Balmung RP, is it dying? Has it changed?

[Andromeda]

On 5/1/2018 at 1:56 PM, Aegir said:

There's more RP on Balmung than you can shake a Moogle at.

He should know. He's like 80% of it. Including the moogle.

 

In my experience there a are a few patterns that power interest and energy, all of which are in full swing.

 

The first is summer duldrums. I don't know why exactly, but every summer activity and engagement drops, particularly in "routine" RP that repeats weekly or every other week like Grindstone. That said, more unusual RP events like the monthly Sultana's Breath Shopping Arcade seem to still pull good numbers.

 

Second is patch lull. This is an easy pattern to spot and most event planners know to take it into a account when evaluating their success. People are less hype about the game in general so less motivated to log in.

 

Third is the lock. From the little we saw as a pattern over the last year, after taking few months with no new blood things stagnate. And each time someone tries recruiting they pull from a diminishing pool, making growing a group a zero-sum proposition. This is stressful for some community organizers and it, in my view, tracks with a rise in drama and anxiety. If we assume Balmung will open for a month every few patches this will be another cycle we'll settle into. If not it's a challenging reality we'll need to adapt to. Either way, it's one of the current factors.

 

So are we dying out? No, not even a little. Changing? Only in the worst case scenario. I think everything else is just a matter of a few cycles lining up to kick is particularly hard these past few months.

 

I didn't realize this was a thread from May when I posted, but I think it's been a rough summer so it's worth revisiting now on the other side of a couple tough months.

Edited August 17, 2018 by Andromeda

[Dravus]

I wouldn't say it's dying so much as it's stagnating. I don't really post here much these days and there's a lot I could say on the matter but I'll try to keep it brief. The most obvious cause of the stagnation is the server being locked down. That prevents fresh faces from popping up outside of the occasional returning player and makes it difficult for various Free Companies to recruit additional members. This is even more apparent when accounting for niche concepts.

 

I've also found that a lot of role-players are unfortunately prone to baggage in the form of needless drama and/or manipulative, flaky behaviour...so I doubt that I'm the only one who is very selective about who I choose to interact with these days. 

[Erah'sae]

I'll say this much, activity patterns for events haven't changed that much thus far.  There's still new ones cropping up on a regular basis, even ones that aren't run by Aegir's crew.  So far I wouldn't call it so much stagnation as stabilization.  Prior to this there were a dozen 'brand new concepts' every month that would then disappear two or so months later.  

 

I was always getting pings from people going "I was doing this, now everyone is off on their new flavor of the month alt... can you help me find something similar."  It's not happening as much anymore.  However I do still get pings from people going "Hey, I'm looking at getting my feet wet in RP, can you point me at events for this sort of thing in my time zone."

 

There's less churn.  This, to me, is a good thing.