@auspice said in San Francisco: Paris of the West:
@gangofdolls said in San Francisco: Paris of the West:
but I'm not sure that feeling like Mage PC #431-9 in a sea of other PCs all clamoring to get involved in the same IG opportunities is fun, either.
The question is:
What will they provide for the people that get walled off for X weeks? Everyone's gonna get established, settled, grab spots, roll up on any plots running....
Are they factoring in the need to help new people get/feel involved once those spheres reopen? The perk to rolling 'enrollment' as it were is there's a sort of steady stream of new people. But if you're the only ones for the foreseeable future, I can see people (esp. the bad Mage players and the ultra-cliquey Changeling players) making sure they grab up any and everything they can and hoarding.
Tbh, my general experience is the first 'wave' of players in a newly open game generally gets this kind of unfettered access to building ties, getting established, etc. so cap or no cap, there's just a certain amount of this sort of thing that I think is unavoidable. I don't confuse that with necessarily being good but I think of it as a cost of doing business in terms of coming into a game later.
My attempt on Fallen World, for example, had stripes off this problem. Granted, I wasn't aware of any resource hoarding or the usual kind of channel clique fuckery that you may see on other games. Instead, what I did experienced was that most PCs were hugely siloed into their situation. Many of them didn't leave their builds, except for plot participation. There was very little public RP and while some players were open to new PCs, many people seemed to be satisfied with their IC networks as they existed.
I generally pride myself on being a proactive player in most game environments but I had a very hard time getting into things there in part because the blush was off the rose and the honeymoon period had passed and the game phase was definitely set to 'coast'. I think if I had been not quite so burned out on MU* at that point, I may have hung on longer but I just couldn't do it. I just happened to get lucky on the timing where SF is concerned, in terms of being around at opening.
I think, though, that small caps do make for better spotting where your concerns are related when staff is solid. I so far believe the SF staff fits this bill. They seem more inclined to squash a problem like you're describing because they have a better sense of what is happening in their own game sphere. There's just no way that 100+ mage PCs even has that kind of visibility because its just not humanly possible.
And its still possible that bad actors and broken stairs will be in these spheres, the statistics generally reflect that you'll get a percentage of that no matter what. But at least staff has a better chance at preserving resources, ensuring continuity, and controlling for quality so that its easier to bring the next wave in. If people are unfriendly or closed off if you're in that second wave, that's their loss and I mean that as a compliment to you.
