What will keep you in ALFA2?

[Rumple C]

So, plenty of returning players around, which is fantastic. My question to all out community is though, what will keep you logging back in? I don't want to see a slide back down this activity in a few months time, so I ask with the intention to help provide what you want.

What will keep you logging back into ALFA2?

Please comment below. And keep it respectful of other peoples ideas, please. This is a chance for you to get your thoughts out, not a chance to idea bash someone else.

Ideas?

A grand plot? (Pretty sure Heegz is well on top of this one in BG)
More stuff to do with my buddies without a dm? (See statics out of Ruqel in BG btw)
A sense of purpose for my PC?
More dm'ing for my pc?
Other players
A chance to make physical changes to the server (Burning down a house, building a palisade)
More high level monster drops
More low level monster drops
-Insert your awesome idea here-

I should probably add, the more detail you can provide, the better the result you (ALFA) will get back. Verbosity, people.

[HEEGZ]

For me it is having few obstacles to play with my friends. These are primarily free time and ALFA rules. Having a DM on MS would be very nice, and I don't seem to lack for players to DM on BG at the moment.

[edit]
Don't forget the infestations on BG are added content filler for people besides static quests when no DMs are on. Group up and take them down. I have at least three other infestation themes ready to go if you knock out the first two...

[Ithildur]

A grand plot? (Pretty sure Heegz is well on top of this one in BG)
More stuff to do with my buddies without a dm? (See statics out of Ruqel in BG btw)
A sense of purpose for my PC?
More dm'ing for my pc?
Other players
A chance to make physical changes to the server (Burning down a house, building a palisade)
More high level monster drops
More low level monster drops

E. All of the above

[Rumple C]

E. All of the above doesn't help me target my efforts Ith. I want the most bang for my buck.

[Ithildur]

Ah, I got you.

In that case I shall have to get back to you because it'll mean I have to think, which is somewhat painful these days.

[Xanthea]

More DMing of any kind.

[Rumple C]

I should probably add, the more detail you can provide, the better the result you (ALFA) will get back. Verbosity, people.

[boombrakh]

[Post deleted by author]

[Swift]

For me, the problem has been an eternal struggle since I first joined: I live in the wrong timezone.

Finding even semi-consistent DMing as a player from Australia is near on impossible in hours that are actually convenient. The days of being up until 5am to catch a Euro DM are long gone.

Edit: And before anyone has a chance to say "Become a DM and run a session", that is not something that would actually keep me, because I enjoy playing more.

[Rumple C]

Perhaps worth noting swift, that there have been US night owls that are playing (and dm'ing even) during your evenings, and heegz infestations on BG provide things for players to (kill) do. But I hear you on the time zone thing.

[HEEGZ]

More DMing of any kind.

It has pretty much always boiled down to this.

[Zelknolf]

I'd note that there've been six hak releases, and I wrote the largest quest in ALFA ... and then made an even bigger one since Persephone's seen a DM, and I'm still routinely ignored or excluded from typical player-run activities. Not that I expect to get DMed an equal amount to the work I put in here, because that's not doable, but my willingness to work here steadily wanes as I spend more and more time not participating in things. And if I'm not working here, I'm probably working somewhere else, and probably also playing where I work.


Though, of course, I'd probably respond to the "drop even more rules!" and the "DMing of any kind!" to note that Xan totally quit a regular game and we need rules to ensure that the leaving PC can join other play and be still in the ballpark of reasonability in terms of history and balance-- the character left Moonshaes with a normal kit for her level and without having gone into space or robbed a palace in clogs or arm wrestled a deity and won-- and those are about the only rules we have left. Nobody's asked Standards to do anything in a long while, our "bloated" pricing and XP rules are automated, DM oversight amounts to telling your HDM what happened, and our charter's mostly about how we assign responsibility to keep the place running and defining what the place is that we're trying to make run.

So I guess "clearly not any kind," and "I'm pretty sure we need these rules. These are the ones that still do stuff for us."

[Twin Axes]

Regular once/week campaign with people I like whose PC's are at similar levels to my PC.

[Adanu]

For people to actually keep to time slots if I decide to try DMing a campaign with them, and for a DM to actually DM the 10+ levels. I'm not retiring Zyrus anytime soon, and he's ripe for getting a player group together along with some fun assets. Vashand is a potential DM for this, but more would be great.

I need more 3+ level players for a WHL campaign. I've been asking for players for months (now about a year), so I can resume it. Analogkid has tried to help me organize in this regard, but he can only do so much when I have barely three people interested.

[Ithildur]

After some thought, I think the key issue for me comes down to: whatever eliminates the sense of static-ness/predictability in the game world that ALFA has suffered from for a very long time. This is probably more true for long time players and/or players of higher level PCs that have explored quite a bit of static content, but I think eventually it becomes applicable for most everyone.

The hunger for DMing is about the fact that when a DM comes online and starts interacting with players, the world starts to feel less static; you never know what that NPC is going to do/say, you never know if something besides the usual critters in location x are going to jump out at you and do some serious harm. Even something as simple as a narrative description of the weather changing is a bit of dynamism (?) imo.

DMing is probably the best, or at least the quickest, high impact method of infusing unpredictability/dynamism from a investment/returns aspect. 20-30 minutes of spontaneous possession/dialog with a significant NPC can suddenly turn everything on it's head! While it's not impossible to do something similar between PCs, it just doesn't happen very often in my experience due to 1. shift in culture 2. shift in ruleset (i.e. CvC) 3. smaller playerbase.

Building/adding new content is obviously another way to infuse dynamism, but it's quite time/investment heavy and thanks to the nature of NWN2's toolset, a rather daunting challenge for many folks. And something else that may or may not be obvious; the very nature of adding content through building in NWN2 makes things static in the long run (things were better in NWN1 when the average DM or even player could build stuff relatively quickly and put them in/update modules on a fairly regular basis; my observation is that's been much more rare with NWN2, though some of that could be blamed on absent HDMs or such). No matter how interesting, well crafted, dynamic, etc the new content is, it is eventually going to be rather static (unless some creative solutions can be implemented to make a static more random/unpredictable in various ways perhaps). Players that have been around for years are no longer going to be as enthused by the low lvl statics on server X that were once a source of great fun; I've even heard folks say they dread having to do them again with new low lvl PCs for the umpteenth time. i.e. the shelf life/returns on investment aren't as good as time spent say DMing in the long run, because DMing will always be 'fresh' and unpredictable in a certain sense, vs static content being by it's very nature, static.

Having said that, the obvious fact is that regardless, we need more static content and benefit from them; every time a bit of new static content goes in it's a bit of fresh air, whether it stays fresh for 1 month, 6 months, or 1 year it's definitely an addition, improvement, and adds to the sense of dynamism in the world, as well as a sense of stability that the world needs. I can testify that the half dozen or so new areas from Foam that I saw in BG this week successfully breathed a bit of new life for me even if the areas weren't full of dynamic high lvl adventures or whatnot, simply because it was a bit of a break from predictability/static-ness. I am sooo appreciative to Zelk and Foam (and whoever else I don't know about) that have been actively building and putting in new statics, etc. even if the new content may not be an ideal fit for my main PC currently. I want to scream from the mountaintops that people should go check them out (unless their PCs are Banites or something).