Roleplay World Rework -- Suggestions and Feedback

[Goat-kun 2,527]

I'm still confused on how lore can work in practice when even the official RP renovator is compelled to use fanon Grogar & Tambelon for the official forum event

 

Anyhow, I'd remove all the dead threads in there and make an action adventure and play house section instead of canon and non-canon. It'd be easier to search for what you want. You can always put up labels to state if it's canon or not, whatever that means these days.

[Jeric 46,850]

On 6/30/2018 at 9:17 AM, Jeric said:

There is a strong interest on staff in evaluating RP on MLPF. Looking at what works, tossing what doesn't, fixing some broken things, and introducing some new ideas that might make RP more exciting for some. For simplicity's sake, EvE is the RP section that allows freedom to explore Pony and non-Pony RP without having to strictly adhere to canon requirements. EqE is the canon Pony RP Section. Basically anything in there should not contradict the show. I wanted to go over that because some ideas will be for EqE and some won't work in the canon environment. 

Before I go further, obviously the Character Databases are a priority. Getting the templates to display HTML correctly is going to be a major focus for me over the next month. Luckily I have time and patience. Now, I'm going to list some ideas we've already mentioned that would impact the canon area. I'm curious as to how they would be received. 

 

EqE Ideas

Some ideas that have been tossed around include reevaluating EqE to make it more accessible and adding some perks for jumping in.

• This includes streamlining the application process through some automation and improved response time, making some of the requirements a bit more friendly toward the lesser experienced individual, creating a page that includes all the rules in an intuitive model. Basically, to quote another staffer, we have realized that it takes an awful amount of effort to simply say, "Hi, I'm Pinkie Pie!"
• Some cool ideas that seem to ha e almost unanimous approval  are investing in a IPB extension that will allow members to be able to switch to their Cast characters on the fly so that they would be posting as Applejack with an Applejack profile. Also allowing this characters to be able to interact with the community during various events and in statuses. 
• The removal of character bans is happening. Basically, villains and Equestria Girls characters would be open to the community to grab. While this would make EqE slightly more canon flexible with the introduction of characters like King Sombra and Tirek, we see this as a important step to opening EqE. 
• Event based RP's with a focus on adventure and epicness. Currently EqE is mostly an SoL affair. We want to work with the community to create massive exciting event epics within RP that would be memorable experiences. We even have the Clubs feature that we may leverage for such occasions. 

 

EvE Ideas

• A guided beginners system that would slowly introduce inexperienced people to RP that would leverage the Mentor program and help people craft phenomenal characters and learn how to create a fun interactive narrative. 
• A greater focus on organizing non-Pony RP. Yeah we are a Pony site, but creating an area for other properties to thrive is not something that is off-the-table. 

 

Back to you

So I'm curious if you, the community, have any ideas. Regardless of whether you RP or not we are listening. This is your time to have your voice heard. What would you change. 

 

Recapping and these will happen in no particular order, but the harder to implement options are last. This is also not comprehensive. A LOT of good ideas are being discussed 

1) Reduction in requirements to begin and maintain a character in EqE

2) Overhaul of the character dabatases which will include some table top elements such as character statistics. Any advanced elements will be optional for those that do not want to use them since they will be tied to the more advanced technical implementations.

3) Seperation of Pony and non-Pony RP’s 

4) A full Lore, location, and beastiary section

5) removal of character limitations in EqE

6) Event driven RP’s (focused on adventure) 

7) Post as a character 

8) Dice mechanisms 

9) Guided tour of RP

10) Automation notifying individuals who are due to post.

11) Automation archiving abandoned RP’s 

12) Rule book. 

13. OOC drives me crazy and there has to be a better way of implementing this on a forum. 

 

These will start being communicated in the next few weeks and go live shortly afterward. RP will be a year long overhaul and several of the over changes will have their own phases of development. The character DB, Lore DB, and Rules in particular will be dynamic so we don’t overload the community. 

To @Troblems concern, images will continue and any gamification elements using the trophy/awards system will be tied to the RP story elements, particularly the Event driven RP’s. Imagine a fetch quest or something like that where you obtain an item to use at a later part of the RP. Your point about trophies being superficial is well taken. 

If we implement anything that is not well received, we can easily roll it back or tweak it. This whole thing is about making RP more enjoyable. 

[Fhaolan 4,483]

One of the things that I really wanted to do, but just couldn't overcome the technical barriers for without giving up and diving into being a Dev for Poniverse rather than an Admin for MLPF/PonyRoleplay, was wiki-like character pages. Basically allowing people to modify their character sheet formats and layouts to some extent, have a picture gallery, etc. They used to have such a thing for City of Heroes and some other RP sites. Unfortunately the places I know used to do it, don't exist anymore.

The thing that made it important to me was one RP site with this ability, where people put a *lot* of effort into their character pages. The pages would link to the RPs the characters were in, summarize important events that had happened in the RPs from the character's perspective, link to other characters that the players felt were important, have galleries of the artwork the player had commissioned/been gifted/drew for the character, etc. The character sheets became *important* rather than a throw-away thing done just to be allowed into the RP area. And the people who would put that effort in would also be making the pages attractive, with fancy formatting allowed by the BB-Code/Wiki-style formatting tags.

The basic workflow would be creating a character through the database would automatically generate a default character page with default formatting. The owner of the character would have the ability to open up the page for editing, and would be able to use BB-Code to rearrange and reformat the default page (which would have special codes to pull datapoints from the database). The database wouldn't need fields to store the big swaths of text for 'background' or the like, that would be part of the wiki page. It would be just storing specific datapoints that would be used for searching and cataloging.

 

 

[Troblems 5,617]

At one point Adam had a secondary page working for each RP working. Basically each RP had a 'notes' page. It was basically a tab at the top of each page you could click that took you to a secondary page just for OOC so they would be inextricably linked, and wouldn't have to create a thread elsewhere explicitly for it. I don't remember if it was here or PRP, but it was beautiful, and I loved it. Then it broke and I cried.

Come to think of it, I think there was a third page for staff notes, akin to account notes. It was so beautifully organized. We all know how I love organization.

[Fhaolan 4,483]

41 minutes ago, Just Troblems said:

At one point Adam had a secondary page working for each RP working. Basically each RP had a 'notes' page. It was basically a tab at the top of each page you could click that took you to a secondary page just for OOC so they would be inextricably linked, and wouldn't have to create a thread elsewhere explicitly for it. I don't remember if it was here or PRP, but it was beautiful, and I loved it. Then it broke and I cried.

Come to think of it, I think there was a third page for staff notes, akin to account notes. It was so beautifully organized. We all know how I love organization.

Yeah, that was the PRP prototype. It was a wondrous thing that allowed the RP, the OOC, and any special staff-only Notes to actually be in the same 'thread' and you could flip back and forth at will via tabs. The staff-visible-only Notes thing was something I wanted to pull across to *all* the threads on the forum, as it would have made stuff so much easier to organize. Any special considerations the mods needed to know about a thread could actually be attached to the thread itself, rather than somewhere else on the forum (or worse, in a document in a Poniverse staff-only share on Google Docs).

[Fhaolan 4,483]

1 hour ago, Bas said:

@Fhaolan Couldn't there be any software like that existing already on the internet?

The question is there is any API that could handle with this board, thinking like bridging the 2 software solutions.

I'm sure there are, and there are add-ons for this forum software that might be most of the way there, but they need dev-level access and ponypower to install, configure, and 'make ready for prime-time', which was something we were not exactly flush with when I was an Admin. The reason why the character sheets we have right now are still partially broken is because the documentation on how to configure the forum software isn't exactly... comprehensive, and Community Admins (like @Jeric now, and what I was at the time) don't have full back-end dev-level access to be able to poke at things and see *exactly* what those changes really do. There were so many other things that were higher priority to get fixed, and only so many Poniverse Devs willing to look at this software package and spend time on it.

 

[Troblems 5,617]

7 minutes ago, Fhaolan said:

Yeah, that was the PRP prototype. It was a wondrous thing that allowed the RP, the OOC, and any special staff-only Notes to actually be in the same 'thread' and you could flip back and forth at will via tabs. The staff-visible-only Notes thing was something I wanted to pull across to *all* the threads on the forum, as it would have made stuff so much easier to organize. Any special considerations the mods needed to know about a thread could actually be attached to the thread itself, rather than somewhere else on the forum (or worse, in a document in a Poniverse staff-only share on Google Docs).

I thought he had done it on a super early version of the IPV5 MLPF. But again, I could be completely wrong. All I remember is being broken inside when it stopped functioning. Anyways, it should be a thing. I demand a thing! Seriously though, getting rid of all of the OOC threads? Not having to police each RP for one? Migrating them over would be a bitch through.