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. :)
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If I may, I would like to expand on role play, more so from my perspective as opposed to fully within SL.
I served five years in play by e-mail sims out of Bravo Fleet. In that time, I had a total of five character’s I RP’ed and one non-player character (not a main crew member, and for occasional use). Three of the characters I RP’ed lasted about a total of six months each at most. It was either a case where I didn't quite fit in to with crew (starship or starbase) or the character himself didn’t flesh out the way I wanted and was going to be more of a detriment than an addition. My first and main character served for a total of five years aboard the same ship. I promoted him up from Lieutenant JG to Commander, moving from Operations to ship’s Executive Officer. The second primary moved from Lieutenant up to Lieutenant Commander, and made the same jump from departments between both a starbase and two starships.
With each on of those characters I found that it took me a good 6 months to fully develop who I felt they were. Bravo Fleet has in its rules the emphasis on try to stay away for the “super hero” and “all powerful” players/characters who can solve every technological issue or take on a Klingon war fleet with only an old Miranda class starship. That’s not to say that you don’t get new or existing crew members who have that line of thought. You just have to talk to them and try and show them how they affect the ability of others to delve into and participate in a mission. Why leave orbit when your engineer just said he/she figured out a way to attain warp ten and thus save the universe in the process?
Because of this, I created and still create (both in SL and outside) flawed characters. It makes them human, makes them vulnerable and hopefully better to interact with. For example, my main BF character had a history. He served once with Starfleet in the past, doing things he accepted as orders, but took the first chance to leave upon meeting his future wife. His return back to fleet duty was due to her unexpected and tragic loss. This return to the stars was a manner of trying to escape the past. To go as far away from everything and yet still have some sense of purpose. Over time, his mood and attitude shifted. People change, characters change. Crews turn over for reasons both dealing with the sim itself or due to real life issues. If you keep your character static, you limit yourself on what you experience and of the joy that role playing brings you. In time, he found that someone showed interest in him. He gained back his confidence and came to terms with his loss. Its not all just about duty for kin and country. I took him back to Earth to have his future wife meet his mother. To give a sense of purpose behind who he was, how his life shaped him and in the end to let him be who he was meant to be. Born of a small idea, a seed of who I thought he would be, he changed and grew with the passage of time.
It is that passage of time which eventually caught up though. On the main ship, crew members were declining. People had lives outside of the sim that took away from their time and ability to contribute. As XO I was responsible for helping either plan and run or fully run missions. Stories grew to big, or too complicated to guide. Its like writing a script or a novel with anywhere from four to ten authors or more. You fix small slip-ups here and there and address and admonish crew members who abuse their rank and privileges, especially by putting other players in a context they themselves would not. In the end, you cannot and will not get through to some people. After five years, things started to wain, and it was better to leave on a high note than to drop to a low.
When it comes to Rp'ing in SL, I've only really had once place I went to for a good amount of time. Vampires ruled and all Lycans were subject to their extreme rule. I didn't mind it, but I was never too combat oriented. My friend who took me there essentially gave me this piece of advice.
(Paraphrasing)
You can either be younger looking and get all the women's attention or be like you are now and expect a different approach to the role play.
I chose to keep my normal aged look. Not all Lycans are young and handsome or drop dead gorgeous. I also didn't want to get into anything close to sex or sexually related RP. I chose not to join up with either of the two Lycan packs or the third one that formed. My normal times on were usually sim down times, or when I was one people were engaging in combat or combat training while others looked on. So I spent a lot of time traveling the sim, meeting people and fleshing out my character. It just wasn't a good match. Nice people, very nice place but not my type of game play. That is why I am still unaffiliated. Maybe I'll find some RP'ing in a different genre, or just find a small group of people who share the same ideas when it comes to RP. In the end, the fulcrum has to be in a position to balance out what you want out of your experience.
It was one hell of a sim though Neit. :)
~Imaginos
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