Endless Nights, Lessons Learned - Part 2

I always have to learn things the hard way.

Endless Nights is/was a beautiful build - a great idea - and was staffed with good folks. It had a chance at first.

Then the idiocy started.

I was approached by an old friend of mine from Dark City (the original - not Equator, or Obsidian City, where lag rules supreme, but the Dark City sim) about renting/buying a sim and setting it up for roleplay. He was all enthused about it, and told me he could come up with the initial money. Well, that fell through, so we shelved the idea.

Then he and another person approached me about trying again. At the same time, I was talking to another friend with an empty sim who wasn't going to be using it for awhile...and Noelyci Ingmann, another friend, was wanting to design a low-lag, low-prim sim using some of his incredible builds - everything just came together for the first time. One of the idea people was to run the sim, and the other was to help out as time permitted, and to help cover tier. I made it clear up front that my time this fall was going to be very very limited; my real life has been crazy, and will stay that way for awhile. I just don't have the time to spend in SL right now, and I tried to be very clear about that.

The build took about six weeks, and was truly amazing. I think it's one of the coolest RP sims I've ever been on. There was almost NO lag, too! The framerate on it was incredible, I usually stayed around 60fps. To give some idea, I averaged around 15fps in Obsidian City, and still do.

When we opened, we had an amazing amount of people stop by. Some tried to RP - and it just didn't work. Why? The majority of the people that seemed to want to be in Endless Nights wanted to stand around and shoot gestures, or just do combat with no roleplay - in short, there was almost NO real roleplay. The weekly tournaments were a good idea, but so poorly run that many of the people who participated only did so for a week. Staff just can't leave people standing around twiddling their thumbs for fifteen or thirty minutes while you figure out what to do. So the tournaments died a slow and painful death. The silliness Ricard introduced with his juvenile antics really just highlighted the real problem in the sim.

And to top that off, there was, after a couple of weeks, only one sim-wide roleplay storyline implemented, and that happened almost by accident. Why was that? To be honest, I'm still not sure. We had a couple of staff meetings where people were practically threatened to stay in the sim, and then nothing happened. It was disheartening.

Most of the staff were old friends of mine, and several of them told me essentially the same thing. The level of RP established from the beginning of Endless Nights was just silly - it was the same ol' thing we see in other laggy RP sims. Everyone is the ultimate - the ultimate vampire, the ultimate lycan, the ultimate demon, the ultimate bitch - and egos reign supreme. It seems the most popular thing to do in RP sims in SL is to find someone to do, or to collar. Just watching the parade of profile wars was incredible. It's still happening - apparently that's the drama du jour, and not having an SL partner makes you a loser. Must all RP be sexual? I don't think it has to be - there has to be more imagination than *that* in SL.

The art of RP is a fragile thing. You know something is sadly wrong when you are in a nice RP, change into a dragon, get people involved - and someone says, OOCly, "I won't RP with Neit - she doesn't like us vampires."

Excuse me - but who DOES like vampires, other than other vampires? Isn't the idea of RP to play a role? Yet it seems that a number of people in Endless Nights could not distinguish roleplay from personal interaction - and drama was born. Drama after drama after drama...just like the other RP sims I'd tried to play in recently. It was just OC silliness all over again.

Then it hit me. You cannot have an RP sim if you just bring in the same people, who bring the same habits and gestures and drama, no matter what the build or who the staff is. The mindset of this clique that moves from sim to sim - usually after being banned or at least cast out - isn't going to change. And worst of all, they run out the real RPers.

If I had the time or energy, I really think I could have made the sim work. We certainly got the traffic initially. There is a need for a sim like Endless Nights in SL, if the right people get together and make it work. I look back and wonder if I could have changed things if I'd been more active at first in the sim management - but it really doesn't matter now. I've learned my lesson.

It was worth the money and the time and effort. I learned a lot about people, and about myself. I won't make this mistake again. (I'll make other, bigger, more dramatic, mistakes instead.) I'll leave RP sim running up to people who can be here a lot more than me, and can stomach the drama and egos that seem to never go away.

I can't say I wasn't warned - Ethan tried to tell me, long ago, what this turns into, but I didn't listen. He gets to chuckle, he's earned his scars. Maybe he's right, and the only good RP in SL really is in Gor. It's a shame I'll never find out.

Thanks to everyone - sincerely - for the effort you put into Endless Nights. I made some good friends, and got to play with some old ones. We had some great times. Now it's time for Endless Nights to join City of Dreams, and Dark City, up in that great sim burial ground in the sky.

I always have to learn things the hard way. :)