Discord&Closed Communities Leading To Mediocrity(?)

[latenight]

Hey everyone.

 

As a player in the RP community for more than ten years, I started to recognize some points in general. I'm not trying to judge anybody nor saying these are facts but wondering your point of view instead.

 

Most of you may know, far back in the day most of the factions were doing OOC applications whether they're law enforcement or gang/mafia. But then It was obvious that IC recruitment for gangs and mafia is far more realistic AND ALSO FUN to do since It resembles real life, you get to know new people no matter If they're incredibly talented high-iq roleplayers or just a newbie trying to figure things out. 

 

After a good while of IC recruitment in every single RP environment, in my opinion most of the hot-shot names (E-famous illegal faction members, video creators, etc.) and their friend group started to get bigger and bigger by time. It came to a point that most of the factions (mostly street gangs) communicate on discord, have good e-relations (which is obviously no problem) then start to close their doors for the newbies or for the people just want to roleplay with them. People who don't know them or have their discord have no choice but pray/pm for a chance to RP with them because the faction is already packed up with good friends, they don't really have any reason to invite new members. 

 

This situation makes them a bit hostile to the newcomers because they simply don't need them. A new player or a wannabe is more like another victim of a robbery or a customer who should spend his paychecks on the drugs. It's obviously understandable for gangs to g-check, test their new wannabes, there's no problem with that HOWEVER not really giving a fuck about them, just bullying them in every chance they get and then tell them to "be original, create your own RP" while they're once again roleplaying a ruthless gangbanger with a different ethnicity for the 15th time this month.

 

By the way I might exeggerate a bit to explain what I'm talking about...

 

This "hyper-realistic" style of roleplay is just outpouring of poor leadership skills in my opinion. Like, imagine a well led organization with a good leader and good invited members, who occasionally monitors your activities, recognize your effort and so on, you don't give a shit If you get butt-fucked constantly by them because you know in the long run you'll be awarded for your effort. However, on the flip side, you'd get frustrated If you get constant harassment in the name of testing for months but then you see a guy with face-tats appear and now he's the right-hand of the leader because he just changed his name and decided to join your faction and he makes really good shoot-out videos.

 

In my opinion all of these things really discourage the new players and the people who don't really have that big friend group. They're doomed to join legal factions because they can easily participate in different scenarios without the need of people grouping up in discord or without the fear of the faction shutting down because leaders are having some OOC drama.

Furthermore, the big friend groups I mentioned above is decreasing the quality of the roleplay in my opinion. They're simply creating a bunch of mediocre characters who are ruthless with no feelings, interact with nobody but their inner circle, can't take a tiny joke except when It was made by one of his friends and so on. This mentality also leads these closed-communities to have hatred against eachother which lead to shitload of poor shoot-outs with edits in them showing the "names" and "forum pms" of the dead bodies...This play-to-win mentality in illegal factions, causing them to shoot a 30 deep rival group, killing every single one of them and still cursing at their ragdolled asses because they were saying something about their faction on the forums.

 

I must say I saw thousands of exceptional characters in here, most of the official factions have a well-structured leadership, members and exceptionally high RP quality. Maybe the people I'm bad mouthing about are the minority, as I said in my first sentence, I'm curious about your opinions.

[Alys]

27 minutes ago, latenight said:

This situation makes them a bit hostile to the newcomers because they simply don't need them. A new player or a wannabe is more like another victim of a robbery or a customer who should spend his paychecks on the drugs. It's obviously understandable for gangs to g-check, test their new wannabes, there's no problem with that HOWEVER not really giving a fuck about them, just bullying them in every chance they get and then tell them to "be original, create your own RP" while they're once again roleplaying a ruthless gangbanger with a different ethnicity for the 15th time this month.

As someone who has been experiencing this, I can only confirm this.

[Tickle]

The entire server is full of OOC nepotism disguised as IC motive. Being friends OOCly with the right people is way more important then the Roleplay you might bring to them. In fact, because they don't know you then your roleplay will perhaps be taken in the wrong context pre-emptively without proper conversation and understanding. That plus "cut /b" culture makes it difficult to communicate and break into social circles. People say it's all IC when for many people it is clearly not. And that's a legal, illegal, and in-between thing.

Edited October 27, 2021 by Tickle

[ZaE]

They gonna destroy you for this, but it's fucking facts. 

[Alys]

13 minutes ago, Tickle said:

The entire server is full of OOC nepotism disguised as IC motive. Being friends OOCly with the right people is way more important then the Roleplay you might bring to them. In fact, because they don't know you then your roleplay will perhaps be taken in the wrong context preventively without proper conversation and understanding. That plus "cut /b" culture makes it difficult to communicate and break into social circles. People say it's all IC when for many people it is clearly not. And that's a legal, illegal, and in-between thing.

Thing with this is that people only roleplay very privately and it's incredibly difficult to get into the group OOC too, unless you want to deal with the extreme bullying or people mocking you for nothing while you're just being told ¨deal with it¨ or that it's not ¨serious¨, when it's clearly breaking against the Common Courtesy-rule of how you should treat other members.
A lot of the time you'll as a new member get met with bullying, just pure OOC bullying, and IC bullying as well.
Most factions are strongly built on OOC-connections or OOC-relations, there is no attempt most of the time of people trying to be friendly IC and it just goes to straight-up ostracism both IC and OOC, making it impossible to join a group.

Personally, I wish that the common courtesy rule with administrators in the faction discords were followed up on more or that there were more administrators in the faction discords to keep up and notice the bullying or the downright disgusting treatment some members have to deal with, or an example would be that moderators that solely dealt with keeping an eye on that the factions followed the common courtesy rule were implemented.

I think that the common courtesy rule is the rule that people always forget or never follow, and I think that rule is the rule that probably needs to be moderated a lot more. 

We always preach in reality this golden rule:

¨Treat others the same way you want to be treated.¨

But on here, it's like this rule is non-existent.

That's just my opinion though.

Edited October 27, 2021 by Alys

[The.Godfather]

30 minutes ago, Tickle said:

The entire server is full of OOC nepotism disguised as IC motive. Being friends OOCly with the right people is way more important then the Roleplay you might bring to them. In fact, because they don't know you then your roleplay will perhaps be taken in the wrong context pre-emptively without proper conversation and understanding. That plus "cut /b" culture makes it difficult to communicate and break into social circles. People say it's all IC when for many people it is clearly not. And that's a legal, illegal, and in-between thing.

💯

[Illusory]

Every time I've tried roleplaying with a new faction I'm asked for my discord name almost immediately. I also get a lot of "What is your plan for your character in this faction", etc. Even if we have only been roleplaying together for an hour or so at most. Character development and progression would be much better if I didn't have to provide my discord ID the moment I start RPing with any group.

[Koko]

I've made it a point to, other than my main faction (K-Town, where our Discord communication is mostly as a social hub to mostly chat, shitpost and meme anyway) and a few other long-standing friends from the community, to limit my OOC communication with people I RP with as much as possible. In fact, I don't really RP at all with most of the GTAW people I talk to on Discord. We're just OOC buddies and we don't let that interfere in the paths of our characters. I definitely don't like discussing IC decisions or motives with the people involved IC, and if I meet someone spontaneously through RP, I have never asked for a Discord handle unless it was for something specific like needing to share a relevant file, image or document for something. If communication happens OOC, it usually relates to the RP at hand and it's kept to a minimum.

 

It helps my enjoyment and if there's a falling out it's easier to remain certain in the fact that it was 99% ICly motivated, due to events happening in the game. I'm here to RP first and foremost. It's nice that you can get along OOC, but it's not even really necessary as long as you're having fun in your shared hobby together.

[Sixth]

I hate being in a discord when I'm RPing with a faction or group of friends. It ruins the immersion for me and it's always "you ig?"

 

I prefer things to be natural. Hop in game and ICly meet up and such.

[ozymandias]

Without fail, being in Discords or otherwise mixing IC and OOC with people I've met in game has led to me enjoying the RP less and less. I understand it being used as an organizational tool, but it really just becomes tedious. I don't like people being able to @ me and tell me to get on, or inadvertently metagaming by learning about IC events through Discord. 

 

I found that I enjoyed GTA:W the most when I was brand new to it and everything felt organic IC; my character met a group of people IC, got to know them IC, earned their trust, etc. Things started to fall off once we had an OOC connection. For me, it makes things feel less natural and more forced. I'm all for setting up RP scenarios OOC for the purpose of story telling and character development, but when you're PMing me on Discord telling me to get on so my character can pay his weekly fee to the faction, it's just gonna make me get on less.