(01-03-2018, 05:28 PM)MonevaQestir Wrote: Personally, from my experience, it is because Discord has become such a positive tool for the Mateus community. Need an rp event? Right there. Post your FC? Right there. Make connections? Right there. You don't have to weed through other players on other servers, you get instant response times, and the discord is growing daily. When I found the discord, I literally never came on this site except to post events or peruse topics.
I know from when I first moved to Mateus back in SB time, a handful of people on this site were... well, not really welcoming from what I personally saw.
I certainly agree that it makes things easy for users when all their information is in a single place. However! Discord's search and history really wasn't made to be a neverending repository for posts and content. Eventually, all that data from all of their servers is gonna reach some point where it's too much overhead to search back, or takes up too much space to store forever. In either of those situations, you get a loss of information.
The other major concern is having to actually find the discord. Perhaps this is more a perspective issue on my part, but if I were a new RPer trying to join in, the first things I'd look for are websites and posts to prove that yes, people actually RP there. A discord link still needs to be hosted, advertised, and put out -somewhere- for people to find it. Public shouts or random invites can alleviate some of that, but ultimately, people need to know where to go. An invite-only or invite-link-required method doesn't really help much with exposure.
So I am curious there. Do people simply repost their character/event/making connections on end? Because trying to navigate those lists to scroll up to see everything must be a nightmare.
(01-03-2018, 05:28 PM)MonevaQestir Wrote: Now, I am not trying to say anything bad about the people on here, but I know a lot of people had expressed to me that they didn't feel welcome on this site at all, based on how people have acted in the past to growing a second RP server, etc. I don't know if that's 100% on that, but I do remember seeing some fights in the forums back when Mateus and co. was getting off their feet.Â
I'd ask to find a RP "community" where that hasn't happened though. For some, change is horrifying. Or some really want everyone grouped on a single server. ...which isn't sustainable. (We can all point to Balmung on that.) The forum fires are inevitable.
(01-03-2018, 05:28 PM)MonevaQestir Wrote: Plus, when Mateus was first getting off their feet, there wasn't even an *Icon* for FCs, you had to rummage through the pile of other server FCs and hope there was one with Mateus on it. Also, Server events: There is a very bad bad bad structure on it. If I go on the events page, it is literally 99% Balmung. Which is fine, I have no complaints: But the point is, this site was completely made for Gilg and Balmung. It continued to be that way for quite some time after Mateus grew, and now has finally a decent format for the other servers. But some advice is just to try and separate servers in terms of events and such. If there was a, say, Mateus RP Calender, or Cactaur RP Calender, etc. It would make people more willing to use this site.
The RPC's layout, while looking about the same as ever, has actually changed quite a lot over the years as the site's needs have changed and adjusted. Some positive changed require a lot more custom-coding than they appear to need. Most notably, the Linkshell and Free Company halls, which are hand-coded and built with custom templates. Yes, they are -technically- forums, but all of that filtering is done manually. The forum/thread display was all manual too. And with a plugin that is extremely powerful, yet also very delicate. The gist is that it takes quite a bit of work and tinkering to even make the slightest changes, like adding sections for Mateus and Omega.
Things like the Calendar are a major sticking point. MyBB's calendar is pretty terrible in my opinion and it's one of the reasons we're moving away from it in favor of an InvisionPower site instead. There, we can actually make separate calendars for servers. And import/sync them with google calendars too.
As for events, this is something I have to keep saying to the point of being a broken record. How will the events forum look anything different from "99% Balmung" if nobody but people on Balmung post there? I'd encourage you and others to cross-post events for exposure. It's not going to make a change overnight, but it is firmly rooted in confirmation bias. In the past, we did have separate forums for Balmung and Gilgamesh, as that was how the site was set up back when it relaunched in 2013. They were later merged in when more and more Gilgamesh RPers transfered to Balmung, and we introduced server prefixes instead to mark threads. We could go back to that, assuming people would use them. (Otherwise, it just feeds the same confirmation bias that "nobody posts events for ____ here" which makes a feedback loop.) in the new IPS site, server tags and prefixes will actually let someone filter content by that tag/server, which should help make things easier.
(01-03-2018, 05:28 PM)MonevaQestir Wrote: Also, I guess the only other thing I wanna ask is why are the Balmung folk creating this topic and are so concerned over it? I'm honestly curious, no hostility.
I think this is partly because there really isn't as large a split between the bigger unofficial RP servers as people seem to think there are. While it's definitely true that there are people who might only RP/play on one or the other, we share a datacenter and a decent number of people hop back and forth. Or "migrate" from one to the other. ...but it's still all the same people, largely.
Whew...ok. This was a longer reply than intended. And I don't mean to put a spotlight on you in particular, but the above does contain some of my concerns when I see Mateus trying to operate solely out of discord. I've talked to some of the mods/leaders in the past and usually get a "yeah! That's a good idea!" response when it comes to helping Mateus gain exposure, but then little seems to happen after. I love that Meteus has grown, but I see a lot of repeat issues that have already happened on Balmung/the RPC before. And with Mateus starting to hit that point where it's getting closed character creation, it may help to keep things unified somewhere where it'll last.
