So here's the deal. When I played last, you made a point of interacting with PCs, because the game wasn't any fun otherwise. You didn't entirely ignore the ambient population, but it wasn't something that was constantly brought up, almost like a defense mechanism either. Now I'm noticing there's a bigger push to... ignore PCs, and let people decide if they want to do something that will get everyone's attention. At the same time, there's explicit encouragement to interact with PCs in the rules, and I've been instantly picked out of a crowd a number of times. I'm starting to get whiplash trying to balance this out, and I feel like I'm becoming more reluctant to engage other PCs, given the occasional IC comments of "Oh, you just picked me, out of all these people here, to ask that, huh?" or the like...
I'm going to be honest, my immediate reaction to this is that it's being used as a metaphorical club to discourage uninteresting parties or a particular type of RP they don't want to happen (i.e. getting mugged, basic immy stuff they've gone through a hundred times, interrupting their current agenda, etc).
Hoodies are another matter (note: not shrouds... hoodies, which show other clothing). Looking over the forums I see a lot of push to start overlooking people with disguises, to the point that Slither went through the trouble of coding up generated shrouded and hooded NPCs, and that's fine. But surely there are times when it's perfectly acceptable to say "Hey. That guy in the red hoodie wearing all that protek gear, and holding the uzi looks EXACTLY like the guy I saw hanging around here earlier before the place got shot up! Let's get him!" Is that not perfectly acceptable? If they're making no effort to hide other identifying features, then surely I can say "that might be", right?
Legitimately, am I thinking about this wrong?