<Snipped quote by Odin>
Yeah; this always bothered me. This isn't a jab at the players, but it was confusing to call the PW a PW when in reality it wasn't much more than a glorified sandbox with individual stories within it. Reminds me of the first PW in which there was a Mod-Only super faction that was essentially the top dog of the galaxy and yet nothing ever happened with it. The faction just sat there doing nothing for the life of the PW, which is kind of what happened with the SWPW too. Didn't really see the Republic and Empire skirmishing, no galactic wide bounty hunts like the Great Hunt, etc. I believe there was supposed to be some kind of thing going on with Ruby's Selene character, but I'm not entirely sure, though.
Finally someone else said it, lol. Give people an entire universe to play with, an entire official set of lore books, and most of them will be content to sit in.. some Twi'lek cantina, drinking beer and looking at eachother in badass ways, without actually doing anything meaningful. The entire SWPW could've been summed up in 3 threads with the maximum character-count worth of rules (which was another issue -- advertise an RP as ''easy to get into'' and then make the CS and rules convoluted as fuck and provide absolutely no leniency to people) and a single thread where people shitposted about thinking Twi'leks are hot, or something. That's it. Send tweet. That was SWPW.
At least the first PW had
some stuff going on at first, but it died so fast you'd barely be able to tell something happened. Galactic-scale setting, and not enough people to fill even a single planet.
I think Bango had a good point earlier that I'd used before to explain why the PW's we'd seen aren't actual PW's -- street-level PW's would work best here. I even used superheroes as my example. You'd make a bunch of locations as threads, and people would come and go to these locations as needed. Batman is chasing the Joker from his mansion to, idk, 54th ave, and he'd have to move from his mansion, write an exit post on that location, and then write an entry post in the 54th ave thread, interrupting everyone's RP to chase the Joker into some sewer manhole to go to the creepy underground Jokerbunker, or whatever. IDK, I never watched any Batman. He dances down some stairs or something?
Anyway, simply because you'd need multiple threads (that all need activity, or else it looks bad) and you can really only have your character in 1 thread at a time, you'd need a tonne of people and we don't have enough active users on RPG. So, there will never be a big PW again (at least, if we do the smart thing).
We should rather focus on the strengths of RPG, imho, which is diversity in writing. If we can find a way to turn that into something interesting,
then we could have a really successful event. The contests are sorta that but they don't receive enough attention, both from the players and the admin.
