and pool your efforts. Work together with other people who are currently running small alternative RP communities to bring your efforts together in one place. It seems like there are a good handful of you guys, all with 20-100 people each, who all had the initial thought of "why don't we go somewhere other than Balmung? I'll just pick any low-pop server/the server I initially happened to roll on". If you seriously want to make a valid, serious, stable alternative, then I think you need to start bringing yourselves together with one another. Set aside your pride, stump up the cash to move if you must, and create one, unified RP community on an otherwise low-population server. Do your own thing there! You don't necessarily need to be in communication and coordination with everyone on that server, so place the logistical fears out of your mind - in fact, if there's so many people that you can't, that's a healthy sign that you're on your way to sustainability. Just do it all in the same place so people know where to go.
That way, new players aren't looking at entering one of a number of single FCs or small clusters of FCs where if they don't like the OOC culture, or the stance on lore, the genre of RP, or one of the people there just plain ol' dislikes them, they have to move or reroll again. There should be a choice within a single World, both in terms of what content is on offer and what people are offering it. That would be forming the basis of a genuine Balmung alternative, where people who would otherwise have moved to Balmung will actually want to go.
My summarised opinion/advice to people who want to create a Balmung alternative: I really, really want to see you guys succeed in creating a valid alternative... but I really fear it's not possible to achieve that with single-leader communities. Single-leader communities are great. While they last. But there's no longevity there. You need to consolidate into a multi-leader playerbase if you're going to create something sustainable, that will survive in the long term, and provide a genuine alternative to Balmung. Contact leaders of other alternative communities, pool your efforts on one server, and go on from there.
![[Image: tUzrT.png]](https://puu.sh/tUzrT.png)
