Enforcing OOC Roleplay Standards IC
Chain vat me till I RP the way you like?

So in that spirit, I'd like to express my frustration about a phenomena that is sapping all of my excitement and fun from the game and making me want to play a lot less. The policing of player's roleplay through heavy-handed IC means.

Let me explain a little more what I mean, while obviously being vague about IC matters. I've been noticing what feels like a rising tide of what appears to be people facing IC consequences for a player's OOC opinion about the health of the game, usually with an accompanying statement along the lines of "you are what's wrong with Withmore." Nothing personal done to the offending player. In fact usually no leading up interpersonal roleplay at all, just some occasional exchanged pubSIC messages. And then, shroud up, stealth murder with minimal roleplay, relay a cryptic message that feels like it accuses the murdered person of roleplaying in some way that is against the spirit of the game.

Vague accusations and criticisms continue, the depressing setting of the game feels even more depressing when you get day after day of negative feedback IC that feels like it's predicated upon how you choose to roleplay and not your IC actions, and then bleed happens and you question whether or not you're actually wanted in the game. Whether you wouldn't be better off just quitting.

I'm not going to be a drama queen and pretend I don't know a lot of people who appreciate my roleplay and what I contribute to the game. But I still carry that frustration from what I perceive as bleed. Of players who haven't really seen much of my roleplay making assumptions about the themeliness of the choices I make.

And conversely, hey, I don't know. The staff may actually consider my roleplay bad. But I guess if it were bad or did need adjustment, I'd rather get the OOC nod from someone than have someone take it IC and make up some poorly rationalized justifications that sound more like an ill-informed discussion of mechanical game balance than a reaction to my IC actions, and then just chain-vat me until I am roleplaying a character they want me to roleplay.

In any case I thought I might bring it up to the group. Am I alone in thinking that this is prevalent in current roleplay? Are people trying to enforce people's roleplay through IC actions for gameplay balance reasons, and is there a better way to achieve this?

1. Theme overall across the game.

2. Learning to not enforce your OOC views on the game at all times, but utilizing those when it's appropriate in reasons your character would have to be upset with someone (an example being while some stuff annoys me as a player, and I know I annoy others, I generally don't push that ICly unless my character has a reason - there's 92 million people doing dumb shit, afterall).

3. Being flexible, no-selling, short-selling, learning to take losses and change when needed, learning to ease up when you get your win (all those are separated but combined for this suggested combined in-depth conversation).

Not to be too on the nose but I believe some of what I've personally experienced is people perceiving non-faction cliques that aren't really cliques and moving aggressively to break them up, when in reality the relationships inside of them are far more varied and complex than they assume.

In other words people seeing a small social key of a half dozen people in a city of 9X million and assuming it is some conspiracy to overthrow the corporate council or something similar.

Crashdown, I feel like you touched on a good point here in saying that there's so many people doing dumb shit, how would some of this rise to the surface and annoy someone enough to commit murder over it when it isn't directly impacting certain people? It just feels incongruous and like small-worlding at times that there should be this hyper-focus on every minor misdeed of characters that don't even directly interact with you day to day.

I would almost always express a personal gameplay and theme preference for player frictions rising to the point of open conflict rather than having circles of characters who roleplay internally are otherwise non-interactive with one another.

In the past some big conflicts were driven by someone just choosing to flip a switch and stir the pot to see what would boil over, it doesn't always have to make sense.

There is an idiom in machine intelligence research that goes something like: An artificial general intelligence does not hate you nor does it love you, but you are made of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen, which it can use for something else.

It may be a bit dramatic, but I find it pretty useful to view Sindome in these terms. Players are a resource to the game at large in terms of populating the game world and driving the engine of the game economy and providing the instruments of storytelling, and players can leverage their value as resources to engage with the game in the ways they want, but if given an opportunity Sindome will disassemble a player into their component elements and reassemble them into a story more useful to itself.

Other characters are gonna judge yours based on what they can immediately see. Even if a glimpse is offered of what a PC is like behind closed doors it's still their public image that's going to define that PC to everybody else.

All character motivations are player motivations on some level pretty much by definition.

Players don't have to be able to justify their character decisions to anyone except in cases where their roles or plots require that staff scrutiny, I don't think it makes sense to frame it as players doing something that is disallowed or discouraged when it isn't.

There are entire characters, famous ones, whose whole purpose was to push OOC changes or create some specific thematic archetype that was needed OOC. I agree that it's best narrative practice to do things as much as possible as a character might do them, but I don't think players are ever in a good position to tell one another which roleplaying choices are valid for someone's else's characters or not.