i do agree with Rilla on Sci-fi or fantasy all the way through even with a persistent universe as it was inevitable that arbitrary balancing mechanisms would be put to use. Even if said balancing didn't address the technology issues that plagued say, a knight versus a gun man and don't bother to die to the rock paper sissors balancing which tech magic mundane had.

I also feel like I was part of the problem due to the network making other worlds too soon when it would have been better off as some political organization within the Sci-fi world than as its own civilization. Honestly the Mylian Belt and the Network in general pretty much showed why you don't allow a group to make their own planets.

Probably would be better to limit groups to a set few factions whose culture and MO would be influenced by who joins them. So for instance a general "communist" group which whose lore is developed by whoever joins it. In general probably make world building something you must build inwards instead of outwards. The GMs set the major factions and planets, the players than work within that being able to add species and abilities/technologies to the world. In that regards having only 3 worlds was actually one of the better calls.

Probably would be better to limit groups to a set few factions . . .

I don't particularly agree with this sentiment, though I understand where you're coming from. I would consider that an overly restrictive move which doesn't give enough freedom for a supposed persistent world. I think having some prefab factions that are nice and fleshed out would be a great idea, but I think players should still be able to submit faction applications. That said, those should absolutely undergo a much more significant level of scrutiny.

Do we really have to revitalize an entire sub-forum just for the same problems to reoccur. Between the 100-200 people that peruse RPG daily, how many of those are going to be active in EH, how many of those will stick around for longer than a month and how many of those are actually going to use the 300 threads that are available instead of just 'hanging out' in the 'bar thread.'

So in retrospect, what we had in EH was:

• A decently organized, but flawed, persistent world
• A very low starting number of players, comparable to a large RP that takes 1 thread to host..
• Admins and moderators hosting it that didn't care and left
• No thread activity except for 1 thread
• And new plans to restart this project because it went over so well last time
• And all of that is placed at the top of RPG for........ no reason

I honestly wouldn't care about this but it's kind of painful to see that an existing PW that already had 20+ members was interested in making a sub-forum here, and Mahz never replied to that, but some dead PW idea that got pushed out in supposedly a week was given the top space on RPG because uhhhhhhhh, yeah.

Do we really need an inactive forum as the header for RPG as a whole? That's a nice sales pitch.

@Odin I understand your sentiment, but some of the things you said were either addressed when EH was released or aren't factually accurate.

To reiterate what Mahz said when EH was released, the reason it is at the top of the main page is because it was new and he cited some precedence for such. That is no longer the case, so it can be moved elsewhere on the main page.

There is more than one active thread and a new person seems to submit a new character (~125 submissions over ~180 days) at least every other day or so, although pointing that out isn't by any means saying EH is successful. It just indicates that people are interested, but for some reason don't jump in and participate after their character is approved.

There were actually a relatively high starting number of players who expressed interest, submitted characters, and even posted. Were that not the case, I doubt Mahz would have created the space for them to play.

All that said, it doesn't change the situation. We have a subforum with very little oversight that isn't doing as well as it should be, so our options are:

* continue to let it languish
* remove it and make everyone who contributed to it in the past upset that their content is gone
* try to make it better.

@Circ People have had plenty of time to jump in, save their content or do something. It seems counterintuitive to jump in a few weeks/months after it has, more or less, died and start yelling about how we need to improve the situation. You can't make it better. PW won't work, has never worked and will never work on RPG. That is not a matter of planning, creation or anything involving the creative or planning process - it is something inherent to the RPG playerbase. There is a reason after all that we have such a high turnover rate for roleplays. It has nothing to do with the quality of the roleplays and everything to do with the people that are on RPG.

Who is going to be upset? The moderators that have given up on EH and who, by large, are responsible for letting it languish? Well, tough luck.

I find that the amount of submissions does little to speak in your favour and actually speaks against it. 125 submissions, that's a lot, and out of those how many actually played? How many of those are still active? Isn't that sort of speaking against the fact that EH will be able to retry and survive? I find it hard that those who played before will suddenly go 'ah revival! Time to retry _{and lose interest again after a week!}'.

Secondarily, I know from first hand source of someone involved in the mod team and the PW (leaves little room as to who it is) that Mahz had no idea what he was creating the subforum for. The only reason it exists was because someone's name was attached to it that was in the mod team. That's all it was.

I say remove it. If you're upsetti spaghetti over your content being gone then you've had ample time to save it somewhere and/or revive it. If anything we can move it to a legacy sub-forum at the bottom so that you can retrieve it. I don't see a reason to maintain it when it's clearly the case that it didn't work and will never work. No amount of broken revival attempts are going to solve that because the reason for failure is not in the hands of the GM's - it's the playerbase.

* continue to let it languish
* remove it and make everyone who contributed to it in the past upset that their content is gone
* try to make it better.

* restructure the concept to put point 3 right into the foundation (where, typically, it should be) and integrate the first half of point 2 while communicating to make the other half a non-issue.

In other words, a new PW, with concepts taken from the original to learn in the next attempt.

Either way, the first thing I'd say that would be a proper change is to "demote" the forum to at least be just below the main roleplay sections.

* continue to let it languish
* remove it and make everyone who contributed to it in the past upset that their content is gone
* try to make it better.

* move the existing threads to casual or advanced, since there's like 3 or 4 active threads at the moment that could easily be their own little persistent world amongst them, only in one of the existing roleplay subforums that isn't expanding horizons.