Prime Time?

I forgot query existed and I'm kicking myself for that, but this brings up kind of a related question I would welcome any and all thoughts on.  I feel like I see people doing stuff all the time and I want to also do stuff, but I have no idea HOW to explore any of my thoughts or ideas. I actually have a petition asking about this right now, even, but some player examples of how people are doing this would help a lot. 

More specifically, we have query, we have story request, we have just writing story developments, we have Request Quick Attention (in the webportal), we can submit stories, we have petitions...

I'm struggling with:

1) How to know which command/route is the right way to use to share what you'd like to do with staff;

2) How much you can/should be asking for at one time - like if you have a longer-term thing like a research request waiting, it seems to me like you probably shouldn't submit a story. But a quick request, maybe, or a query is fine? 

The research requests show up in the admin task list, so it's probably just a matter of the volume of stuff to deal with that has primarily fallen just on Mistsparrow's shoulders. Stuff will take some time, and the quality of lore is very amazing, so for research it's a good idea to just wait. You can roleplay about going to the library and spending time looking through the stacks to find what you're looking for, etc, and the more you roleplay about something the more it's on staff 'radar', so to speak -- but in my experience, you can't rush Mistsparrow's lore. It'll come out once it's done percolating and it'll be perfect when it does. :D

As for other plot stuff, I've been thinking about how to develop a more interactive broader story system that will allow players to signify their interest in any ongoing plots. I've been thinking about it since early alpha when we had a long discussion over the story system and its various drawbacks and confusing parts. Since this is more of a development issue, maybe we should make another thread for it, but here's roughly what I have in mind.

- A 'plot' is a collection of shared story arcs.

- Staff-run plots will be posted publicly and there will be ways to OOCly request involvement in these, as well as available 'roles' and pre-set 'hooks'.

- Players will also be able to publish plots if they want, to offer other players roles and hooks and to share related story arcs.

So, the things for this system that I'm contemplating are... how to visually represent the plot. Should it be on a timeline? Etc. And should there be a way to keep private the developments on a shared story arc? Probably, just so that people don't need to make a seperate story arc just to track whatever they might be doing related to the plot that they'd prefer to keep secret...

Putting together the puzzle pieces for how to represent this system and connect the parts is what's making me take so long with this, but I'm curious for feedback and what would be helpful/unhelpful. 

Sorry, to be clear, my question re: research was "if I have research waiting, should I not request anything else, or is it okay to still put in queries on other issues, submit other stories, etc?" I definitely know I need to be patient on that front! I do think the research system probably should work in a different fashion but that's another story - just really unsure about having concurrent requests in the pipeline.

The plot system sounds awesome, and I'm sure I'd have opinions on how to display it, but I think it might be helpful to understand what it would be used for. Is there anything ongoing in game that would count? The sea serpent stuff, maybe? (I've been unsure to what extent that's something players are meant to be investigating/pursuing, vs. something that's happening as background events with no expectation we be able to unpack or respond to it.)

If you're waiting for the resolution to any particular request, like a research project or a query, it's perfectly fine to put in other requests at the same time. The limiting factor there is really just my own time and energy, and obviously the more stuff I have in my to-do queue the longer it can take to get to any one particular thing. The only type of request for which there's an actual coded limitation is full personal story submissions, which I think can be done once every 3 months. But smaller stuff is all right -- all I ask is that everyone keep in mind that I am only one person, and I will get to things when and as I can. :)

As far as background events go, essentially anything that happens in the world, whether as in-game happenings or rumors or IC story announcements or whatever else, is something that is available for players/PCs to engage with. They can do this in really any number of ways -- putting in queries to talk to an NPC, investigating through plot notes, RPing with whatever NPCs might happen along, creating their own more personal story arc to go along with some particular aspect of an event, or whatever else. This doesn't mean that anybody HAS to do so, nor does it mean that there's any expectation on the admin side that any specific action will be taken. No one has to engage with any particular event at all (unless of course something directly happens to sweep them in). Nothing that's been happening in Omrazir so far is of vastly earth-shaking scale or urgent in nature, so PCs and staff alike can simply engage with them as time allows.

Also, any given happening may have more natural "hooks" for some PCs than others, depending on their background and the interests they've demonstrated through RP, but there's nothing to stop anyone from engaging in any way that makes sense for their character. I'm also happy to try to help people get involved by working with them to develop a hook that they find interesting. Of course once a PC is involved in things there's no guarantee of exactly what will happen as a result! (I usually don't fully know either.)

From the perspective of thinking of other types of games, it might help to see Avaria as more of a simulation game than a big-story narrative RPG. There are lots of things out happening in the background of the world, some near at hand and some farther away. It's possible for any of them to affect PCs and their personal stories in various ways, directly or indirectly, and it's equally possible for PCs to affect them by reacting to them in any number of (open-ended) ways. Very occasionally some event will happen that's big enough to directly impact most or all of the playerbase, but especially at this point in development that's very much the exception rather than the rule.

So you can pretty much decide how you want your character to spend their time within the framework of the world, whether that's jumping into an existing storyline (either staff-run or PC-driven) that seems right up your character's alley, coming up with your own stories to sweep other people up into, or just quietly doing your own thing with your own more personal stories. Each of these things can definitely have its own personal rewards.

From the perspective of thinking of other types of games, it might help to see Avaria as more of a simulation game than a big-story narrative RPG.

I think (some) confusion might partly stem from:

 If you're looking to spend your gameplay in a more typical simulation-style MUD, resource-gathering, mob-grinding, and mass-crafting, look elsewhere. 
 

I think one thing I've sort of ... tried to find a delicate way to say is that any of the logs of Alpha events or stories that are told ICly from characters who began in Alpha, are big story narrative RPG type stories. There are fights and magic items and evil bad guys and losses and triumphs. And it can give this perpetual feeling of fomo where ... all of the cool, over-the-top, fantastical stuff already happened. With the hints that those things likely won't happen again. So it can make it mildly hard to ponder what to look forward to or what could be/can be done now that would in any way compete with the cool stuff folks already did. 

Well, for starters, what's mentioned in the About section on the webpage is a very different kind of micro-level task simulation, where what is simulated is a system of completing numerous small repetitive tasks for purely instrumental purposes (e.g., crafting weapons for better stats, gathering herbs to make potions for coded bonuses, grinding mobs to gain levels and be the most powerful fighter, etc). Avaria is more of a macro-level world simulation, where world events are playing out in the background (weather events, geopolitical strife, criminal conspiracies, mysterious phenomena, and the like), and these impinge on the playable setting in various ways.

I think the picture newer players have of the earlier Alpha stages ends up being skewed in various ways. First off, the initial ship phase was wildly different from anything that came after, and while it was exciting and intense it was completely unsustainable from a long-term (or really all but the shortest-term) staff perspective. It was also not even particularly to the taste of some players who preferred a slower and more low-key style -- a style that in itself is probably actually more suited to Avaria as planned, and one that doesn't necessitate essentially playing for at least a few hours every single day to keep up, and even then playing in a really intense and often in-your-face barge-into-everything way.

After the ship wrecked in St. Loomis, things were totally different, and far far slower. Essentially there were two plotlines there. The first was the very broad one where all the shipwreckees had to deal with living in a foreign land while maybe trying to solve some of the strange background mysteries there in hopes of getting home, all while some xenophobic NPCs were being not very nice to them. The second plotline was the witch plotline, which played out in a pretty small handful of overall very short scenes over about nine months, but which did admittedly have a couple of cool inflection points: namely, the horrific murders and the capture of the perpetrator of them, and the grand finale event. The witch plotline was the only one that was any kind of big more-or-less single-narrative story, in a period of over two years spent in St. Loomis.

The PCs who were there just tend to talk about the witch plot a lot (and the few months on the ship) because it was, in effect, the only really "big" thing that has happened. People also don't tend to post logs or talk too much about anything more small-scale and personal they're up to, and as far as the logs I posted as admin -- yes, they're basically everything major that happened in St. Loomis.

As for why there was at least that one more-typical active MUD plotline in St. Loomis, that mostly comes down to the admin time available. When PCs got to St. Loomis, the entire town and surrounding area were fully built and filled in with jobs, shops, resources, crafting supplies, flora and fauna, and everything else necessary for self-sufficiency. There were also two staffers still each spending a fair amount of time on their separate development spheres. And while I provided the background lore and a lot of the "supporting cast" of the witch plotline and for St. Loomis in general, Pilgrim was the one who was responsible for the key NPCs (namely, the witch and the murderer) and had the time to run the murderer events, some short witch interactions, and the finale. And even with that, there were plenty of long dull periods where mostly not a lot happened.

In this phase, I am essentially the only admin working full-time-in-my-off-time from RL work, and I'm having to juggle essentially everything that isn't serious coding, including helping with PCs' own stories, in a locale where there is still a huge amount of stuff to even be set up and built. That means that even if I would like to do more dramatic and driven plotlines (and I would), I simply don't have the time and energy for it. And yes, there are some times when I play in Avaria simply for my own personal enjoyment, because not doing that is a road to complete burn-out.

It has been a huge labor of love to carry Avaria this far, and despite the definite very high amount of labor in that equation, the love variable guarantees that I'm not about stop working on it (and working with Pilgrim on it to the degree that their current life circumstances allow them). But for the time being it's regrettably the case that stories are probably going to continue to be relatively low-key and slow-moving, because that's the only thing that is really sustainable right now.

I agree with the player of Jannah, right now it does feel like a simulation of day-today life and a slice-of-life MU* than a than a big-story narrative RPG. I would like to say that I feel that slice-of-life is a little better than simulation as you are working on creating plots and interactions. At the same time, I do agree with Mistsparrow that it's more sustainable to have a slow, low burning roleplay. I honestly don't mind this type of play as it allows me to create a meanful character that can co-create their mark on the gameworld without the risk of a cheap death or a character/player death; that's something that created a lot of stress when I played Arm MUD. How long can my character go without dying? And how much impact can they make? SoA, instead, can allow Tasenu to grow and become a long standing community memeber of Omrazir and co-create meaning with others while doing her day-to-day things like carpentry, being a student of the various peoples of Avaria, and an assitant prayer leader of Azadi faith. She and I, as a player, might mind the world events but if they don't affect us, then we might just ignore them.

My concern is understanding the pacing of plots due to thae fact that one can somewhat grind due to code, but if you, as the staff, have ways to pervent that- that's awesome! Although, for me at least, I perfer doing things without the help of code and even coded skills.