The Question:
With the new RP forum architecture should there be any restrictions on access? Should people be required to be on these forums for a certain length of time? Should they need to have made a certain number of posts? Should they have a "sponsor" from within the RiG community? Should they be required to share a story with the RiG before being given access? Should some of these forums be more/less restricted than others? Should they be required to request access to the RP Forums? Can you think of any other objective criteria that might be used?Background:I have been, with much help, developing a new forum architecture to help the community here.
You can read more here. We have begun discussing what degree of restriction (if any) we would like placed on access to the RP forums and it occurred to me that input from RPers would probably be a good thing
The structure you have coming at this time is:
- RP & Lore Forums = "The place for RP Help, Planning and Discussion, with sub-forums for RP and Lore"
- Star Wars Lore Discussion = "The place for discussion of Lore. Spoiler Alert!"
- Character Backgrounds = "The place for your character's background and biographical information."
- Open RP = "The place to run open forum RP sessions."
- Fan Stories = "The place for your character's continuing saga and other fan stories."
The concept of restrictions are requirements for access are also being discussed for the Trade Forum currently in development.
You can read more about the possible Trade Forum restrictions starting on page 3 of this thread.Pros and Cons of Restrictions (as I see them):
PRO:
There will undoubtedly be people who try to disrupt not only the RiG community in general, but the RP specifically. I've seen it quite a bit on days when PvP and PvE servers were down in WoW. For awhile it appeared to be considered quite the cool thing to do. I definitely expect it to happen here, sooner or later.
CON:
Some have argued (and I personally tend to agree) that RPers are already rather elitist. Certainly RPers tend to be a rather closed group. But if you want to expand awareness of RP and gather new RPers into the game then you have to both allow and encourage participation.
PRO:
Conversely I believe this elitism and defensiveness stems from the nearly constant assault on RP. As it stands now RPers are very defensive about whom they allow to even know about their RP. Worse, many people who are simply new to RP get turned off because in trying to learn to RP they offend someone and get excluded or even ranted at. Perhaps having a "safe haven" for RP would help people relax and just enjoy the experience?
For Myself:I'm not much of a "social RPer". I have some back-story in my head for every character I've ever played seriously. In Bioware games I maintain some sort of motivational concept which I allow to drive my choices in-game. But, being the overly analytic engineering sort that I am, I just don't deal as well with free-form, interactive, go-with-the-flow RP. On that note I might mention that there was this one time (in band camp) when I actually honestly thought I might be over-thinking things. But on 13th thought, nahhhh...
So what I'm getting at is that I would really like to hear from the social RPers in the community on this topic.