Newbie Brutality

I just wanted to kind of post some of my thoughts concerning the game and its environment after having been kicking around about a week or so. I have to admit, for a game that has SO MANY prompts about role play, and doing one's part to keep new players around, I don't think I've had a harder time finding literally ANYONE willing to interact with me beyond a couple of sentences worth of answering a direct question in all my years of slagging through the MUD.

The game has no representation of any class of character except brand new baka-shit bags, so there is no ladder to climb really - and in a situation where EVERYONE is a crap IMMY who had to carve life out in your Mix - there's a lot of up-noseing that happens toward anyone who already isn't in a person's Clique.

Short version - This game is not only a brutal by theme, as it should be, but brutal to the newbie and it doesn't surprise me that your activity numbers are relatively low. I came here from CS because there is no RP to be had on CS pretty much at all. So far, there hasn't been any RP to be had here either, and their code is better than yours.

While I know that short-lived opinions in the community such as mine are often glossed over or dog-piled with insult and naysaying ... I hope that the poor experience, and that 0/10 would play again review offers a little food for thought for those in position to make some changes.

I was in your position when I first started. My opinions closely mirrored your own.

My experience was that the "game" is first and foremost figuring out how to survive. Once you do that, and in the process of figuring out how to do that, you will connect with other characters who will RP with you.

You, and all new players, have an uphill battle. There are literally countless people who login here every week, then give up not long after. It happens so frequently, that very few long term players want to make the effort to get to know someone new.

In the year I've been here, I've lost track of the number of new players I tried to help out, only to have them vanish when they decided that this game was "too hard".

I can assure you that if you stick around, you will find an extremely deep and complex game. But it is a game that you get out of what you put into it.

First you have to figure out how to survive. And figure out SOME of the systems work.

Once you've been around for a month or two and established yourself as someone who is sticking around, you will find that people are willing to invest some time in you.

Or put another way, it's not you, it's us.

But that being said, we aren't changing. This game isn't for everyone. Most people self select out of it.

Never underestimate the power of getting an immy on your side.

I am a constant advocate for the new player experience but the ball is super in your court at the start. That said you don't have to be amazing out the gate, just stick around, play a nobody just trying to make their way in a hostile world, and eventually things will start coming together.

Being a strong roleplayer will be a dramatic shortcut, but even modest roleplayers can lean on just having a decent amount of experience or know-how to get by and make a name for themselves.

Keep in mind also that the majority of players are on the more passive side, if you initiate and generate RP rather than looking for someone to give it to you, people will flock to you.

I liken it to a small towner coming to New York. Everyone ICly has seen small towners burn out and leave, and as the "newcomer" it's up to the player to find a reason to make others notice you and hook you in. Build a rep, that kind of thing. I like to stress that there's a huge divide between IC and OOC attitudes from players. That guy that seems to be ignoring you in the bar is actually waiting for you to give him a reason to interact with you: whether that's by asking him for advice, or by telling him he's a bitch. We all want you here OOCly, but from an IC perspective, the three-year murder machine who chews raw steel and shits out bullets has a lot on their mind. Give them a reason to look at you, whether it's good or bad.

The times I felt like I was being most ignored sometimes coincided with when I was struggling with syntax and asked on local OOC. The outpouring of support locally on OOC was overwhelming proof that people cared OOCly but needed me to step up ICly.

Like someone else said, joining a gang/faction is a great way to get into it with people. Also, doing the dumbest and most reckless thing can actually be a great way to hook in with new people. When players see you willing to do dumb shit, they'll rope you in for more adventures. Plan for your current character to perm out. Rob someone you know will whip your ass, they may see that willingness to risk death as a sign that you're ready to get into it. Just yesterday I olive-branched someone who really stepped in it and they're getting onto a cool path I wish someone had extended to me when I started.

Also, finally, the PvP hangs over every interaction, especially in Red. A lot of the people blowing by you in the streets are in real danger all the time. Especially in Red. It can be hard for them to stop and chat in a relaxed way when they're under such pressure. It can help to try to network with other immies because you have the same gripes and goals. If you desire longer more dialogue heavy scenes, find a few immies in your general play time and buy them a drink, or go to a hotel and vent your IC frustrations. It could be the start of a long IC relationship that will blossom when you're old and gray.

Welcome in, and I hope you find what you're looking for : )

1. No @nakeds or subpar amount of detail for them.

2. Bad spelling/grammar.

3. Nothing for me to want to interact with. There’s millions in the Dome, if you’re not doing anything beyond breathing and there’s no conversation-starters about you - you’re not giving me anything to interact with.

This is not immy exclusive. There are long time characters that still spurn the same apathetic reaction for those reasons.

Reasons I would be brutal towards an immy:

1. Lack of respect / bad mouthing me or my faction.

That’s it. Immy’s are expected to be dumb or confused and often that’s a way for others to start interacting with them, but they aren’t exempt from any of those OOC/IC criteria.

I am very cool with in-game consequences but being punished for another player not playing the game properly really sucks

and, yeah, "lol its cyberpunk tho" is a very shitty excuse for meta

(Edited by Slither at 11:44 am on 7/30/2020)

Believe me, someone meta-ing your disguise is nothing compared to some of the stuff players can do to you, and I say that because you mentioned 2 weeks worth of play time. With no offence intended at all, that is not even a drop in the bucket in terms of a character's growth or identity. Even a six month old character can change archetype/environment/personality fairly easily.

It sucks that someone was shitty to you, but I do agree with the staff's decision not to police disguises and simply buff them so you have more tools to be undetectable that you may or may not be aware of yet. I cannot begin to imagine how annoying and petty it must've been to mediate two people debate whether or not they should've been detected.

Stick around. RP with people IC about it, see what you can get out of it. You'll usually find things are not nearly as black and white as they seem, there are always options.

Unless it was, like, identifying your typing style through prose syntax, common misspellings, common use of certain uncommon words, and such things that are difficult to change about the person behind the screen. That requires some serious investment of time and energy.

I tend to be more critical of the occasionally very punishing nature of the game than most, but as a new player almost all of the hurdles will involve learning mechanics, both coded and social, and how to leverage them and roleplay to tell the story you want.

I would say I felt mechanically comfortable with Sindome after about a month of serious play, and felt like I had learned how to achieve the things I wanted after about a year.

I promise you that everyone had early struggles. Strong roleplayers can write their own tickets in many ways, so if you have a lot of experience I encourage you to stick with it, but there is definitely a lot to learn.

I don't think they were hoping for a magical retcon. And I think it's fair to say since staff (apparently) backed them up in their grievance that the situation was blatant and silly enough that their frustration is more than warranted.

As Baguette mentioned, these meta situations happens a LOT and it extends well beyond disguise/appearance. I also think the decision staff made about meta around disguise was a poor one -- the reasoning around it wasn't even 'this is best for the game', it was just 'we don't have time for this'. That's absolutely fair in a pragmatic sense, but it's just a recipe for....to put it nicely, a whole lot of nonsense.

'What is the punishment...' the answer by now to that seems clear, I'm not sure what the confusion is.

Considering how seriously metagaming is supposedly taken, their frustration is probably that they suffered disproportionately compared to the player(s) that metagamed against them, which it's hard for us on the outside to judge, though I'm inclined to empathize.

Whether it's a two-week character or a ten-year one, a lot of RP and work can go into things, and when someone lazily ruins it via meta and your efforts are nullified and there's not much sense of justice, cynically piling on the victim feels like an odd move.

There are absolutely people in the game that take advantage of the fact that meta can be sometimes hard to prove and easy to get away with, particularly by more experienced player who know how to be at least slightly subtle about it, and overworked staff who likely have a million things they'd rather work on than potential-meta-complaint-number-seventy-three.

I understand Sindome does not do retcons but the fact that the people who ruined so much of the effort I put in because they were playing to win, small-worlding and being meta get a slap on the wrist and the GM policy here is that "sorry we tried to police this in the past and it didn't work" in a self-proclaimed RPI game is just crazy to me!!

So much about an RPI is that breaches of meta are taken very seriously in order to preserve the suspension of disbelief involved in the world. What happened tells me that this game isn't really an RPI experience, it's a "meta as much as you can get away with it before the GMs notice" game.

This all really sucks because I was enjoying playing with the people here heaps until this happened. There's some really awesome and fun characters hanging around but I can't stomach having to deal with this again and the GMs just shrugging and saying they can't do anything about it when they could be a lot harder on the people breaking meta, especially with all the rules you have about OOC stuff.