Kumi Azai's Suggestion Board [Week 1]

#1

Hello there! It’s your friendly neighborhood Fox-Avali!

I am writing this suggestion board to give Accipter, and other members of our fine roleplay, as well as for the people who are new to the roleplay as a whole and are visiting the forums to see about the setting and future ideas proposed by the community. I will post these topics once a week, unless otherwise delayed due to IRL circumstances.

Lets set the topics I want to talk about for this week,

  1. Getting a baseline
  2. Helping new players
  3. The locations that should be added
  4. Funding the website as a whole

Lets start by talking about topic one, Getting a baseline.
Every roleplay starts with at least two people talking to each other, writing their own stories through interaction with other characters. If we wish to be able to properly construct a long lasting, enjoyable, and fun roleplay environment, we will want to make a few minor additions if the codebase allows for it.

The first thing I wanted to talk about in topic one is getting some soft-lore, a term that I believe is used by some other roleplay environments, for instance, one of my first experiences in this server was my character realizing they may not have any money to pay for goods and or services, I was in response told by a character that this is a leisure economy, where its a system where you can take as much as you want, without having to pay in return to my knowledge. A good example of soft-lore that we don’t have is a somewhat standard currency that does not have to be used, but could be used if a player or character wants to maintain that sense of normalcy associated with an economy. However, a great example of soft-lore that we do have is, the yellow train can have incoming, but not outgoing people, as Sinder is a place locked in a unknown reality. Now while I understand that in most cases a roleplay community is defined by the stories its characters make, I want to address that some player and characters may have a difficult time working with minimalized asset and lore. Not all lore has to be set in stone either, a lot of it can be simply malleable.

How we can make this better, is by talking here in the topic thread about suggestions for soft-lore, and coming to community bases agreements of what should, and shouldn’t, be considered official soft lore.

Next up in topic one, is the creation of standard communication platform norms, also known as, creating interfaces that allow users who are being frustrated with someone who isn’t breaking the rules, but is not following common norms, to mute or block, alongside adding a friend function in the future, I don’t know how much work you are able to put into Wolfery on a day to day basis, but we all love it here, and we dearly thank you for your hard work, so doing this might cause less workload for moderators that would end up having to deal with unfortunate situations. Mentions and replies are already in place.

Lastly in topic one is the concept of time, what time period is Wolfery in? What is the date, the hour, the year?.. This would be a fantastic example of just Lore, stuff that is rigid, but can still be changed over time. Maybe asking some people to take up a lore writers position after a small test would be a good idea, a community lore writing contest might be a good proposal as well… A lot of things can happen to better bring the environment together.

Next up is topic two, this is a shorter topic than topic one, but still important. Helping new players. New players are going to be the lifeblood of Wolfery for these next few months, because getting in the potential for new stories, new location proposals, new ideas, and new concepts is crucial to having a fluidly functioning roleplay environment with ton to do, see, and experience…

The thing I wanted to discuss in topic two first, is the potential of making some more greeter bots, as I don’t know how often everyone has the time to use any of the dummy characters, and I don’t know how often the Station Master is online. I know a custom tailored user experience is preferred, so potentially another counter argument idea, would be to have a dedicated ‘Greeter’ Role for some players and characters who wish to help newer players and characters get off their feet and into the world of Wolfery to begin creating new content.

The second thing at hand with topic two is the idea of expanding the tutorial, I saw it being mentioned that a tutorial phase could be a good idea, and I wanted to second that, alongside have an area for introductions for new characters, as not everyone knows how to introduce themselves to new areas well.

Lastly in topic two I wanted to discuss clearer informational panels on certain aspect of roleplay, we might have a couple good examples for the roleplay aspect of characters here on the forums, but perhaps some more interactivity or a potential roleplay mechanics test might be a good idea to help player know where they stand in experience, without discouraging them from partaking to begin with.

Next up again, is topic three, this is one of the more straightforward and bullet pointed topics in my suggestions board for the week. New locations are the lifeblood of innovative roleplay and may inspire people to create their own creations!

Some of the first things I would like to mention is that there are a few particular places I would love to see a form of implemented in the coming months, and I encourage all who read this to steal my ideas and try to make it a reality. They are as follows,

Medical place of some kind, could be a clinic, or a hospital.
Small police station just to make sure that people don’t try to rob or murder everyone they come across, after all, murder hobos are no fun to roleplay with.
Community center, maybe with a basketball court, or some kind of activity center, this one is a particular personal interest of mine.
Getting the town hall operational is probably on the list but I will mention it anyways.
Maybe some public places like more parks, and sports areas.
A museum would be great for learning about the history of Sinder!
A fancy restaurant for people who want to go on fancy dates of course.
Perhaps a small shopping district like a mall or storefront area wouldn’t be a bad idea either.

That’s pretty much all my standard recommendations for in the city.

Finally its time for my last idea, Funding the Website as a whole. Lets be real, if this blows up in a short time frame, I don’t know how Accipiter is going to keep up if they are just one person. That is why I propose some new roles be created, and a fundraising site be used.

Patreon is a fantastic site with very little legal bs to worry about, I personally use it to support a lot of my favorite content creators and artists, and would love to support here as well, and I think a lot of people would agree. Setting up some small role based tiers would be a fantastic idea, and I think that the tiers should go something as follows, the names of said tiers can of course be decided by you!

$1 - Tipper
$5 - Supporter
$10 - Fluffy Supporter
$25 - Extra Fluffy Supporter
$50 - Super Supporter
$100 - Amazing Supporter

No higher than one hundred dollars a month for the highest tier however, as that just encourages a paid enjoyment mindset.

That is pretty much it for this week of Kumi Azai’s Suggestion Board… And I wish you all a lovely wonderful fluffy wolfy day.

P.S - Don’t forget to pet the fox-vali.

#2

I was the one who made the statement about the leisure economy (I think I was on as one of my alts at the time). I probably should add that my statement about it being a leisure economy wasn’t definitive so much as, without an established means of exchange, either by lore or by some in-game mechanism, that sort of ends up being what you end up with by default. Although there’s a lot to be said for an environment whose commercial environment is chaotic, with all sorts of currencies being tossed about.

People do tend to fret about not having currency or jobs, so I do sort of feel obligated to gently suggest that they won’t be forced to live under bridges or wander off into the woods and live off of berries and bugs and stuff.

#3

Yeah, I didn’t mean to sound like I called you out, I was just using it s an example. Hopefully that clears things up lol.

#4

I moved this to General since it didn’t have a very specific call to a feature or bug, with Kumi’s approval.

First, about lore: That can be pretty loose! Because a good chunk of Sinder’s soft-lore is that it’s the coming together of different shards of reality through the rift. It’s lore that manages to be lightweight and at the same time accommodates different lore segments in different areas. (except in extreme cases and that’s what you’d want your own Mucklet Realm for when that happens.)

Greeting: We’ve decided for now to let this be a bit… organic, happening out in the park. The reason is something that surprised us too (and is documented a bit on this forum): We found as often as not that people didn’t react positively to being engaged by Tom. In some cases they ran, usually out to the park. I’m not sure why that is, but so far it’s a thing. He’s not going anywhere though. :slight_smile:

Areas: Good ideas all. It’s somewhat important to have a built in community or purpose in mind, to some extent we don’t want ‘dead’ areas building up, which I talk about in this thread. Have a look at the Building and Areas board for more, too! And there’s nothing stopping you from getting started disconnected from the grid. It can always be connected.

Support: These are good ideas, let’s see what Boss Wolf says. :slight_smile: We’re currently trying to restructure things a little behind the scenes to take pressure off him and let him concentrate more on features and bugs.

One nice thing about the software that runs Wolfery is that it runs well, even on ‘potato hardware’ as we used to call the old tiny server. It’s not like the old days of mucks where you had to find a rack with internet access and power and…

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#5

Hi @KumiAzai! And welcome to the forum :smiley:

I have limited time today, but will just reply in short (Post Edit- I lied. It didn’t end up short):

Getting a baseline

World building and lore is really not my thing. These are areas I’d happily leave completely to the community. But I can tell you about my initial thoughts, which we surely can stray from!

This realm (Wolfery) is actually sort of a ‘test realm’, hopefully the first of many. It was purposely given no theme except “furry”.
The background story was meant to be vague. Sort of a “Let’s start here and see where it goes.”
I expect realms to come to be more specific in their themes though.

Currencies

Due to this vagueness, I have imagined someone paying with coins at the inn, credit card by the kiosk, or by trade at the nimbat village. An official currency? Sure. As said, I’d happily leave this in other hands.

Time and seasons

How I’ve imagined time and seasons is that, those things are locked to the reality fragments. While time moves within a fragment (eg. Station Park, which happens to be a fragment of its own), it allows folks to move and act in there. But what is outside, like the sky and the weather, is just a mere ‘memory’ attached to that fragment, locked in place.
In previous roleplay, the boss wolf (me!) has found ways to detach some of these fragment ‘memories’, and reattach at a different ‘memory’. He did this during Christmas when we had snow in the park.

This sort of lore detaches the world’s time with RL time. And it allows one area to be permanently night, another locked at sunset, and a third to have actual moving time (once I allow LUA scripting to let you script rooms changing descriptions based on time).

Helping players

I actually have plans of adding a helper role, and a help request system that works in a similar way like the moderators’ report system. Helpers would see if someone has requested some help, maybe with commands or with some building issue. This sort of thing would offload me, as currently all requests to create exits into Sinder ends up in my Request inbox.

About greeting newcomers, I still believe in Tom for this!
Tom Greyback is a puppet that helpers can take turns and use. As @Talon mentioned, many got intimidated when Tom actively greeted them. But I got better response when being more passive (Tom nods in sleepy greeting from his bench.), only acting if someone asked for help or started RP’ing themselves.
Unfortunately, few has shared this task (basically only me and Talon). We would need more Tom helpers.

And with some tutorial system inside the train, allowing players to first try out commands before having to interact with Tom, I think the first experience with the station master can be improved!

Locations to add

Go ahead community! I leave this to others. :smiley:

Funding

To be honest, my dream is to be able to work on this full time. That would be awesome!
I actually have a supporter role already in place. And it comes with a few perks as well, including a blue supporter title tag.

No one has this role yet, however :sweat_smile: . Not because no one wants to support, but because no one is able to at the moment!

My future plans include of some sort of supporter subscription.

But I must honestly admit that the game, ever since launch, has started to eat out quite a bit of time from my normal paid work that I do. And this is a bit problematic.

And… well… I do have some patreon similar thing already (or rather, my Github Sponsor). Not for Wolfery, but rather for resgate.io , the open source real-time API gateway project that this whole game is built upon.

Maybe, that is something to use if people wish to help out before the ‘real’ subscription system is in place?
But that would go to me as a person, while later I guess it will go to the Mucklet company of mine, which I use to pay for servers and such.

A supporter role for anyone with at $10 recurring pledge…? That might be one way meanwhile.

Okay… that was not short.

/Accipiter

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Financially Supporting Wolfery
#6

I have to admit that reading this made me laugh out loud. Oh dear.

It does make sense that newbies more often than not need some time to adjust to Wolfery’s whole UI the very first time they see it, free to poke buttons and type things at their own pace… and that a puppet of an elderly badger suddenly lurching into animation beside them, roaring greetings, might be a little shocking!

#7

Of these notions for areas: As things grow, we do need to be careful of potential dead areas… and moreover, keep notions on what these areas would give to a place.
A Hospital/Clinic is important, but more important is to have doctors and nurses to fill the place and to help with the roleplaying of medical care. Hazel is the only medical person who seems to pop about on a regular basis, and she works out of a well-stocked medical bag pretty well for situations. Maybe a small clinic would be good for roleplay, though!
A Town Hall or Museum might be nice places to look at, but you also need hooks for people to be there. Why would you go to a town hall? Do you need a “Went through a tutorial, set up my schracter properly” shiny license?
A police station and/or tiny jail might be good roleplay hooks, but you’d need police officers and jailors, which might be good puppet options.
Right now we do have two restaurants in Club Caribe and Miranda’s. While fancy might be a direction for dates- that’s sort of a ‘Two people, one time’ area rather than the social energy of a bar and a cafe.
We do have two shopping areas, at the Docks and over in the minimally-used Cape Theia.

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#8
  • For having town hall meetings, raising issues IC/OOCly about governing Sinder
  • if we choose to go the route of elected officials (OOCly, moderators?), this could be a touch point for them to inform the populace of issues affecting Sinder
  • For getting permits and licenses to operate our businesses at a chamber of commerce

Wikipedia: Town hall meeting

#9

I get that these are examples, but I’ve definitely got concerns regarding anybody playing city officials or law enforcement representatives for the town of Sinder, for obvious reasons of differentiation and IC/OOC confusion for new users. Anything resembling a position of social authority should either be for private RP settings or far aside from any main grid/realm run settings.

I imagine this is largely why cops/security weren’t played outside of very specific themed area settings on TapestriesMUCK actually as well.

1 Like
#10

A building of this sort would largely serve as an OOC information office for detailing procedure on how to interact with the administration in the most efficient way, and I definitely agree with it being a useful angle to explore. As much as I’d like to be as IC as possible in Town of Sinder, I do feel there is plenty of room for some OOC notes to critical services for players wishing to grow the place.