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.