Why the Low Numbers?

[Fuzziebunny]

This. This is me right here.

I've never been the one to DM or create events, but I've always been one to interact with situations and figure out how to work problems. It's awesome to read some of these RP Central posts and figure out what's going on in the world, but there's no one I could do something like that.

The other issue I have is whenever a DM does log on for "Hey guys! Send me a request!" and I just sit here like

"Well... I mean... I have X and Y going on, but I see 9 other people online, so I'll let oyu have them. I'll just be over here farming on my guy..."

It's not that you guys are intimidating, it's just I have no idea how to form a request, be it character or in-game, without sounding like "Yo! I need yo helpz over here STAT. We got a major issue and it needs resolvin'!"

This is my issue right here. I just don't think my character has anything a DM would want to do anything for, honestly. I love to RP but I get that I am not the best or most creative at it.

I would love to see more faction events. Of course I don't normally get to attend them, but I love hear about them. It makes things move along. I also feel that if the DM's feel players are moving a faction in a direction they don't feel it should go then there should be consequences. Honestly, I feel that all RP is fun. Embracing the good and the bad things that effect our characters is what makes the game fun.

[Starrizer]

I'm just chillin' out until February That's when Drake will be playable again! I've had him RP wise doing Lathander things, helping people, etc. However, I don't feel comfortable actually playing since there is a bounty on him and junks - and with no favor it'd be a horrible idea to even talk to someone interested in his bounty. :3 So I'll be back soon enough - not much longer at all!

As far as the stagnation - you guys are just busy and things have slowed down :P
You can only do so much my wonderful DM's! But I assure you - your work is very appreciated! *High five*

[crawmorr]

I've been playing D&D on PnP for a long time ago , and i 've been playng this game about six months , and i'm still having problems to know how exactly the mechanic Works compared to the PnP. That makes me real shy to make a request and mess it all . I 've played on another server before , where the DM's ,sometimes , did some random Events (like using a shout to everyone saying that some gate was broken by some enemies )
And seeing all experienced PC's rolling its a good way for who are not confourtable , or shy, learn how to act , know how DM's use to pull the strings , etc..
Its been a month that i came to Sundren and its a really beatifull Valley (congratz).
But i didn't saw anyone of my Faction interacting with a DM or any random event (i still don't know if that happens in Sundren) to my Faction's goal.
But i'm not complaining , i'm still enjoying to play along the Others PC's , its really fun. They help me a lot to understand the game mechanics .
I know sometimes its hard to gather everyone at the same time , and i'm having a few time to play theses days .Maybe the others are on the same matters . I think thats the reason for the low numbers.

This is a great server (And i'm very addicted to this game )

Cheers !

[gamestarmike]

I just got tired of farming whurest and armory. I've purposely held off rep gains on Tyranus from flags so that I could rank through events, because I feel that flag rep should cap off at some point. Any person can just grind flags all day and get the highest rank in the faction without any rp. I just think that’s wrong imo.

Tyranus is pretty useless in fights(pve and pvp), I can cap his ac to 48 but everything hits for 45-50+ and his ab is around (27ab-42ac, 21ab-48ac) and since all the mobs have an insane amount of ac I have to roll 18+ to hit, so the intended thought process of having a character that was a tank but had reduced hit/dmg turned into a low ac(48ac is somehow low which blows my mind) and no way to deal any damage unless I roll 20's. I don't want my dwarf to be some overpowered tank/dps, I just want character roles to actually mean something, dps shouldn't be the only viable build on this server.

There is no real balance, it is just build power gaming characters that deal insane amounts of damage and it’s over. The only time healer characters are ever needed is if it is a player pvp event and both sides all-star dps characters blow each other up and healers race to somehow burst heal their party since any semblance of tabletop combat is thrown out because the game itself is not turn based in the sense of a real turn based game and fights are over in mere seconds.

I have enjoyed every event I have ever been in, the DM's have done great by them recently, Atmosphere even had Tyranus the center point of our treasure hunt last week with him enticing everyone with a treasure map he found in his beard which really made me happy. It was an event that anyone could have joined and I’m sure everyone had a blast that went.

tl;dr
- Balance problems
- Grinding, people soloing to end game faction reps with little to no rp involved
- Recent DM events have been amazing but the staff has been working on icewind dale so faction rp has been at a standstill for months

[Jhickey]

3. Tell us how you plan on doing it. Give us your actions as a PC, a real plan that shows forethought and insight. Are you going to walk on in? Do it in disguise? Ethereal your way in? The more specific you make your methods, the easier it'll be for us to help you accomplish (or fail) at them.

4. Know that you're not going to always win. Some stuff will blow up in your face. Others will peter out, and others will be flat denied or argued against. But, that's ok. The trick is to keep trying, until you get it accomplished. No single mover on this server has ever accomplished something on the first try. Or second, or third, or tenth.
"

I can only echo this. Not only have I made countless requests, but I have also failed at events. I find that it is one of the best experiences I do have. I always ask, and sometimes over ask. You should never be afraid of what the answer is, infact always be ready to hear a no, or expect to be asked for a revision; remember that because you have an idea and wrote it down does not mean that the person on the other end of their computer is fully understanding your idea.

There are very few people that I do not enjoy RPing with on this server. And infact relish when I have a chance to RP when I am on as Datton. Give your ideas to the busy DM team, and be presistent and ready to revise.

[Dossey]

I agree with most of what Fury said, while I understand that you can't always get what you want, I feel like roughly 99% of what I have attempted to do with my character has gone nowhere. The contracts and plans I have laid out are either waiting on other players or DM intervention, and there is only so much time I can spend shooting the breeze with other players IC before I feel like I am wasting my real life having fake conversations. Don't get me wrong, I love to RP with people, but there is only so much we can talk about without any real current events happening around us.

This is what made me lose interest. I enjoyed sitting around the Enclave and talking with Sandro about our plans, ideas, etc., and what we would do moving forward... Only to never really see anything happen. I had 2 posts in the Enclave forums that never got responded to (well, one was responded to by a DM but nothing ever came from it when I replied). There's only so much you can do with other players.

Unfortunately, DM activity is pretty much what always drives a server forward and keeps high player counts. I'm not bitching or anything, as I just decided to move on, but I figured I'd share the reason since you asked.

[Atmosphere]

We have a staff side thread going on about this but here are my thoughts.

Wouldn't say I'm burnt out. Just demotivated. Both players and staff seem fixated on the mechanical element of our world and not the fictional fun role play part that gets me going. Right now, I feel if I make a post in the forums about anything story related its lucky if it gets one response while the smallest stupid mechanical change ends up having pages and pages of babble.

And I do have a server wide event going.. . . people seem more interested in doing their own thing.... and I can't read minds.

[Fuzziebunny]

I didn't know there was a server wide event going. I am not interested in doing my own thing. I would actually like to be involved in something. I suppose I just feel like my character is not important enough to post anything on events. I look at what is going on and I think, wrongly now I know, that the posts made are for a specific group.

I feel as if I am event crashing I guess.

[Redjack]

I wouldn't want any of the DM's to be discouraged. They always seem to be working hard to keep people happy. The server has never been better, this is the most complete thought out and mature NWN2 server available.
Personally I don't have the time to commit to regular play. But as long as this server exists I will be here on a more or less irregular basis.

[thaelis]

No plots going on.

It's supposed to be at war but actually you log in and it's more like a nice holiday in the south of France

The most dangerous event taking place recently was Sandro and Quintin having a bicker near the campfire.

[sonuvalich]

I can't speak for other players, but in the comparison of mechanics vs. story, story will always, always win. NWN2 sucks as a D&D emulator, I got over it, it could be worse. I played "Temple of Elemental Evil" before they patched it to make it playable. My personal feeling (feeling means lacking evidence to back it up) is that people would be happy with lore advancing without mechanical or in-game changes for many things. I think players would be happy to handle more of the running of stuff if they could, but many things require DM action to have repercussions in game, or at least a show of event approval from the staff.

For example:
I recently put in a thread about wanting to start a project with the Red Wizards to build some gnoll caves to breed better gnolls. I didn't need a DM event with twists and turns and map changes to the Enclave or new NPC models for the gnolls in Aquor. A little DM oversight on the event would have been fun, but we could have winged it as a player-run event using our imaginations. What it really needed was a staff thumbs up that it was kosher for us to do, and possibly some rough numbers on what it would have cost, what we needed for materials, etc. In the end, I would have been content with a small Enclave-run event for ourselves and a small post on the Aquor rumors sticky that new, meaner gnolls were seen strutting in Aquor if we succeeded or that whispers were spreading of a great mishap within the Enclave and maybe the death of some Wizards if we failed.

The biggest reason we don't just go "fuck it, we're running this event ourselves and we'll tell everyone IC that they should act like they see big, badass gnolls in Aquor now" is because we respect the server and the need for balance and avoiding god-modding. If we're saying one thing and the staff is saying another (or nothing) then the narrative gets muddled, and that kills the fun more than anything else. Instead of IC conflict, we'd get player vs. player conflict about what was canonical and what rules were being broken. And of course, running it ourselves wouldn't be as fun because we can't spawn in the surprise nest of umber hulks or squash a character dead for botching a spell and collapsing a tunnel on his head.

I just think if there was some way to advance stories of groups, even without events, it might revitalize some people. One thought I have on that regard is the ability to make invite threads. If we could invite one faction to view only a particular thread of our forum, we could collaborate more easily without making everything public knowledge until we wanted to. If this is not something we can do, I guess we could try password locked Google docs or something...

[Vaelek]

We have a staff side thread going on about this but here are my thoughts.



And I do have a server wide event going.. . . people seem more interested in doing their own thing.... and I can't read minds.

Mechanics are easy to reply to.
While story is inevitably more interesting, not every story applies to every character. I've certainly skipped out of so-called 'server wide' events that took place in Mirakus. Why? Not because I hate server wide events, but because there are cool IC relations with people presiding over Mirakus that make it difficult to go there.

On other occasions I've gone to the Second Wind Inn, seen a server wide event, and decided it would be for the best that I leave that as well. Again, not because I hate server wide events, but because there were enough people about doing chaotic or bordering evil things that my character would have devolved into PvP with them. I love good conflict RP. And certainly there are times where I've shown up, taken action and killed a bitch. But this shouldn't be the norm lest I ruin a chance at fun, on every occasion, for said alternative alignment players. Actions that devolve into pew-pew 'dead-or-alive-you're-coming-with-me' PvP mid-event, unless an event is catered to such, I love less so.

I see GD replied fairly quickly here to players saying there wasn't enough response to individual player events and ideas. Maybe the staff has been too bogged down by these, but I've yet to see response to any of my personal plots - as opposed to my faction plots, which receive relatively quick replies. Unless they don't.

The population of a server seems to always be tied to the number of active, event running DMs. On the occasions that I've logged in recently, this number seems low. People have real lives, burnout is a constant threat and it's hard to pin 'responsibility' as a DM on your fellow staff members, expecting them to show up any time to take the reigns. I understand that completely. But in my honest opinion, formulated by witnessing Sundren in this situation several times now, the server comes back very briefly when the main plot is advanced. And then we very abruptly again come to the point of a faction stalemate without minor advancement, or by my own experience, personalized advancement. And so, DM inactivity followed subsequently by player inactivity. Which is not necessarily to say that our current DMs are inactive, but that perhaps it's difficult to focus on the wide range needed to entertain a full audience. Or that there aren't enough of them, as they have schedules that only allow a certain degree of time investment to reply to very certain things.

I could be wrong, other people could disagree. Players are certainly guilty of being inane baboons on the other end of things, too. This is just what I've found to be the case here most predominantly.

[Torgar]

I can say from personal experience and watching the Legion forums, that I hardly, if ever, see a Legion post responded too at all. This often leads to the feelings mentioned earlier of "Why bother working for it if there isn't going to be any interest in it?", which is depressing at times. Sometimes, all those posts really need is some one having some high ranking npc reading the reports, and actually acknowledging them. There's been posts on many of the things other people, either individuals or entire factions, are doing and our proposed responses to them, and nothing but crickets on every post. I get that it can be rather rough for one person to go through and read an entire faction's posts everyday, but I really do think it'd be doable. I personally don't do a lot of RP posts on my faction forums specifically because of just having that overall feeling that no one is going to bother reading it, or that anything important I put in there just is going to get lost and forgotten.

Another problem I've noticed is that many people have absolutely no idea what their faction's goals are. I guarantee most Blackwood or Ebon Coin couldn't really tell you exactly what their faction's goals are at this point. Legion has the whole "retake the valley" goal, but that's so incredibly vague. There's no direction on what they should be doing now, either inside the city or groundside. Black Hand has Sestra, and then....what? About the only thing I hear from them for the most part is "Blargh, kill the good guys and rule the valley....I guess?" Because many of the newer folk have absolutely no idea what the BH's true objectives are.

So, those are probably the two biggest things I've seen to explain the drop in numbers.

1. Feelings of being ignored within your faction by the npc leadership.

2. Lack of direction within the factions.

About the best I could suggest on number two is that, although it's fun to learn surprising information in some elaborate twist in an event for what our faction's next move is, I think with how low the numbers are, it's actually time for those who are within one rank of the top of their faction to actually get some more indepth information on what the faction's major plans are coming up ahead of time, so things can be prepared for. Does the deeper doom of the banites know what the next invasion plan is? Does the centurio of the 10th have a clue as to the first step in getting troops back groundside? Does the Thayan Archmage know what the plan is for Aquor? I know the answer to one of those is a very large "No, he doesn't", but won't get into which. Just saying, we don't have the numbers to have so many secret plans from the player leadership of the factions. Some players need this knowledge, so they can act in the stead of the staff in some minor matters when the staff is not there.

If we know what the plans are, or even just an idea of where we're going, we'll know what events to request to further our own person goals and to further our factions goals on a smaller scale.

[Farmboy2003]

I know a few players who ache for nature factions. The lycanthrope rumors are really cool, but for myself I cannot figure if I need to be good-natureish or fury-natureish. I somehow wish that the DEV's would take charge if players didn't. There's no strong PC influence to start the nature guys up? Then perhaps a DM should do it, so the faction can be implemented at least.

But perhaps the nature faction needs to be implemented as part as a server wide plot?

I think it's not as much a server plot that's needed, but more that faction events need to give consequences to the conflict at large. Like the thing we've got on in the legion friday with GD. If were successful, it'll mean a lot for the legion and the conflict at large.

As Manu states, being a European player can sometimes be tiresome because very few DM's are on. I've decided personally to reconcile myself with it and get the fun I can - So I'd much rather plot and do self-made stuff with players than DMs!

EDIT: I think Torgar is onto something too. I'm not wholly into how the DMs work practically with events, interactions and mechanics, so I'm sometimes full of ideas, but not really in possession of the means to how I go about it. It would be nice with some Information For Slowpokes for factions and the like. Much like GD has already replied with.

[gamestarmike]

I feel if I make a post in the forums about anything story related its lucky if it gets one response while the smallest stupid mechanical change ends up having pages and pages of babble.

Wow these are literally words out of my mouth. Are you me? I have said this multiple times with lich in private conversations. A few weeks ago as he had mentioned we started a few threads for Thay RP in hopes of getting some small events thrown our way, instead we got no responses for a week and three threads about etheral with a sum of 70+ posts. I stopped being active after that. As of right now I will come on to my characters if events require them but other then that I am completely burnt out on the grindfest.

Atmosphere, I would rather join a thousand events run by you or other dm's then ever see any game mechanics changed, i'm sure you know most of all the problems and as dms, would play around them for the groups. I really really enjoyed that pirate event, I almost came back, but watching threads like the etheral one get reply after reply and rp threads get crickets really gets to me.