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- Ameliorative 1h
- Napoleon 5h
- Bruhlicious 4h Deine Mutter stinkt nach Erbrochenem und Bier.
- AdamBlue9000 3s Rolling 526d6 damage against both of us.
a Mench 8h Doing a bit of everything.
- notloose 3h
And 13 more hiding and/or disguised

Genre Stagnation
like tears in the rain

Thing I want to do in a cyberpunk setting:

Open a public relations firm

Start a communist rebellion

Pretend to build a socialist utopia

Do DNA tests of random people to make sure they aren't alien infiltrators

Undermine said anti-alien efforts by selling gene mods because capitalism

Watch a Michael Bay movie

Lead an attack on a UFO crash site

Help a trillionaire build an orbital death ray

Overengineer a spaceship with the help of 20 other players

Join the secretive military organization known only as P.A.T.R.I.O.T. and use all of that advanced training and technology to punch robots in the face

Things i can actually do in a cyberpunk setting:

Mug people on the streets

Incrementally upgrade my stats

Pretend to fight capitalism by embracing capitalist values

Watch the rain fall and wonder why writers keep using the same tired tropes over and over

The genre's oldest works featured whimsical stuff such as checkers, chess, thermonuclear warfare, friend computers, feudal japanese warriors, murderbots that pretend to be human and an internet that fries your brain if you misbehave.

The world we live in includes frightening things such as fascist disinformation, resurgent communists, citizen scores, meme stocks, and a real-life james bond villain who calls himself Elon Musk. These things are free real estate for writers and yet all we ever get is grey drab melodramas that flow like tears in the rain

Pretty sure almost all those things you want to do have happened in some capacity at least once in the history of Sindome. Some of them recent and player-led, even.

It's not something anyone should expect to do overnight. But with careful planning, you can set any one of them as a goal and try to achieve it. Start small, build to bigger goals. We can't all have the spotlight all the time. Sometimes you'll just be henchman #3 that helped assemble the parts for the death laser.

And yet I can already tell this will be a sluggish experience. I could spend a long amount of time to build up to one of these things in a city where all the fun things to do are hidden away. Or I could look elsewhere for a medium-roleplay approach that doesn't take entire days to to set up a character

This isn't a sindome problem specifically. This is a problem with cyberpunk in general. Brigador is the only recent work of the genre that is halfway decent. The rest is just undefined bland melodrama for an audience four decades past

Want to be a hacker? No sorry you have to find out "ingame" despite having spent all those skill points with the hope of being able to do cool things. Want to be a doctor? The game doesn't care that your doctor might have a college degree and thus literally knows more then anyone else about the topic you still don't get any information on how to use your medicine skill. You have no opportunity to bring starting tools into the city to learn the game with or even worse actually start out with a job so you can learn by doing. The end result is a game that actively gets in the way of having fun.

Sindome has the same problems as the genre in general because of how it copies off of only the most cliche of cyber tropes. It embraces the core cyberpunk message of rebellion by writing about what every other cyberpunk author writes about. It heavily restricts the player in the name of "survival" and "grittyness" without asking if this is something that people actually want to play

I am legit curious to know the statistics for how often this game retains new players. The fancy list of features is great and all but none of that matters if people can't get started

sounds like you're just mad that you can't powergame
You can do things in all skills. Some require more RP than others, of course, such as your idea of making a spaceship with 20 other people...but they all have happened. Some of them by people fairly fresh out of the gate.

While many people play to tropes, many also do not play to tropes. Just because you are seeing one side of the game now doesn't mean that pursuing other sides won't lead to you seeing other options when it comes to those things.

A lot of cool things are happening behind the scenes that you might not particularly know about unless you ask about it IC. Throw some of these ideas around at a bar, and you might find some characters who are interested in helping you make it happen.
Off the top of my head, I have seen completely careerist public relations employees, socialist rebellion, attempts at creating the perfect commune, blood testing and accusations of the data being sold, pro-gene-mod campaigns, aeros blowing up in fiery crashes, mad chases to get the rare space tech that crashed in the Badlands, the destruction of an orbital station, space pilots who hire on crew, and open conflict between heavy chrome users and those who fight them.

So, everything you listed, in some form or another. Complaining about how you "can't do these things" on the forums - when so many of them have actually happened in recent memory - isn't how you achieve these goals. If you really want to see these dreams come to fruition for your character, talk about them to other players, make IC-GOAL notes about them, and pursue them relentlessly. Good luck!

Make a big loud character who pushes your unique themes and goals. If you're a new player, most of what you've seen is just the "backdrop". Not every room can be exploding with fascinating groundbreaking edgepushing tropekilling hyper-awesomeness.

A lot of people are rushing around trying to do a lot of what you're saying. More cool shit is getting developed all the time. Speak up, be loud, take some risks and get involved!

Man, I've seen some mad shit in this game.
I have seen and done some insane shit playing Sindome. It is not a game where you come into it, say you want something, and it happens. You have to make it happen. The game doesn't carry you to victory. These are real people you're dealing with, its not a single player experience. Work around that aspect.
On my first character, within my first few months of starting the game, I was doing something close to one of the things on your list. It involved a lot of people and could have gone further if I chose to pursue it. I could have done it a lot sooner, too.

I didn't have any knowledge of the game, notable character skills, guidance from staff, or more IC resources than is normally available to a newer character.

It's about getting other characters to believe in your thing.

If you can convince many characters to buy into your communist utopia, or your gene-mod campaign, or your desire to destroy faction X, etc., then you have either a good chance of making it happen (with work), or at least memorable RP ahead. It's all about that buy-in. Staff will notice all the interest and likely support you, or nudge developments in an unexpected direction. And that can be fun, too.

You don't have to be a "leader" character to do this, either. Your character can even actively eschew leadership, and still create this kind of movement, simply by being compelling enough in how you present them and what they stand for. That's all roleplaying. You've got to sell it.

It seems like you feel entitled to do all these things because you spend UE on character gen (for reference, chargen UE is like, 5% of your total UE you can get. Probably less). If you -could- be the best doctor in the city straight out the gates because your backstory said so, then... What would happen when a pandemic happens and you have no idea what to do mechanics wise, where to go, etc? Or more importantly, what would happen to doctors who've been around longer than you, contributed more than you and have more UE than you? How would that work? And this is coming from someone who thinks people should get considerably more UE at chargen.

Your problems have nothing to do with the genre (except the alien stuff, that's more classic sci-fi than cyberpunk) it's that you want to play the game and immediately do exactly what you envision for that character without any work, RP, or time. Like people have said, almost everything you mentioned has happened and/or can happen. Even out of the gate. There are even, right now, characters that have been around for only a few weeks doing cool shit. Being an immy affords you a lot of leeway and the immies that take advantage of that often get involved in really interesting stuff.

If you could kill corp CEO x or destroy gang y just like that, what would be the point? Would anyone care? If you want to tell stories without any rules or pacing, go ahead, plenty of avenues to have freeform RP out there. But the draw of Sindome is that everything has weight, risks, and real reactions. It's a world that doesn't bend for you, a game you have to survive in and develop your character with RP and others. You have to live in it, not just create fake backdrops full of explosions and villains for the players to look cool in for fifteen minutes. Those big moments will come, but if they happened all the time, for everyone, they would mean nothing.

I thought cyberpunk was supposed to be about cool cyberenhanced characters doing cool stuff? From browsing the forums I can tell that am not the first to complain. Ofcourse this begs the question of what qualifies as "cool stuff" without being massively overpowered. I don't have a full answer but it probably involves being able to actually do things rather then just standing on the streets with no directions whatsoever

"If you -could- be the best doctor in the city straight out the gates because your backstory said so"

Cuban doctors literally are world class. Okay, if I can't have a cuban doctor then how about you guys give me a sample character that better fits whatever setting you have in mind

Look I would tolerate *all* of this if only you had a enjoyable setting that I can immerse myself in. Cyberpunk used to be this sharp biting criticism of 80's yuppie culture but now it is just this bland thing that makes me want to search elsewhere

You start from the bottom and so does everyone else. If you aren't excited by the prospect of arriving alone and unconnected, asking around and making contacts, building your rep and flash, pursuing your goals a step at a time, and enjoying the hard-fought path it takes to get there, then Sindome is probably not the game for you.

That's okay, it isn't for everyone. It's about your character's journey as much as their destination, and that journey can be pretty tough at the beginning. If you decide you'll stick with it, good luck and have fun!

It would be disappointing to me if someone could come in and immediately topple whole megacorporations or powerful NPCs without serious time and effort put in. This game has been around for more than 20 years. It's bigger than us. It may have been easier in the past to be big more immediately when the game was smaller. You can become someone that does big things if it contributes to RP beyond yourself. But not without putting the effort in first to beef up your character and clout. That's the whole point of the game. All of us want to play memorable characters. Some take the fast and furious approach and do well. Others, like me, take a slow burn approach, pushing hard longterm to make it toward a goal. After 2 years, that goal is still very far away for me. That gets frustrating, but it's also exciting. Ive been able to rp a lot with others along the way and create big and small stories. Ive helped revamp systems within a corp which others will never hear or care about. I think that's cool. Part of the game that is uniquely stamped by me. If you're looking for immediate gratification, a D&D campaign might be more suited? This community is pretty big. Respecting the legacy of writing and lore is important.
So... the OP seems to be on a rant and it's possible that the game/genre is not for them. That's okay, there are lots of MUDs out there if this is not the one for you.

However, there is also a kernel of truth in what is being said. I love the staff, they are wonderful and work incredibly hard to give this experience, but with a larger player base, there are less GMs to players and less time to devote to some of the cool things. At least on a per capita basis.

Yes, I totally agree that if you work hard, RP; interesting things happen. However, there are a lot of things you just can not do without GM time and effort, and that is in limited supply. They mention Decking, so I understand where some of this frustration could be coming from. There are warnings on the profession page and even with Grid 3.0, they are as true today as they were when that was written. It's changing, but it's slow.

There are also a lot of oddities in the theme. We are often less Hardwired and more Mad Max, less Altered Carbon and more Survivor. So I can see where new players might be put off by this. But the Theme is Sindome... which is it's own Genre really with plenty of space to explore new themes. Stick around a couple years and you will see the culture change slowly over time.

On the other hand, as people have pointed out, cool things really do happen. The question is... how do we make more cool things happen for people? I've been an advocate in shortening the curve to get good at a thing for a long time. It's a PvP game and disposable characters makes folks less risk adverse. No character, no matter how old, should feel safe when engaging in combat.

In the end, while I see the OP as a rant, there are aspects of me that understand where the rant is coming from. We've all had those frustrations at times. However, OP, for those of us that have been here years, there is more than enough payoff to keep logging in day after day.

There's a help file about this.
I started around the same time as another new player who tried to raise a fuss on the forums with much the same vibe that you are I think. Both of you are either looking for something Sindome is not (something like a single-player experience, focused around you?), or you are just looking for a lot of flash in a very short amount of time.

Sindome, to me, is more of a "living world" of Cyberpunk than a "videogame" kind of experience. Reinforcing this, the time is 1:1. Each day IRL is one day in Sindome. If you lived in a Cyberpunk world - or any other world for that matter - you probably shouldn't expect to just appear and take stuff over on your first day into a foreign city in which you know no one and own nothing.

In Sindome, you're not stepping into your own Cyberpunk comic book where you can blow stuff up, chop up chromed-out cyborgs and topple capitalist regimes on day one. You're playing a character, living in their shoes day by day, and as a player, hopefully enjoying that journey long before you ever get to reach that destination. It takes more smarts, patience, interpersonal skills, and - very often - a grasp of subtlety than stat boosts in your medical skill.

My experience has been different than most, but you should know: around the time the guy who started when I did was broadcasting this kind of dissatisfaction with the game, mine was literally becoming famous, phone ringing off the hook at all hours, and was known almost dome-wide within the first week of their appearance in Withmore. And their background is that they were a nobody loser with no marketable skills. Rest assured, I've experienced it: life can move VERY fast in Sindome.

But it's up to you to make that happen.

Man, I've seen even more wild shit in this game.