So something I've been observing, and hearing the occasional mention/complaint of, is the fact that people can't find anyone to RP with, can't find any citizens, or wonder where the hell everyone is a lot of the time, despite the fact that there are 8-12 or more people on the server. I was thinking of ways to remedy this, I have a suggestion I hope you can consider. [u][b]Suggestion:[/b][/u][b] The Outlands are fun, but it's hard to have them and the city active at the same time. We should have admin-prompted Outlands Hours.[/b] Of course, the exact implementation/specifics/numbers of this would be up to administration, as it should be. My suggestion would be to have designated Outlands-time for 2 hours during active hours every other day. Basically, every other day, when the server gets active, the admins would declare Outlands-mode. I don't think it necessarily has to be this short/long, we could even periodically take a vote of the server to see if they wanna extend Outlands mode or not. This would be when you would be encouraged to get on a character that's going to RP in the Outlands with other Outlanders. During this time, I think that players should be given the option to create a new character and have them "spawn" in the Outlands, so that people without Outlands characters would not have to sit out. I'm not advocating that the Outlands and the City be kept completely separate, either. This is simply in the interest of citizen-RP, so that we can have the city be the focus most times, but have frequent snapshots of what's going on in the Outlands. People should be able to ICly move between, as I believe they currently can. In both City and Outlands mode, the MPF should be doing patrols of the city's perimeter. Thus, there's obviously a bit of risk involved in moving between them, I'd imagine. Having a map with an Outlands section allows us the exciting prospect of having organic smuggling and movement of blackmarket items in and out of the City. Outlands mode would be when a smart businessman would try to make a trip with as much as he can carry to sell to Outlanders, the same thing with City mode, for selling to City-dwellers. Just to be clear, I don't want to force anyone to do anything, I just think if we agreed to this as a community, we could all have fun together instead of being split half and half between two far flung locales. Thanks for reading, and please let me know if you support it. If you are neutral or against, please let me know why.

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[color=#c0392b]-downvote[/color] Personally I prefer the freedom of being anywhere at any time. The 'outlands' area is clearly difficult to access and therefore should be achieved IC, making it much more immersive and interesting when you actually manage to access it through your character's own means. Although I aknowledge that some admins spend time in the outlands RPing amongst themselves (putatively, that is) when they could be helping out making the citizen roleplay interesting, it's down to the players themselves to either passively RP or generate their own RP. As it says on the steam page, this roleplaying server seems to be a 'habitable' environment in which everyone can rp: we don't need to have our hands held with things like designated time periods in each area.  If you're interested in accessing the outlands area, then you shoul find an IC reason to do so for your character and work towards that goal, and there already is some RP material that's been generated. The idea is interesting however, and suggestions like this are very helpful in indicating problems with servers.

[quote][url='/user/340393']Saving Private Gandhi[/url] said previously: [color=#c0392b]-downvote[/color] Personally I prefer the freedom of being anywhere at any time. The 'outlands' area is clearly difficult to access and therefore should be achieved IC, making it much more immersive and interesting when you actually manage to access it through your character's own means. Although I aknowledge that some admins spend time in the outlands RPing amongst themselves (putatively, that is) when they could be helping out making the citizen roleplay interesting, it's down to the players themselves to either passively RP or generate their own RP. As it says on the steam page, this roleplaying server seems to be a 'habitable' environment in which everyone can rp: we don't need to have our hands held with things like designated time periods in each area.  If you're interested in accessing the outlands area, then you shoul find an IC reason to do so for your character and work towards that goal, and there already is some RP material that's been generated. The idea is interesting however, and suggestions like this are very helpful in indicating problems with servers.[/quote] "Just to be clear, I don't want to force anyone to do anything, I just think if we agreed to this as a community, we could all have fun together instead of being split half and half between two far flung locales." I mean this to say that there would be absolutely no enforcement of this, and you can go wherever you want whenever you want. This is simply like "hey, everyone's probably gonna be on city characters most of the time, and let's have a reserved time where we all get on to interact as Outlanders" If you wanna be alone in the Outlands, no one should stop you. Lastly, I think that the Outlands as a hard-to-access super special area is kind of dumb because it encourages people to try to get to the Outlands cause it's so cool and exclusive, instead of just RPing whatever they want. People don't need to prove themselves by speaking to the right super special character or walking up to the right super special part of the map. The knowledge of how to move between the two realms would be very valuable and secret, and I support not giving that away (or allowing people to asspull it if they didn't have it ICly). However, I see no reason to exclude anyone from having a character who lives out there. There's literally less stuff out there for them to mess with and screw up, and less people.

Fair enough. Still think I'd personally prefer the vanilla way of doing things. Call me old fashioned x

[quote][url='/user/340393']Saving Private Gandhi[/url] said previously: Fair enough. Still think I'd personally prefer the vanilla way of doing things. Call me old fashioned x[/quote] By the vanilla way, do you mean having two separate servers, one running a city map, and one running an outlands map? Also, because I am pretty unfamiliar with the current (sorta massive) map, it does have a slums area, right? I think in every server there should be a compromise between Outlands and City, traditionally called the slums, which is typically patrolled with a bit more force, but more sparingly, and doesn't have units posted up (cause it's a little shady). If any area like that doesn't exist, I think we should have one.

[quote][url='/user/336903']Noble Savage[/url] said previously: [quote]Also, because I am pretty unfamiliar with the current (sorta massive) map, it does have a slums area, right? [/quote] [/quote] There is over the bridge I believe.

Yeah I've always enjoyed the slums-city dynamic, and viewed the City->Outlands transition as a rather more drastic and dangerous path. I don't wanna have to cross between them constantly, I'd rather have characters who have backgrounds and lives in either sector. We could even delete the passport or make a note on the character data for "Outlanders" (people who came to this area through the outlands) to mark them as Missing Anti-Citizens, which add an additional RP dynamic of ordinary citizens harboring  and hiding poor outlanders from the fascist oppressors who wanna gas them, which could be cool. Anyways, this is kinda peripheral to the point. If you like outlander RP, wouldn't you like it if we focused on having a vibrant, lively and realistic Outlands setting like every other day? Instead of its current status, where it seems to have 2-4 players in it doing their own thing while there's 2 civil protection who are bored and like 2-3 more civilians who can't find each other and are bored.