As a player I have strong feeling that most of socializing, political
intrigue, major decision agreements are moved to ForumMaster to the
extent that it is almost impossible to establish communication - even
on level of mere courtesy - via in-game messaging, in so many realms.
Most of my characters are frequently changing realms in hope to find
ones where at least minimal communication exists.
Messages within many realms are so rare - even with char who is member
of most of message groups - that for many realms it would be
impossible to function if there were no other means of communication.
This is what I sent to Tom some days ago, and he advised me to share it to the forum. As I developed strong repulsion toward forums, I was quite reluctant to do so, but now seeing that something is going on, with this lock of locals, I have decided to go with it.
I would add few more simple points:
- If people that spend much effort to elaborate thoughts, give comments about characters and situations on forums would add minimal effort to shape it into in-character style and post it in-game, current game would be largely improved as well as player's interest.
- It seems that many players have forgotten, some new maybe did not learn as well - that all of us are friends, not only those with whom you are chatting on forums or those whom you know in real-world.
- No matter which level of rp-ing we want to run into, as a minimum, it is completely normal that you have enemies in-game, betray or backstab your ooc friends, have good friendship with one in-game character but hate the other, change your stance toward some family, use any kind of in-character tricks and plots. In times when I was playing chess, I used many tricks to win, but never remember that anyone hated me outside the game. I believe it should be absolutely the same in BM, without that most of thrill is lost.
- Personally I see no any single reason why any day-to-day operation of realm functioning should be moved to different channels, like forums, irc. There are so many options within game - armies, guilds, standing orders, stewards, automatic orders etc. that I cannot imagine what should be done more efficiently by ooc means.
