Likely changes in RP landscape with Free to Play

We've never actually complained about the opportunity the destruction of Galaxy City represents.

What we complained about was destroying our venue for our social RP, with no replacement offered beyond the "Oh, but you can go to the Ghost of Galaxy zone, if you're level 14." Which kind of completely slaps us in the face and misses the point in one swoop.

But, I've given up complaining about it, they won't do squat about it to help the RPers they're displacing (by actually listening to them), so we'll move and adjust.

Woe betide them they do it a second time however.

To play Devil's Advocate, in this case the changes to Galaxy affect one set of RPers on one server. With everything else they are doing, it can't be efficient for the Devs to actively look at making some sort of replacement. Especially as GG is basically (to an outside view) just a random spot on a zone map. Of course it sucks to lose a place with such a weight of history. But I don't think it can really be seen as an affront to RPers in general.

FFM's viewpoint is historically accurate, and I feel is becoming worse again, but there was a time where they seemed to think Roleplayers were worth having. Frankly, I think applying this to the demise of GG is over-the-top. As Kiken says, GG is a microscopic component the game environment and despite being possibly the most vocal element of RP on the forums, really not worth considering in the grand scheme of things.

Equally, to support FFMs view: bases and the arenas. When both of these were proposed, roleplayers looked upon them with a degree of glee, but it rapidly became aparent that if there was any decision to be made which would make it useful for roleplayers, Cryptic were going to make darn sure they went the other way.

One good example: even the PvPers wanted selectable maps for arenas, but for RPers the ability to spawn an instanced map wih PvP turned on became next to useless when you had no control over what you ended up in. Cryptic could have made it switchable, because that was exactly what eventually happened (it wasn't technology-based, it was a design choice), but instead they chose the option which gave less advantage to RPers, less choice to everyone, and no actual benefit to PvPers because Stateman wanted to enforce his view of fairness on everyone.


Then they gave us AE, which is awesome. However, recently they seem to have been backsliding.

^ Regarding the arena, they also took the extremely puzzling decision to make it impossible to use emote text...

Yeah, I cannot for the life of my understand why emote text was disabled. It just...why? *mindboggle*

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I have no current plans to stop paying my subscription or to move off Virtue. It's the only server I play on and it's where my friends are. Things change, but that's where I stand at the moment.

Actually, I don't count providing a single animation that's been in the NPC selection for ages as a toggle power for PCs as counterbalancing every time they've done something that is either detrimental or simply not helpful to RP.

Whilst I deeply appreciate [Walk], it is not the remedy to every issue, and shouldn't be waved in our faces as "Why are you complaining, you have this".

I'm sorry, but please show me how we're being ignored. The way I see it, all evidence points to the contrary.

The costume creation itself is a huge boon to roleplayers. The variety of possible emotes is likewise. The inclusion of any additional costume pieces and emotes, which are developed and released to us pretty regularly, are things that are mostly valuable to roleplayers.

Not only that, there is the fact that all of our gear has absolutely no cosmetic effect. All the high end IOs you want will not impact your character's appearance. You do not have to sacrifice concept for functionality as you do in so many other games. There really is no customization in a game where there is a clear top end gear and everybody wears it.

Issue 16 was power customization, or have we forgot entirely about that? This was an enormous undertaking by the development staff which gave the largest payoff to roleplayers.

Again I ask, how are we being ignored?

Emotes, which mostly don't scale properly unless you accept default sizes. Costume parts which clip horribly. Booster packs with, again, costume parts which clip horribly (and we pay EXTRA for these), as well as usually either being gating to specific genders, or just being plain incomplete. Power customization was nice, but again, it's incomplete.

Seeing a trend here? Devs DO give us stuff from time to time; but it's rarely finished, and it's usually broken and hardly every gets fixed, even if its stuff we've paid extra for.

But we're getting wildly off topic now. Will RP change with Freedom? Not a lot. We'll get a few more a-holes bothering us, and those of us that are losing our long established RP location will have to move elsewhere; but otherwise, not a lot will change.

I think I'll butt in here to point out something that Dechs appears to be missing.

That all your examples wern't done for RPs, but have the handy side effect of helping them.

The new aura's costume parts and emotes gated behind trials for example, trials some of us will not do. Were they breadcrumbs to RPers they wouldn't be gated so.

Booster packs sell well beyond RPers too, because pretty much everyone who plays enjoys tweaking costumes and I'd hazard that there were more bosoter packs sold then there are RPers in the servers.

While on the same token, steps are apparently taken that have no logical sense other then to annoy RPers (Like no emtoes and choosable maps for Arena fights, destroying one nice low level gathering spot and leaving the other as raid central [Raiders being a well known group of people who antagonise RPers just for giggles]).

These are the points being brought up here, who'd have thunk that an MMORPG would take design choices to make RP more difficult.

RPers get ignored/not-ignored just about as much as any other subset of players.

Saying anything and everything that can be done that would be counter to RPers is... Haha, c'mon, it's not even necessary to address such a hyperbolic statement.

Don't get me wrong... There are a lot of things I'd like to see different.
And I've voiced my strong displeasure about the new emotes, chest emblems and auras being locked behind Empyrean and Astral merits.

And, honestly, what bugs me about the Galaxy City thing is that they're removing the zone altogether. I thought there'd be a wrecked Galaxy City to visit, whenever we wanted, whatever level we want.
I knew it'd be a tutorial zone... but... after the tutorial... and for all of us who've been in the existing game world this long... There should be a way for us to go and see the damage.
Somewhere we can have our characters go and fit this new reality into their heads. Into their actions.

I don't have a problem with them blowing up a zone. In fact, I think it is fantastic.
I'm just disappointed that it is being done in a way that we don't even have a chance to include it in our in-game sessions.

Wouldn't you want to go there? Visit? See it? Help clean up? Fight? SOMETHING?!

I hope there's, at least, some sort of mission map (for use without exemplar-ing) of the wrecked Galaxy City.

/end ramble