@Starfall
That was me, but I never got around to actualizing the idea.

@LeeRoy

It's a good idea, stop being lazy.

@MelonHead

Heck we even have a storyline that explains why Shin-Ra is here during which we've fashioned a setting for the Arena and RP Guild when we could find none in place. It's not that obvious since we're not invading the community and making a shitshow of things by throwing our egos out there. But that fits SRI's theme, we're not here to destroy the Guild so much as we're here to explore and make new connections, it's our job.

Don't get me wrong, the Arena has a multiverse, it's just very disjointed. The Nexus of Worlds is the current one in place (it's been around for about two years) I interact with it because it is immensely convenient and simplistic, all universes are connected by a system of portals and wormholes, destabilising elements have broken the veil in multiple places allowing characters from separate universes to interact who wouldn't normally be able to.

Every fight I've ever had also adds to the stories of my existing characters, though only some of it gets written up depending on how important the fight is or how interesting the opponent was.

@MelonHead
I'd crush your skull in a rematch with Shin :V

I handcuffed Shin so much for that tournament, just to get that damn disc.

Disc? You mean the weapon he was using? I know Shin left behind some sort of rail-gun pole which would probably kill Metz, he has a lot of hurdles I have to leap over just to use his abilities. Still rekt everyone in the tournament though, using the power of luck predominantly.

A write-up somewhere for the Nexus of Worlds, and at least a skeletal framework for it, could significantly increase engagement with the Arena. Star and I have seen it before plenty – even players who’re mostly interested in punching faces rather than Adventuring like having that backdrop of legitimacy to punch faces against. Gives people a place to start when trying to design a character, as well. Some vague sense of setting that might spark them to do something cool, instead of staring at an empty character sheet for half an hour, bereft of inspiration, before going “hell with this” and heading back to Casual.

Heh…think of it all in terms of baseball, I suppose. Right now, the Arena is a baseball league without any teams or any real setting/history – just a big pool of players that occasionally spits out a match. Now, whether you love baseball or find it incredibly boring, I imagine it’d be less engaging/more boring if there were no Favorite Teams to get behind and root for. If there were teams to root for, and a grand ol’ setting for the teams to fight over/in, there’d probably be a lot more interest.

…probably. I mean hell, I’m just the SRI black sheep, what do I know? …beyond the fact that Arena stables of a fewish players banding together, with their own signature arena and standing rivalries/alliances with other stables, sounds like it could actually be a lot of fun even without necessarily needing a Nexus of Worlds backdrop. With that backdrop, and stables representing their chosen world’s interests in variously-sized/placed duels to the victory…I’unno. Sounds like it could be a different, Arena-y sort of take on concepts I’ve seen players striving towards for over a decade.

No doubt, I'd have much preferred another re-do of the Arena multiverse to the ranked system tournament, but that's what people wanted this season so that's what they got.

Exactly what you describe was tried earlier in the season in regards to duels between individuals for their planets and the like, but it never took off for whatever reason. Perhaps the community is just too small.

@LeeRoy

Thread is up! Have fun!
http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/92846-only-two-things-come-from-texas-leeroy-vs-gonad/ic

@MelonHead

The Prize: A Forgotten Dark Disc [+]

Prize: A Forgotten Dark Disc
This torc is made of a liquid black metal that constantly shifts and moves. When the wearer focuses their attention on the torc it will create a six-foot black disc that the summoner can step upon. The disc allows the summoner a form of flight, rising to a maximum height of 250 feet and move at a speed of 180 miles per hour.
However, the most important ability is the ability to travel through the dark universe similar to the way Dreamers can travel from one multiverse to another using the Seidher. The Dark Disc will always enter through shadows.

I was going to use this to really get Shin involved in the Multiverse.

A man with a black shapeshifting staff, riding on a black disc, wearing a black mask. It was perfect, y'know.

I removed the three martial arts that Shin created, accidentally removed a chunk of his enhanced vision, removed the staff, and the burning blood. All so I could get that disc.

Hey, looks like I might have won myself a disc, if I cared about stuff like that.

@MelonHead
:V

I was trying to get a character involved in the NoW so there would be better reasons for my characters to be involved rather than:

Sukoh tends to roam the Multiverse for no good reason.
Kanitah's existence is entirely centered around beating the shit out of space assholes.
LeeRoy was going to be connected, until Khazna fucked it up.
Erde was only on that planet because it was similar enough to the planet his story takes place on.

@MelonHeadDoesn't even have to be duels-for-territory, really. Simply the trappings of the 'verse could be a big help. Have a team thread with all the arts & farts the team can put together, a showy description of their 'home' arena (since apparently fixed arenas are a big thing here), a roster of their characters, a list of ongoing/important fights, perhaps a description of the team's preferred combat style/ruleset...get some togetherness in one's facepunching.

Whether or not they duel for Official Planetary Control or just because it's the in thing to do, would both be cool for stables of players to work together and build a shared history like that and also be a natural way to funnel newer Arena guys into a support structure to help them get their footing. Instead of, y'know, one MelonHead doing a ton of educational bouts while everyone else does their own thing.

Dunno. Heh, I'm a transitory idiot, after all. But I've seen similar systems do wonders elsewhere. Might be something to consider if activity's flagging the way I've seen some people mention it is.

Arena has literally always been marked by peaks and troughs on RPG, tending to coincide with the arrival of migratory influences. Someone is bound to come up with something interesting eventually and things will pick up again, it just won't be me, because I have no interest in leading anything.

The biggest issue the Arena has on RPGuild is that it has such a small pool of players. There's probably sixteen active players -- twenty, max, and that's with the newest influx. Teams might be helpful, but I think the somewhat-anemic population would need some bolstering.

The second issue, which dovetails with the first, is that there's no coherency. It's somewhat adrift. There's a vague "setting" in the background, but that's just to explain why and where the fights are happening. There's no connection to any outside roleplaying. The fights are just kind of adrift, free-floating. There's no anchor, nowhere for the characters who fight in the event to really lay their roots. I think there was an attempt at this on oldguild, but I'm not sure how successful it was. There's no roleplay threads - cities, bars, locations of any kind - where character who participate in fights can do something other than fighting.

It doesn't help that RPGuild's organization is based largely around how a person roleplays, rather than what they're roleplaying. It's a bit sixes and sevens - on one hand, you have the casual/free/advanced sections, then you have themed sections like nation/arena/1x1. It's like someone changed their mind halfway through. This also makes it difficult to know where to place a thread like, say, a city that acts as part of a "persistent world" where people play.

I think that's part of why it's so hard to draw people into the Arena. In chatrooms, you always had a persistent world.. even if that world consisted of approximately 100 taverns, bars, inns, and castles. On Gaia, you have something similar: in between fights and tournaments, you character can go dick about in the city of Durem or hang around a bar or.. whatever. There's some kind of continuity to your character's life outside the fights that can be roleplayed, and the fights become part of that character's story.

For once, though, I'm completely fucking knackered for ideas on how to fix that, because it seems like RPGuild's structure isn't going to make it an easy fix.

Hn. In my mind, the immediate answer is "force it." Do a write-up of a Nexus of Worlds setting that ends up stickied here in the Arena, and as part of that setting, cross-link from the write-up posts to persistent threads in Advanced Play where people can go to do the badass-bar thing. Or the castle thing. Or whatever else they end up doing. I imagine players who wanted to could use events in the Arena to set up less-combative (situationally) threads in Advanced between their characters. I'll admit, the Guild's overall structuring is...not terribly conducive to any sort of persistent-world game (which is quite probably the biggest reason I'm mostly just faffing around in the Arena whilst I'm here) - but that mostly just means you need more elbow grease in keeping track of it.

I've seen people do it with less. I've also seen people do it in the face of hostile administration, at least for a little while. Mostly just have to pull together and get everyone pointed in the right direction long enough to pick up some momentum...which is, admittedly, one hell of a trick. Perhaps your Gaian Combat League could be a start point. I dunno. what I do know is that everyone here seems to've seen/been to places where it worked, so the experience is there. Just need to translate it into action somewhere, somehow.

The operative term in MelonHead's post is interest. We(DLL and I specifically) were a part of at least one project that built itself in the middle of a community that was apathetic to the idea at best and hostile at worst. Why Free never out and deleted a section of his forum that regularly cursed his name is beyond me, but if I had to guess it's because it brought activity. But that's because there was interest from people who were invested in the community and were willing to put the project first.

That level of interest needs to come from the natives first. There have been a lot of ideas thrown around but there's very little will to go through with them. Of the actives Shin-Ra already runs its own community, Darth appears to be something of a leader among his people, Gunvinity has his own crew somewhere out there in the ether and so does Drifting Pollen. I'm not saying it's impossible for the lot of us to work together but we've all got something else going on and from what I can gather we're at least content with having the Arena be a distraction from our regularly scheduled activity. The interest needs to start and end with people who actually consider themselves native to the Guild, not just visitors.

And right now there doesn't seem to be much of that.

The key might be to advertise in other sections.

Not that many people come to the arena for the reasons you all described, but one good thing to try might be making a setting, and then advertising a tournament there in "General interest checks" or somewhere that gets a bit more traffic than the arena. People would be able to RP in the tourney thread within the setting, and also fight each other... but losing wouldn't mean getting kicked out of the RP, only not going on for more matches.

I was in a thread like that on another site a while back (it wasn't in that forum's 'arena' section, but was still effectively a fighting tournament), and it ended up attracting loads of people who'd never fought before- including me. The thing ended up being hugely popular, and our characters spend as much time dicking around and bantering as they did fighting. Some of the final matches ended up being really intense, because the characters involved had become close friends IC, and yet were forced to go against each other for the sake of their goals.

So maybe if we tried kicking off such a thread and advertising it to people in the other sections... IDK. It would take a lot of time to manage something like that, and I don't have much to spare right now. Maybe sometime later, though... a forum I post on looks like it may be dying, and if it does kick the bucket, sad as that would be, I'll have more breathing room to maybe start working on something like this.

Well, on the topic of an actual setting where players can sit and chat without actually fighting. Or even set up fights in character before the fight actually begins, that was a thread earlier.

It was the HQ Ranked Lobby.

It got started, but it never actually went anywhere. If you'd like, I could host a new one so we could get the whole personality and story thing going.

@LeeRoy

If nothing else I'll show up and read the newspaper.

It got started, but it never actually went anywhere. If you'd like, I could host a new one so we could get the whole personality and story thing going.

Seems like a pretty fun idea. If we could get enough people interested, it could be just the kind of thing I was talking about... Hard to predict whether it'd work or not, honestly, but if you want to try it then I'd be happy to help out however I can.

Anyway, I've noticed this discussion has popped up, vanished, and popped up again. I was kinda hoping I'd be doing this about August, but I figure I should do it as soon as possible before we lose more members.

I'm going to be hosting a new Multiverse, not based on the Nexus of Worlds.

Kind of like a new start.

New setting, new story, all that jazz.

I was going to hold off on starting for a while so I'd be more prepared, but since the topic is going now I figure I'd put in my two cents.