Bring back the love

Some newer players have been bringing it up, as well as it is a comment that others have had recently. It boils down to there is a lot of focus on singling out players for whatever reason and in general complaining and hating. That makes one realize there is not a lot of incentive to do good deeds for another player, or participate in good RP, or even condone stellar conduct on OOC by helping newbies (even though that is the RPC’s job, why should they be the only ones to do it?) and other things like that.

Some ideas that were brought forward:
*A nomination system where you could give credit to someone after an RP session, perhaps in the form of 50 points
*An achievement system
*Something to give kudos/credit to a person for a well designed character aspect.

In general, we want to foster a better atmosphere here along those lines and promote good interactions between players whether it be IC or OOC. Why not start acknowledging people for that? Actual awards do not need to be much at all as they will accumulate over time. Such a system going in does not seem like it would have any downsides. Points and noms should not be given out blindly, as the opportunity to submit a nom could be revoked if you attempt to give them out for no reason. Overall, this implementation seems like it would do something more positive for the game than random history checks, as well as cover more areas of the game than something most rarely ever see.

I welcome any suggestions or additional ideas.

Love love love love love this.

Anything we can do to start re-enforcing GOOD behavior, instead of what feels like, a focus on punishing poor behavior.

I’d totes give someone a hippy hug for coming up with this idea, and I’m going to spend some time thinking about it.

+1 for this

would be great if the immortals and players weren’t forcing away people who actually try to benefit the RP atmosphere

Are players who benefit the RP atmosphere the same ones who shut down a major clan mid era because they don’t want anyone else to have it?

It’s not just about RP atmosphere and its the pbase in general. It could do with an attitude check but instead of trying to overly punish people why not recognize wanted conduct. Instead of criticizing more recognizing.

In any close knit gaming community – and we ARE a community, despite any imagined grudges or long term rivalries you all hold amongst each other, youre bound to reach points where everyone knows everyone, people fall into the same old groups, and things seem repetitive.

That being said, I dont believe an rp points reward system is the way to go. Seen it implemented in a few places and it inevitably leads to either people flocking to gather around those that can assign points, or unfair/overly frequent rewards.

Achievements would be interesting.

In terms of “wanted conduct” – we hand out small amounts of points quite often (daily, actually) those who are rping well, have good histories, report bugs or make us chuckle with their IC communication or actions. That should serve as a hint :p

Achievements/badges would be interesting as long as they do not effect in game mechanics (I am only mentioning this as someone brought this up on OOC when the topic came up.) For example if someone was on for event X and received a ‘badge’ or whatnot that gives +stat (hp, or whatnot) for being involved. Horrible idea that I hope is never implemented on lotj.

On a side note, a player viewable log of awarded account points would be nice, I have no idea how/when I received some of my account points and that has been driving me nuts.

@Ralen, I completely agree with your assessment of the point nomination thing. I’ve played multiple other muds that almost the sole XP system was based on votes from other players. While it did reward people that put forth more effort, you did seem to find that when you checked the logs, it was the same people voting for each other over and over again.

With that said, on the same note of only sticking with the same players for rewards and such, I want to point that out that I’ve played on LOTJ for many many many years now and have received XP for description/background history/RP/helping a n00b out/think logs/whatever..all of 3 times (that I can recall) for a total of about 100 points maybe. In fact, I’ve pretty much stopped worrying with background history as a whole because nobody ever reads it anyway, players and staff alike. In fact, I just recently changed a character’s history this TL that literally read “I’m keeping this here until an IMM tells me to fix it.” And that character was fully leveled for quite a long time and I’m honestly not sure if I ever changed it. The same goes for descriptions. Rarely do people actually read your description. They look for keywords (if at all), hopefully you were nice enough to highlight those keywords with another color. So while I can’t say that this current full group of staff members are doing it, I can accuse older groups of staff members for basically falling right into line of only awarding the same groups of people. Again, I’m not worried about this with my current characters as I pointed out prior with the history line, I’ve gotten over not being rewarded at random, not that big of a deal really. I’m just offering a bit of caution that the staff already does it, so I can only imagine if the players get their hands on such a system. (Note: I’m not trying to complain about not getting points I stopped worrying over that several TLs ago, I’m just trying to point out how the system works in my view).

I do like the idea of rewarding solid RPers/helpers/etc and think there should be some sort of nomination system. Maybe they have to submit a log of the event. Or there’s just a function that allows you to plug the person’s name and a brief reason why you think they deserve something cool. Even if it’s used as a heads up for the staff to then check out that player the next time they’re on.

In all the years I have played I have been rewarded by Troll, Gathorn, Walldo, Pez, and Gral and Ralen. Ralen is the most consistent of that group Walldo the 2nd most. It has been for Badassery (Usually Ralen), Amazing rp,, Ideas, Help files, bug reports, and on occasion making imms laugh at an ic situation. (I once got stunned by a message drone, After imms were done laughing at me I got 30 points for it.)\

But with the exception of Gathorn, Ralen, and Walldo. Its becoming rarer and rarer. You 3 rock, keep on going. Rest of the imm staff is becoming really anti social and its kinda sad really. I wont name names but one paticuler imm and I used to chat often when they had down time. I don’t hear from them anymore except for official imm business and even then its 1 or 2 word responses.