Anyway, last entry was a little depressing. so before ranting I should put things on a more positive note. I'm back in SL almost every night, having a good time. That's mostly due to these fine folks:
Let's call them Eusebio and Glynn. I met them at Dark Alley, and they're excellent RPers. And good in virtual bed.
And that's the key for me at least to have fun in SL: have some friends who are there almost every day. Sex every other day would be ideal, but some delays are OK if the RP is good. :)
Now for the rant. E&G and I have also been doing some space pirate RP at Botany Bay, often including Kata. (And Piglet even made a now-rare but memorable appearance. As a lovely victim.) I organized an ongoing story involving a long trek to another planet.
I was going to use Midian, but they're closed for renovations. Kata found another place, a SF sim which I won't name. It has a lovely build-- a busy, slightly rundown city. Botany Bay is a frontier colony, so this place stood in for a near-core world, a place where we could sell some goods (some legally acquired, some not so much).
All that went well. Most of the action went down in a bar and grill (apparently the only eating place in the sim). We were alone at first, but then a few people drifted by. For what it's worth, I noticed that one of them was someone I'd blocked... though I couldn't for the life of me remember when or why.
In any case, someone took offense at our RP and rushed excitedly to an admin. The admin trundled in and busted us:
[23:21] [admin]: Mavia, eusebio, ethi, may you all come with me please))
Oh man, we been narced. Look at that cop attitude. No hello, no welcome to the sim, just come with me because we have to stop this unseemly RP immediately.
Are you curious what our offense was? I wasn't; we were pretty much done, so I left. But my companions were nicer, and stayed to find out. The offense was that Eusebio was a non-approved alien species (this in a sim that allows furries), while Ethi was wearing non-earned cyborg attachments. Not even non-approved, just not earned according to the sim's gameplay.
(Admittedly we were also talking discreetly about other stars when, IIRC, their sim is some kind of post-apocalyptic Earth. But I don't recall hearing about this.)
This sort of thing happened to me once before. Rita and I were playing vampires in an urban sim. We were using the Masquerade rules, which actually forbid open use of powers in public. We were just talking, and to each other. Again, some busybody heard this, freaked out, and some admin carefully explained that although they used to use VTM rules, they now had their own vampire rules and we were non-conforming. Eugggh. He was more polite, at least.
Now, I understand where this urge to regulate comes from. If you're running a medieval sim, you don't want people running around in spacesuits. If you're a Star Wars sim, you'd like players to fit in with that somehow. If you want an all-human sim and you get furries, well, you do what you have to do.
But... come on, sim admins. Don't be assholes. Consider what this looks like from our point of view: We came to your sim because we liked the build. We joined the group, wore the stupid titler. We kept to ourselves, didn't impose our story on anyone else. We did nothing but talk in the bar. We're trained RPers, the sort who will bring ongoing stories to life and make the sim an interesting place. This is not griefing. The bystanders who complained, they were griefing. They interrupted a private RP just to be assholes. You supported them, just to be an asshole. You're helping make SL a shittier place.
And then sim owners complain about why people abandon their sims, or why there's no quality RP going on.
Here's the somewhat sad truth, sim admins/owners: It's a big SL. There's always somewhere else to go, and frankly I've never seen a sim which was so attractive in itself that I wanted to stay there indefinitely. It's people that make me come back to a sim regularly. And those people are rarely the admins, either. The attraction is the people who've chosen that sim to hang out, have sex, make stories.
The sim owners and admins, in fact, are rarely out there playing on their sims. If they were, they could influence the stories people are creating. Without them, people will create their own-- making the sim a good place to hang out. To be honest, they'll probably use the sim's architecture as their most important source of lore.
As an example, I used to hang out at Doomed Ship with Rita and/or Kata. I never saw an admin. For awhile there were some regulars, and we cobbled together a sort of collective, low-key, accepting story. There were monsters on the lower decks; once you arrived you were trapped. People told slightly contradictory stories, so I came up with a nice metastory to explain this: the anomaly in control of the ship could grab people from different timelines. It worked fine.
Anyway. It's not important in the scheme of things, and all it really means is that we'll avoid the asshole sim and go somewhere else.
But while I'm at it... I gotta laugh at the "earning" cyborg parts thing. "A deep, complex system", the admin earnestly explained. I'm sorry, but you can't turn SL into an RPG or a MMO with scripts. If you want a crafting system, go play Eve Online or Fallout or Minecraft or something... games designed with a consistent overall system that the player needs to advance. SL sucks when you try to add a combat system, and it sucks when you try to add an economic system, and it doubly sucks when you try to add levelling. I was in one sim that had its own currency and jobs you had to work at once a day... it's interesting for a few days, and then it's boring as hell. Focus on what SL is good at: having real live people to play with. And, you know, try not to chase them off for bullshit reasons.
