Seems like less and less traffic is flowing around the RP world. Everyone talks about wanting to RP but then doesn't do anything about it. Has the world or dare I say the Guild gone mad?

On a serious note though, is it just me or is nothing the same as it was a year ago? Nowhere near as much content or something...

O.o For me things so much livelier than they were when I joined up. (This account and my previous one). Longer running Rp's, people sticking round more, more in-depth story lines. For me it has been a good change over the year in RP. There has been a bit of a down swing over the last 2 months but schools started up, so it was bound to happen. (Some started as early as the last week of July, some start this coming Monday) Yet other than the yearly school dip, I haven't personally noticed any downturn over all.

Maybe it's just me so aha! Feels dead up in here and everywhere, I can't quite put my finger on it but I've noticed this for a while not just to do with school starting back. Maybe no one wants to RP with me. xD

The Guild is not so much dead as it is stagnant. And it only seems to be stagnant in certain sections. For example, Free moves at a much slower pace than Advanced and Casual. There may be a number of reasons for this. One in particular is the timing as a lot of people are likely in the process of going back to school.

My advice is to find one or two strong Roleplays and stick them to like glue. It usually works for me and I acknowledge the stagnation a little less. Also Roleplaying is still cool, but more and more people seem to find the concept of "joining a Roleplay and vanishing" to become more and more acceptable.

I don't know why, but it seems to be a new phenomenon.

@SmileyJaws I just don't find any RP's I'm interested in outside of the 1x1 section nowadays. Whenever I do a casual RP with my friends, it turns into 'post however much you want' rather quickly. I've learned to just stick with the people I know recently - helps me from getting disappointed with lackluster posts.

@SmileyJawsI have indeed noticed a lack of interesting RP's. I joined and there were cool RP's everywhere, and now it's hard to find one I am interested in. But...people do seem to be in RP's and keeping to them longer at least.

one of the core reasons for the guild feels stagnant, beyond what was mentioned earlier is that Mahz is busy and has been busy in RL, so new features haven't come in a while.

Nothing to do about that. But its better in our opinion if there's a three hundred RPs where there were a thousand if a significantly larger portion of those survive.

@SmileyJawsI have indeed noticed a lack of interesting RP's. I joined and there were cool RP's everywhere, and now it's hard to find one I am interested in. But...people do seem to be in RP's and keeping to them longer at least.

I've noticed this too, seems like new ideas have been scarce recently. One solution could be going back to old threads, fish out their best concepts and adapt it to what people want right now.

According to Alexa, the guild's traffic peaked out during July. This makes sense as the summer break was coming into full swing then. Compared to one year ago, RPG actually climbed in terms of traffic.

I haven't been here the past year but things do seem different.

It feels like There are less interest checks being posted, and way more variations on the same idea (post-apocolyptic military survival, anyone?), fewer fandom-based rps, and...what happened to the friend system? I can't find my friends list.

There also used to be way more canons that were developed enough to be more than "I had this very basic idea but I haven't filled in the gaps yet" but less excessive than "here are a couple on 3000 word essays on the lore, history, setting, religion, government, races, technology..." Nowadays those seem to be the only two kinds of canon you find.

I haven't been here the past year but things do seem different.

It feels like There are less interest checks being posted, and way more variations on the same idea (post-apocolyptic military survival, anyone?), fewer fandom-based rps, and...what happened to the friend system? I can't find my friends list.

No, they just changed.

Used to be there were 300 MLP RP's. I'm kinda glad we moved past that.

Well, I've not been on this site long enough to comment on the "good ol' days", but from an outsider's perspective things seem pretty lively. On forums I've frequented in the past, even though I confined myself to the Advanced section, I knew everyone, including people who only stayed in Casual/Free. There were new threads and IC's daily, but only a handful that had any longevity. Now if I compare that to the Guild, where I constantly meet new and new RP'ers and see tens of threads pop up over the various sections (well...apart from NRP, but then again that's always the case with NRP), can't say I'm noticing a downward trend. So I'd say things are just...different, not necessarily worse.

In terms of what types of RP's get posted, well there's always stuff that's more popular than others. Based on my observations during the past decade, I'd say it's cyclic, like most trends & fashion. Besides, if you didn't have derivative RP's, how would the truly good ones stand out? ;)

Things seem far different than from when I used to be a member of this site. I guess they call it pre-"guild-fall" I had long since quit before whatever guild-fall was, but the forums seemed to have a lot of traffic when I was grayecastle. The spam section *always had a lot of traffic too.

Guildfall was essentially a time when the entire guild database (all posts, all users, everything) was lost, @CrimsonCastle.

I haven't been able to find a decent RP in weeks. There's a serious dearth of any advanced roleplays or interest checks, which one would think would be the segment of users least affected by the back-to-school drawdown.