Post by Jubilynn on Jul 29, 2010 19:32:11 GMT -5
Hi Everyone,
Those of you who have been around the sim for a while know, that I often reach out to the players, to find out how things are going and to propose possible changes to the sim. I know that this isn’t often done in Second Life, for many reasons; most notably, its expensive to run a sim, even a small one like Botany Bay. This said, I firmly believe that it may be my money on the line, but without the time and effort that you players put into the sim, it just becomes an empty bunch of pixels.
First let me give you a little background or how Botany came to be, and where we came from, so we can intelligently speak about where we are, and want to go. Botany Bay is in effect the result of me being Kicked out of another RP sim, Exogenisis. I was an avid player there, having started in the first few days that it opened. At the time, I was out of work (injured) and had plenty of time on my hands to spend playing online. I spent about 12-15 hours a day on the Exogenisis sim and felt that I contributed greatly to the atmosphere. I also spent much time getting new players started and involved. After 3 or 4 months I had an altercation with a moderator, who was a Real Life friend of the sim owner. Because I refused to turn over control of on off gird wiki-web page I had built for the sim, to the moderator, I as banned from the sim.
This incident, as well as a some other experiences in SL, drove me to open a place where the owner’s would not treat the sim as their own personal play pen. Yes, owners paid the bills, but players made a sim, a ‘home’, and without some sort of ‘power sharing’ with your players, you could not run a successful RP sim. I didn’t open Botany right away. First Started a small private RP on a ¼ sim I rented. This RP, The Kitsune RPG, ran for a few months. It was a ‘closed’ RP meaning players were invited to join. It was a crew of ‘refuges’ for lack of a better term, on a sentient vessel, the Kitsune, who would visit new dimensions ever few days. The RP was based around set ‘event’ sessions with a more open ship board pick up RP in between. This ran for a few months before the pressure to get everyone together or ‘heard cats’ as I like to call it, got to me and it drifted apart some.
While running the Kitsune RP though, I met many new people and two of these people convinced me to go in on a full homestead, and set up an open sci-fi RP. Well that’s was my intent, but before we even opened, the first partner backed out, as they started to use it as their own ‘playpen’. I was the primary builder for Botany, and we opened in Late July or Early August 2009 (it was a soft opening as I was still building the sim).
From the beginning, Botany Bay was supposed to be an open, interact sim. The few rules we put into place were designed to be guidelines, a loose set of boundaries to keep us all on the same general sheet of paper, and let us move forward and create …. Together… a new fun, world to RP in. I purposely left large swaths of the ‘back story’ vague, to allow players, though their own bits and pieces of story, to weave together a new mosaic of stories, and flesh out the ‘universe’ together. I had seen this done numerous times online in other places. I’ve played online RPGs in text form over IMs and chat rooms since 1994. Never did we have stringent rules, or a ‘moderator’. We simply had imaginative people who played characters within mutually supportive limits to create whole fantasy worlds that would rival any you would read about in a book, or see in a movie. I knew it was possible; I just underestimated how difficult it would be given second life’s norms and mores, especially how they related to Role Playing.
(To get this out of the way now; I myself am an avid fan of ‘adult’ Role Play, but for me, the Role Play is first and the ‘adult’ second. SL has a healthy (perhaps not the right term) “adult” population, but it’s a BSDM and “Gor” fan base. This at times can be a detriment to Role Play that doesn’t’ fit that ‘niche’. )
As the months went on, Botany Bay would grow to a small, but steady core of Role Players. This didn’t happen overnight, nor without our pitfalls. We lost many ‘core’ players and I lost a sim partner, often for the same reasons: the separation of off sim / Out of Character BSDM relationships and On sim, In character issues. This was particularly true of the many ‘slavers’ who have come, and then left. The second issue that drove people off was that of ‘scope’. By scope I mean, the degree or level of event that individual players bring to the table. For instance, players organizing an ‘invasion and take over’ of the colony, rather than a raid. Being a Free Form RPG, a ‘game changing’ event such as a potential invasion should be discussed beforehand with the other ‘RP elders’ those players who have been around for a while and put in their time, before a single player takes off in that direction. In Botany Bay, were we have an Moderator team, well that’s something we’d want to bounce off them. Anyways, its important to note I think .
I’d Like to take a few minutes to talk about what I feel Botany Bay is.
1. Firstly, I feel it’s still a Free Form Role Playing game, or FFRPG. That meaning, that the players work together to drive the story forward. There isn’t’ on central person writing the ‘script’ that everyone else will follow.
2. I believe the moderator team.. currently Myself and Serus, work to try to guide the story forward, and try not to be too heavy handed in our efforts to keep a certain ‘flavor’ to the sim. Botany does not have a combat or RP meter.
3. I never liked them, I feel they are generally a poor substitute for Role playing, and lead to ‘button smashing.’ With SL’s inherent lag, the person with the faster connection always wins in a meter battle.
4. Botany Bay does not ‘pre approve’ characters; in many sims you have to submit your character to the mod team for approval. At botany I prefer to let the community standard weed out what is acceptable or not acceptable within the rather broad guidelines we set, still strangely enough I was told recently we have ‘too many rules’.
5. The ‘build’ of the sim; when I designed botany, I set out to create it as a ‘set’. I thought of places where people could go to RP a screen of one sort or another. I wanted to give places for people to tell their stories, not places you had to visit to get some Moderator driven job or event to take place. This led to a large layout with many different locations, to support a wide and varied Role play. Places such as the Landing pad, Hotel, the Mines, and the Beach; were all made to support story telling.
6. Roleplaying would tell the story, not animations or pose balls. There are very few things that ‘work’ in botany bay. Much of this is by design, the ‘work’ comes from the players imaginations, the prims are just props as far as I am concerned.
Ok, so if you’re still reading this…
Though we have a strong base of support with many daily visitors, something I am thankful for every day. Botany still hasn’t grown large enough to be a ‘stable’ RP. Our daily traffic hovers around 3k, dropping as low as 2k or as high as 4.5k on any given day. Many of you, like myself, have sat in the sim , empty and alone. This is something I want to change, something I feel needs to change for us to continue to have a fun, thriving, diverse RP experience. Also, I’ve come to notice that even if 3 or 4 people are on, they end up scatted around the sim by themselves. I’ve made the following observations that I think are the problem .
1. We’ve drifted too far left into the BSDM side of the RP.
2. We’re adult rated, non ‘adult’ Rpers can’t visit it just cuts down on the available RPer pool.
3. The sim layout is too large – locations are too far apart.
4. Factions never filled out, everyone is on their own .. SL RP seems very faction based.
5. We’re so ‘different’ in our approach, people don’t know what to do when they get to the sim.
6. We don’t hold ‘events’
Looking at what I see to be problems, I’m considering making the following changes:
1. Changing out rating from adult to mature. This will make for a few changes in the ‘sim rules’ but we seem to now rarely have issues in public. I’ve visited many sims that are similar to ours that have mature ratings and are much more ‘adult’ than Botany Bay.
2. The biggest change … I’m seriously thinking of doing a new build for Botany Bay. This would change the sim from the current large open island layout, to a new, station based one. I believe that this change, which would make the RP locations more closely located, and hopefully force people to interact more . If we did this, there would be a RP Event , that would likely destroy the current colony and have the ‘discovery’ of the new one. I have the outline in my head already, if this were to come to pass. The second benefit of this would be we could create several smaller ‘islands’ in the sim to represent ‘away ‘ locations. So people could run events on a ‘different world’. And still be on sim.
3. Moderator Created Factions: I’ve waited for player developed factions to mature, and they haven’t. So to help integrate new players, the Mod team would create a few ‘factions’ with some built in allies and foes to get things moving.
4. More Moderators / Associate Moderators. Many of you already fill this role, but I’d like to extend the OOC involvement for those of you willing to take on helping new visitors and players to the sim become familiar and more involved.
5. Events – Some sims, such as Hayno the super hero sim, conduct regular well attended events. While these events are not really FFRPG strong suits, they do help get people involved. Short ‘away’ missions, would be one way of doing this.
Ok, so these are my thoughts, I’ll be putting up a poll on these items. Please talk to your fellow players in world and have them jump on here to put their opinion in. I’ll be setting up an OOC meeting for players when I get back, sometime in the weekend of Aug 14-15 to get more feedback before I make any decisions. As always, thank you for taking the time to read this, and to be part of our gaming community.
Those of you who have been around the sim for a while know, that I often reach out to the players, to find out how things are going and to propose possible changes to the sim. I know that this isn’t often done in Second Life, for many reasons; most notably, its expensive to run a sim, even a small one like Botany Bay. This said, I firmly believe that it may be my money on the line, but without the time and effort that you players put into the sim, it just becomes an empty bunch of pixels.
First let me give you a little background or how Botany came to be, and where we came from, so we can intelligently speak about where we are, and want to go. Botany Bay is in effect the result of me being Kicked out of another RP sim, Exogenisis. I was an avid player there, having started in the first few days that it opened. At the time, I was out of work (injured) and had plenty of time on my hands to spend playing online. I spent about 12-15 hours a day on the Exogenisis sim and felt that I contributed greatly to the atmosphere. I also spent much time getting new players started and involved. After 3 or 4 months I had an altercation with a moderator, who was a Real Life friend of the sim owner. Because I refused to turn over control of on off gird wiki-web page I had built for the sim, to the moderator, I as banned from the sim.
This incident, as well as a some other experiences in SL, drove me to open a place where the owner’s would not treat the sim as their own personal play pen. Yes, owners paid the bills, but players made a sim, a ‘home’, and without some sort of ‘power sharing’ with your players, you could not run a successful RP sim. I didn’t open Botany right away. First Started a small private RP on a ¼ sim I rented. This RP, The Kitsune RPG, ran for a few months. It was a ‘closed’ RP meaning players were invited to join. It was a crew of ‘refuges’ for lack of a better term, on a sentient vessel, the Kitsune, who would visit new dimensions ever few days. The RP was based around set ‘event’ sessions with a more open ship board pick up RP in between. This ran for a few months before the pressure to get everyone together or ‘heard cats’ as I like to call it, got to me and it drifted apart some.
While running the Kitsune RP though, I met many new people and two of these people convinced me to go in on a full homestead, and set up an open sci-fi RP. Well that’s was my intent, but before we even opened, the first partner backed out, as they started to use it as their own ‘playpen’. I was the primary builder for Botany, and we opened in Late July or Early August 2009 (it was a soft opening as I was still building the sim).
From the beginning, Botany Bay was supposed to be an open, interact sim. The few rules we put into place were designed to be guidelines, a loose set of boundaries to keep us all on the same general sheet of paper, and let us move forward and create …. Together… a new fun, world to RP in. I purposely left large swaths of the ‘back story’ vague, to allow players, though their own bits and pieces of story, to weave together a new mosaic of stories, and flesh out the ‘universe’ together. I had seen this done numerous times online in other places. I’ve played online RPGs in text form over IMs and chat rooms since 1994. Never did we have stringent rules, or a ‘moderator’. We simply had imaginative people who played characters within mutually supportive limits to create whole fantasy worlds that would rival any you would read about in a book, or see in a movie. I knew it was possible; I just underestimated how difficult it would be given second life’s norms and mores, especially how they related to Role Playing.
(To get this out of the way now; I myself am an avid fan of ‘adult’ Role Play, but for me, the Role Play is first and the ‘adult’ second. SL has a healthy (perhaps not the right term) “adult” population, but it’s a BSDM and “Gor” fan base. This at times can be a detriment to Role Play that doesn’t’ fit that ‘niche’. )
As the months went on, Botany Bay would grow to a small, but steady core of Role Players. This didn’t happen overnight, nor without our pitfalls. We lost many ‘core’ players and I lost a sim partner, often for the same reasons: the separation of off sim / Out of Character BSDM relationships and On sim, In character issues. This was particularly true of the many ‘slavers’ who have come, and then left. The second issue that drove people off was that of ‘scope’. By scope I mean, the degree or level of event that individual players bring to the table. For instance, players organizing an ‘invasion and take over’ of the colony, rather than a raid. Being a Free Form RPG, a ‘game changing’ event such as a potential invasion should be discussed beforehand with the other ‘RP elders’ those players who have been around for a while and put in their time, before a single player takes off in that direction. In Botany Bay, were we have an Moderator team, well that’s something we’d want to bounce off them. Anyways, its important to note I think .
I’d Like to take a few minutes to talk about what I feel Botany Bay is.
1. Firstly, I feel it’s still a Free Form Role Playing game, or FFRPG. That meaning, that the players work together to drive the story forward. There isn’t’ on central person writing the ‘script’ that everyone else will follow.
2. I believe the moderator team.. currently Myself and Serus, work to try to guide the story forward, and try not to be too heavy handed in our efforts to keep a certain ‘flavor’ to the sim. Botany does not have a combat or RP meter.
3. I never liked them, I feel they are generally a poor substitute for Role playing, and lead to ‘button smashing.’ With SL’s inherent lag, the person with the faster connection always wins in a meter battle.
4. Botany Bay does not ‘pre approve’ characters; in many sims you have to submit your character to the mod team for approval. At botany I prefer to let the community standard weed out what is acceptable or not acceptable within the rather broad guidelines we set, still strangely enough I was told recently we have ‘too many rules’.
5. The ‘build’ of the sim; when I designed botany, I set out to create it as a ‘set’. I thought of places where people could go to RP a screen of one sort or another. I wanted to give places for people to tell their stories, not places you had to visit to get some Moderator driven job or event to take place. This led to a large layout with many different locations, to support a wide and varied Role play. Places such as the Landing pad, Hotel, the Mines, and the Beach; were all made to support story telling.
6. Roleplaying would tell the story, not animations or pose balls. There are very few things that ‘work’ in botany bay. Much of this is by design, the ‘work’ comes from the players imaginations, the prims are just props as far as I am concerned.
Ok, so if you’re still reading this…
Though we have a strong base of support with many daily visitors, something I am thankful for every day. Botany still hasn’t grown large enough to be a ‘stable’ RP. Our daily traffic hovers around 3k, dropping as low as 2k or as high as 4.5k on any given day. Many of you, like myself, have sat in the sim , empty and alone. This is something I want to change, something I feel needs to change for us to continue to have a fun, thriving, diverse RP experience. Also, I’ve come to notice that even if 3 or 4 people are on, they end up scatted around the sim by themselves. I’ve made the following observations that I think are the problem .
1. We’ve drifted too far left into the BSDM side of the RP.
2. We’re adult rated, non ‘adult’ Rpers can’t visit it just cuts down on the available RPer pool.
3. The sim layout is too large – locations are too far apart.
4. Factions never filled out, everyone is on their own .. SL RP seems very faction based.
5. We’re so ‘different’ in our approach, people don’t know what to do when they get to the sim.
6. We don’t hold ‘events’
Looking at what I see to be problems, I’m considering making the following changes:
1. Changing out rating from adult to mature. This will make for a few changes in the ‘sim rules’ but we seem to now rarely have issues in public. I’ve visited many sims that are similar to ours that have mature ratings and are much more ‘adult’ than Botany Bay.
2. The biggest change … I’m seriously thinking of doing a new build for Botany Bay. This would change the sim from the current large open island layout, to a new, station based one. I believe that this change, which would make the RP locations more closely located, and hopefully force people to interact more . If we did this, there would be a RP Event , that would likely destroy the current colony and have the ‘discovery’ of the new one. I have the outline in my head already, if this were to come to pass. The second benefit of this would be we could create several smaller ‘islands’ in the sim to represent ‘away ‘ locations. So people could run events on a ‘different world’. And still be on sim.
3. Moderator Created Factions: I’ve waited for player developed factions to mature, and they haven’t. So to help integrate new players, the Mod team would create a few ‘factions’ with some built in allies and foes to get things moving.
4. More Moderators / Associate Moderators. Many of you already fill this role, but I’d like to extend the OOC involvement for those of you willing to take on helping new visitors and players to the sim become familiar and more involved.
5. Events – Some sims, such as Hayno the super hero sim, conduct regular well attended events. While these events are not really FFRPG strong suits, they do help get people involved. Short ‘away’ missions, would be one way of doing this.
Ok, so these are my thoughts, I’ll be putting up a poll on these items. Please talk to your fellow players in world and have them jump on here to put their opinion in. I’ll be setting up an OOC meeting for players when I get back, sometime in the weekend of Aug 14-15 to get more feedback before I make any decisions. As always, thank you for taking the time to read this, and to be part of our gaming community.
