I Have a Problem Already.

[Tepe]

Alright listen up everybody. I've already got a pretty significant problem going on with the Hyperion RP Community.

 

Why in the heck are we so scattered? We don't even have our own category on this site, we're ranked in the "Other Category." like rest of the scrubs! (Not that they're bad at RP, just that I'm biased towards Hyperion for obvious reasons, I'm sure they're all delightful people even if they're lower population.)

 

In the past several weeks that I've tried to insert myself into the larger RP community and reach outside my own mansion walls. Whenever I do I see this horrible cacophony of everyone beating to their own tune. We've got like what two groups trying to add a whole roster, some LGBT focused RP groups, different venues, different small time RP groups. We've got leadership shells, RP shells, and discords for every single one of them.

 

Looking at my discord list, I've got no less than 18 different small discords for Hyperion RP. They all have the exact same mission statement.

 

To connect RPers.

 

Well that's a fantastic idea, but shouldn't we have some unity, some solidarity. Everyone is trying to be *the* hub to end all hubs, and it's just confusing. I haven't even talked about the facebook groups!

 

We're scattered, and if you wanna know what's happening say October 12th of this month at 5PM, well heck there might be two events that are going to be hosted but how are we supposed to know about it? Where's the laser like focus, the universally agreed upon standard. Because I bet you if someone is hosting something on October 12th at 5PM they might do some advertisement, but there's no way they can touch this wide plethora of members one scattered discord at a time. So they might host an event alone, with nobody to accompany them. How tragic and heartbreaking is that? Incredibly!

 

Am I the answer? Heck no! I have no idea what the answer is. I barely even have a twitter. This site is super cute, and it's a great start, a great platform, and I love invision power as a platform, if I wanted to make a community it would be this software.

 

Should we stop having a million discords and channels? Absolutely not! Everyone wants a small group to call home.

 

I'm just saying, there needs to be some community standard, some goto place. A solid resource we're all agreed on. So if someone says "Man I've got nothing planned on my day off tomorrow." the response is "Well did you check FFXIV-Roleplayers to see if there's anything going on?" or the alternative. "Man I hope someone shows up to my new teahouse this weekend." the response being "Did you post it on the RPC forums?" like it's the obvious first step.

 

Maybe it's not this site, but I think that this site has some damn fine potential.

 

Also it kind of beats joining another discord channel that I'll absolutely never follow.

Edited October 7, 2018 by Tepe
I typo like an old pro

[Unnamed Mercenary]

Hey there! As one of the site staff (mostly here to do server upkeep), I'd like to welcome you in to the RPC and help address a couple points based on experiences between RP in FFXIV and the RPC!
 

7 hours ago, Tepe said:

In the past several weeks that I've tried to insert myself into the larger RP community and reach outside my own mansion walls. Whenever I do I see this horrible cacophony of everyone beating to their own tune.

 

 

 

This is a good thing! It happened on Balmung. It happened on Gilgamesh (moreso 2.0-3.0 era), and it happened on Mateus. A "roleplay community" is a mythological standard since no singular person or group can possibly be involved in it all. distinct groups for their concepts or interests are ideal, as long as there's some overlap to help keep people connected. The RPC's goal is to help facilitate this.

 

On the main board, I'd heavily recommend making use of tags and prefixes where possible so all that good search engine optimization can work its magic. (Assuming our server doesn't choke!) Prefixes now show up in our recent threads section to give users on the front page a quick glance of things! Over on the wiki, adding [[Category:Hyperion]] to any character pages should also help! Common templates like the infobox are Hyperion friendly already! 

 

7 hours ago, Tepe said:

Looking at my discord list, I've got no less than 18 different small discords for Hyperion RP. They all have the exact same mission statement.

 

To connect RPers.

 

Well that's a fantastic idea, but shouldn't we have some unity, some solidarity. Everyone is trying to be *the* hub to end all hubs, and it's just confusing. I haven't even talked about the facebook groups!

 

This is also normal! (Or has become normal, per the trend of creating a discord for everything). I'd encourage those discord owners to get their group a listing here on the RPC as well. (We're still debating how the club sections will work. These may go back to being little user-created subsections as some feedback has shown that the FC/LS sections were doing better as forums themselves. A formal announcement will be made if/when that happens though!)

 

7 hours ago, Tepe said:

We're scattered, and if you wanna know what's happening say October 12th of this month at 5PM, well heck there might be two events that are going to be hosted but how are we supposed to know about it? Where's the laser like focus, the universally agreed upon standard. Because I bet you if someone is hosting something on October 12th at 5PM they might do some advertisement, but there's no way they can touch this wide plethora of members one scattered discord at a time. So they might host an event alone, with nobody to accompany them. How tragic and heartbreaking is that? Incredibly!

 

 

This is where the calendars (and accompanying bots) come in handy! It does mean that a group of people will want to eventually curate it slightly, like preventing duplicate entries or people editing other people's events. The Balmung and Mateus calendar maintainers @Erah'sae and @Neneso Neso can probably give some tips on this works and pros/cons. (Bots = programming required). In the meantime, I'd recommend using the RPC Community Calendar section for anything you want to be public. If there are internal events or something you only want users in this group to see, the club calendar would then be handy. (This is great for say, using the RPC instead of Enjinn for a FC site). We can technically make ical exports of calendars here, but IPS has a few known limitations with imports and exports. I'd typically recommend moving over to a multi-user managed google calendar for RPC to import if things really kick off.

 

7 hours ago, Tepe said:

So if someone says "Man I've got nothing planned on my day off tomorrow." the response is "Well did you check FFXIV-Roleplayers to see if there's anything going on?" or the alternative. "Man I hope someone shows up to my new teahouse this weekend." the response being "Did you post it on the RPC forums?" like it's the obvious first step.

 

This is exactly why we're here! The RPC should typically be the top result on google and other search engines for FFXIV RP/Roleplay and the like! We're always open to feedback and making adjustments as things change! 

[Tepe]

Oh my goodness, I've gotten the eyes of one of the senior cool people, this is a big day for me. (Definitely not being sarcastic, genuinely cool!)

 

3 hours ago, Unnamed Mercenary said:

A "roleplay community" is a mythological standard since no singular person or group can possibly be involved in it all.

 

That's actually a really cool way to phrase it.

 

See when I first started my FC, the RP community on Hyperion was basically at exactly zero. There were a few groups, all of them relatively small, and none of them super big on advertising. Just small niche groups of close friends. I never really RP'd before I was just making it up as I went along because it sounded fun, but as the RP community grew and grew and grew there's always talk about the community. I never really considered it until this second (Though the evidence has been right in front of me) that there isn't a way to have a hand in every single one of them.

 

3 hours ago, Unnamed Mercenary said:

I'd encourage those discord owners to get their group a listing here on the RPC as well.

 

That's pretty cool. So if I want to do my part and help this place grow, it's just as simple as showing everyone who hasn't heard about. That's how I found this place at least.

 

3 hours ago, Unnamed Mercenary said:

This is exactly why we're here! The RPC should typically be the top result on google and other search engines for FFXIV RP/Roleplay and the like! We're always open to feedback and making adjustments as things change!  

 

Just googled it, didn't realize that it was so high up on the searches. I would love to offer feedback, but hey I just got here so I don't really know enough about the system to make anything.

 

Thanks for taking the time to respond! Hella appreciate it. I hope to see you again someday!

 

P.S. What do we need to do to get our own Hyperion designation like Balmung and Maetus, instead of being put in a group with "other."

Edited October 7, 2018 by Tepe

[Unnamed Mercenary]

Aha....I've been around a while, but I'm still pretty new to RPing as well! FFXIV is the first MMO I've ever RPed in, and even then, I was lured into it at the time by friends, so I cheated and had interconnected backstories from the start!

 

34 minutes ago, Tepe said:

when I first started my FC, the RP community on Hyperion was basically at exactly zero. There were a few groups, all of them relatively small, and none of them super big on advertising.

 

That's exactly how it starts! I don't wanna draw too many parallels to other servers since the focus here should be fostering a place for your FC's RP, but disjoint groups coming together and mixing it up is what starts to create that healthy "server RP" environment where groups can come and go without all the RP suddenly dying. Like, when a server hits that sweet spot of enough events to give people lots of options, while also having open-world stuff casually going on so a person can be as involved as they want!

 

You'll find that RPers are pretty much on every server, even if they tend to cluster around a few. (Until SE gives us cross-world zones or something for a RP venue option, it'll prolly kinda stay that way!) While I can't say I've encountered any server-specific user-generated lore, I know it's happened in other games.

 

44 minutes ago, Tepe said:

So if I want to do my part and help this place grow, it's just as simple as showing everyone who hasn't heard about. That's how I found this place at least.

 

Yup! Let them know if they're interested in RP and are looking for a place to talk about characters, stories, lore, do forum RP, post their character art, etc, the RPC wants to help out! Our forum sections have mostly stayed the same since I started lurking in 2013 as a regular user. ...a few adjustments have been made, as well as our jump to IPS. (although theme is still a huge work in progress. This is mostly just bits and pieces I ported over from our previous MyBB layout.) 

 

47 minutes ago, Tepe said:

who are like the big names around here. People I should know if I want to set roots on this forum and hang out a while.

 

This one's gonna be a subjective answer that I can't really provide. I'd say the majority of users tend to register and make a welcome/directory post. Many also make a character wiki, which is where the bulk of our traffic comes from these days! (Login syncs with the forums, although anyone who makes a username with special characters, underscores, or emoji may encounter a login bridge error. This will -hopefully- be getting fixed in a coming update, but I've still got some testing to do!)

 

We've got a few general interest sections made for all servers though, which is where I'd say a lot of people hang out. Places to discuss RP, work on a character, talk about the game or lore, and other off-topic things like music interest, etc!

[Erah'sae]

Figured I'd join the club just to toss a line out here.   

 

The biggest thing you can do to promote the RP of the server is advertise.

 

Get a page set up for a calendar of events.   Tumblr has a way to show the google calendar as a page widget which can help with some visibility, and people can attach a google calendar to their phones, personal sites, and the like fairly easily.

Create somewhere (could be an email address, or a thread on here) for people to submit events to you, and keep a calendar up to date.  (Weekly updates work, more than that and you'll go insane after a while.)

 

Then give an update about once a week or so, of what's new.   This does two things for you.  a.) It attracts attention.  b.) It lets people who aren't going to look at the calendar itself have a reference for the week.

 

Just like advertising for an FC sometimes it's worth doing a little in game PR as well.   Set up a party finder with "Hyperion RP Event Calendar: (URL). in the description to get people's eyes on it.   Poke folks running events to see if they'll share the link with their event members or give it a mention on their sites, etc.

If I can be of help, give me a yell.

 

~ Erah'sae.