Experiences What do you do when an RP site stagnates?

[Crow]

I don't know if this is the right place, because this RP site is still alive and kicking, far from dropping like a fly!

But I'm sure a lot of you came from stagnating RP sites. Or stagnating sites in general. To tell the truth, I've done some migrating and drifting myself. Sometimes I look at my old hideouts and feel a strong sadness at how little activity they have. Sometimes the activity is decent enough, other times it's en route to death.

It's like Neopets, you know? Neopets was once an unstoppable titan. Now they're... uh... I don't know.

Especially so since I've made so many friends on those sites. Sure I'm still in contact with those friends, but for every friend I keep from there, I lose contact with a few dozen.

So, what are your stories?

 

[Reid]

A community that I've been apart of since I was.... Hmm.... 12? Is experiencing this very thing right at this moment. I've since stopped RPing on there but it's also a community for creative things too. It's spiraled down to petty squabbles, drama literally every week, barely anyone doing what the community was intended for.. Half of the mod team has either been exposed as being friends with, or blantantly ignoring pedos... Hell, even one person on said team was grooming a minor too.
It's changed so much from the place that I once loved but I kept coming back because it was familiar and I guess a part of me was hoping the place would get better? But ultimately, it has changed too much and for the worse. So, I just decided to delete my account. I had nothing keeping me there anymore, everyone that was a friend or whom I enjoyed talking to had since moved on or disappeared so... Yeah.

7 years.... :/ Sad but eh.. That's the nature of things I suppose.

 

[Onmyoji]

My own site where I started roleplaying stagnated and died. In that case the core user base just moved on due to real life, myself included. And didn't dedicate much to promoting the site anymore. Some dramas happened too which didn't help. I keep the site as a read-only archive to this day. Still don't have the heart to get rid of it because of how many good things happened there. I keep in touch with some of my friends from there. We don't rp with them anymore but we have other common interests. So all is good even if sometimes I get nostalgic ^^

A couple other sites where I roleplayed also died. Once I just went there and the site was no more. The owners decided they had enough and closed them.
Some blogs and communities where I roleplayed in passing that I barely remember also disappeared from what I can tell.

Sometimes it just happens. Old users leave, new users don't come, or they do but there is a shift in interests which may not be to everyone's liking. Or the owners get tired of it and want to end once and for all. So all you can do is move on.

So far this site has no intention of dying XD But if one day it happens, the site will always stay in my heart, it has become as important to me as my very first one, probably more ahaha ^^ The people I met here are awesome and the roleplays I got here were among the best in my life. ^^

 

[Crayons]

I still have a friend I managed to keep from Yahoo days - we didn't even roleplay that much but she is a cool person and we are on Facebook together.

Aside from that I've kept friends from the last roleplay site on that imploded at the beginning of this year because of mods failing to eject toxic people from the community. Essentially all the cool people left after a big drama. But my friends from there are awesome and we chat on Discord a lot. We've tried to do some new roleplays a couple of times but they don't really last. Maybe we will again though. One of them I knew from another roleplay site before that and brought him over, so I've managed to keep him as well.

In between those I haven't managed to keep any friends until now, but did keep some after the roleplay ended, but we lost touch or fell out since then. It's just the way of things though.

RPN seems very stable and well-run so I can't see this one ending any time soon. Woop woop.

 

[FoolsErin]

Woo, what a question. A lot of the online games I roleplayed on in some capacity closed down, so this is a familiar experience for me. For Pixie Hollow Online, I was devastated because it was my favorite game at the time. I played it as much as possible before the fated day, and while it was sad, it was a mostly satisfying conclusion. The one regret I have from this is that I didn't hold onto this one friend I made from roleplaying families. She was moving onto Club Penguin, and unfortunately, I never got her username because at the time I didn't play Club Penguin. By the time I did, she was long gone and there was nothing to be done. Kelly Jellywhisk shall remain alone in this bleak world without the comforts of Pixie Hollow, it seems.

For MonkeyQuest, it was a lot more intricate fall from grace because I was actually involved with the community this time around. I watched people beg on the forums (where I mostly hung out and sometimes roleplayed) for the game's salvation, blaming one another for its fall due to anger towards the game, and it was just generally not a fun time. It was kinda sad, viewing the threads I had hung around for so long slowly coming to a halt, with the only activity being on the threads relevant to the situation. I didn't have anything outside of the game out at the time, so I didn't get to necessarily keep any of the people I was "friends" with (I was such a little devil around those forums, I swear). Probably for the better considering some of my behavior, but I still think about the people I left behind from there a lot. Polly Dustspirit may be gone now, but she and her adventures live on in my heart.

The Roblox RPF (Roleplaying Forum) was the only community I was apart of that was actually intended for roleplaying that died. I wasn't there to the very end because I left due to "drama" (aka getting bullied by someone who was actually younger than me) a month or two earlier, but I still stalked around there a lot and saw people deciding where to move to after the roleplaying subforum was removed. I was still not really aware of the bigger scene at the time, so I didn't know what they were talking about at the time. There was a big "good riddance" attitude surrounding the situation, which is fair considering the whole variety of interesting writing that occurred there. I personally contributed a catgirl OC with dual katanas and flame powers, a foxgirl oc with the ability to fly by yelling an Italian word and "aether magic" (which was just magenta lasers because I had that little understanding of everything), rip-offs of Undertale characters, actual Undertale characters, and a variety of other elemental OCs wrapped up in a backstory that had a complete misunderstanding of geography, biology, and basically anything under the sun.

Unlike the first two "main places" I roleplayed at, I actually managed to hold onto a fair few friends from there! Good times, huh guys? marc122 FactionGuerrilla GearBlade654 Haz.

 

[Murdergurl]

Two decades... yup, (a bit more, but I take off a couple years for hiatus reasons) a whole twenty years I've been doing the roleplay thing. I have seen old sites disappear entirely. Like, they literally do not exist at all anymore. I've meandered through more roleplay venues than I can keep track of anymore.

Not counting the really, REALLY old stuff, some of the other places I've been are dreamrealmsroleplaying, gaiaonline, ongoingworlds, Elliquiy, Bluemoonroleplaying, RPGuild, and... if I sit here and really think about it, I'm sure I can remember at least four or five others that are pretty obvious.

Dreamrealms is gone. Don't remember exactly what went down, but the place just isn't there anymore. Gaiaonline was dead af for RP, but the last time I checked in was many many moons ago ( I still have my account, just cant remember my password). Ongoingworlds is still there. But the participation pool is pretty small, last I checked. I DO like their setup for The RPs and character displays, though. Elliquiy has been dying for quite a while and was the last site I was on before coming over here. Bluemoon is like a less-uptight version of Elliquiy and run by the same peeps. But it's a bit lacking in their group RP section. RPGuild is... bleh. Never really had any luck there from the get go and I don't even bother checking in anymore.

Every now and again I search for new sites to join. I laugh when, during the registration process, I come to find my email is already registered to the site. Which tells me that I've already been there and moved on. And more often than not, when I DO find a place I haven't been to yet, I get through all the registration to find that there are like 5 people on. Which tells me the place is well passed its prime. I registered to a site ...I think it was yesterday or the day before, but I signed in and was literally the ONLY member online. lmao!

I've tried the Discord thing. But that venue for RP groups really doesn't fit my style. Imo, it's trash tier roleplay. Trying to sort through all the half-baked servers is more trouble than it's worth.

Regarding "friends", well to be completely honest I've never been a friend collector over the internet as a whole. My facebook has like less than thirty friends and 90% of them are family I don't even talk to. So as you can imagine, I didn't exactly have ties to cut when I left one RP site in search of another place.

 

[Murdergurl]

... all my old stomping grounds are dead, but new sites that aren't forum based are pretty active; but they're method of paragraph RPing often is unappealing to me so I find myself in a rather difficult position of deciding if after 20 years it's time to drop the hobby.

THIS.
I tangle with this notion ALL THE TIME. It seems like the general community has evolved (devolved?) into something that I really don't care for. Not just the methodology, but the general mood and overture of the people in it. I find that I can't relate with a lot of viewpoints/interests of this younger RP generation. Both in and out of roleplay.

 

[Murdergurl]

Murdergurl Same. Last year during NaNoWriMo I thought to myself, maybe I need to just write original fiction and live on Wattpad or something!

Lol! My hubby recently introduced me to Wattpad. I joined with the intent to write something on there... but I have trouble keeping myself motivated of my own volition. Tbh, I really only write continuously when I'm RPing because others spur me on in my creative muse. Left on my own, the motivation quickly fizzles out.

I really do, in my heart of hearts, LOVE roleplaying. But really my only "good" and "long running" RPs have been with RL friends, but none of the RP anymore.

I can count all my irl friends on one hand. And while they share varying numbers of my geeky interests, none of them are writers of any creative degree. I tried to get some of them into it. but it was quickly apparent that they just weren't into it.

I agree there is just a fundamental difference between the generations. Not a bad thing per say, but that whole "you're 30 get off the internet" joke sometimes feels very real. Like I just can't get into the drama, the negativity, the complaining. I feel like I did ALL that when I was a teenager, I know I DID ALL THAT I just have to look at Gaia for example. I feel tired and old, I did all that and I've grown SO MUCH I just want to RP. I don't want to jump through hoops, I don't want to spend 40 hrs trying to setup the perfect RP with banners, graphics, a SLEW of information no one reads. I just wanna RP basic simple like I did when I first started, but ppl don't like that they think it lacks effort . . . and I'm like bby please, please you'll learn the effort doesn't give or take anything away from the experience of telling a story with someone . . . even if an RP lacks all the lore, graphics, coding it doesn't remove from writing with others! >D

My experience is a bit different, tbh. Though I did get called a Boomer once. Which is funny because that's like two whole generations before me.
Anyhow, I've found that roleplays nowadays have too little effort put into them. So many half-baked ideas and vague worldbuilds when concerning Original settings, and otherwise all the fandoms are the same 8 ideas over and over, ad infinitum. I've always been into heavy narrative, even "back in the day". I'm a multi-paragraph writer in RP. And by "multi", I mean, MULTI. In retrospect, it may have been why I always had issues keeping partners, but I digress. There was definitely a Golden Age for me something like 10-ish years ago. But since then, it's been slowly becoming harder and harder to find people that enjoy a similar style in shared interests. I have been told to "go write a book" on at least four occasions this year because the venues I was looking for roleplay on simply did not support my length of narrative. I've already been (low key) told to do so on THIS site, and I've only been here since early July.

But I definitely will agree that advertisements have become annoyingly flashy and overdone. I've seen some on here that I don't even bother with because they are windows and scrolls within themselves. I can't even begin to understand that kind of coding, but it's definitely annoying to try and read.

Anyhow... prolly getting a little off-topic, here.

 

[Sacrilege]

So, I migrated here from another certain ""repository"" site that I was on for about 2-3 years. And oh boy, was that site a disaster.

For a while, it was okay. I'd say probably around 250 users on at prime time? The forums used to actually move throughout the day, and there were several groups that kept the community alive. I DMed several fantasy threads myself, and other friends had some giant sci-fi shenanigans running for two years. There were also only 3-4 moderators, the last good ones before the great Mod Team Additions ™ that introduced a group of moderators involved in a clique for a certain pixel game that will become important later. Most of the OG users were still around, and finding new partners wasn't that big of a deal.

Somewhere along the line, traffic took a hit there and it dwindled down to 100 or so active users a day. You can post an RP ad and still see it on the front page three days later, and get maybe two or three people who actually look at your ad - I've gone weeks before without getting a single bite, whereas here I can get several a day. The admin of the site thought they could fix it with a "revive", which was basically just swindling the community out of $14,000 for an update that made the site SO FUCKING SLOW and unusable. This revive was extremely hyped up, there was merch, the most activity it'd seen for a while...and then the update hit and it was actually the most disappointing thing ever. A year later, you really have to wonder where $14,000 went, because it sure as hell didn't go towards improving much of anything.

It's a sad, dead, desolate hole for smut requests from the same five players now, along with a bunch of equally sad users who cling to a certain pay-walled furry pixel game 20 years later. The site is almost entirely funded by aforementioned pixel game's most prominent group that glorifies and sexualizes sex trafficking and slavery, but you can get the banhammer for saying the word "fuck" too many times because it'll hurt the children's ears. The moderators fiercely protect people from this group and several others, because money and friends. God help you if you say anything bad about that game, because you'll have 20 people coming to slit your throat. 60% of the users are people you can't write with because they're exclusive to some off-site continuity, which leaves you with slim pickings; the average age for the site also dwindled a lot, which means most of them are around 13-16. The community has become extremely toxic and rampant with racism and internalized homophobia, while also cramming everyone into cliques. Single player RP is almost impossible to find there now.

The moral of the story? Money makes people do whack things. It's why I like RPN so much - there's no obligation to spend money to get features needed to actually make the site usable, and there's such a huge player base here that you'll always meet new people and have someone interested in your writing. Anyone who tries to be some "big dog" who bullies everyone into licking their balls gets lost with the rest of the crowd, if not immediately pummeled into oblivion by the mods. ILU guys < 3

 

[Murdergurl]

Putting the quote at the bottom!

Ah, yes. I don't tend to write a lot per post. I am certainly a "I like my replies short and a little more rapid" I think I sit around 400 - 600 word average (2 - 6 para or so). I use to totally write 30 paragraph 3k+ replies, but I couldn't do it now. BUT I can totally see why that would be a problem here and anywhere else, that is a pretty demanding style of RPing not everyone is game for it.

Oh lord don't get me started on the scrolls inside tiny boxes. "Graphic Design Is My Passion" meme is what I think of every damn time. I get how its impressive on a technical level, its cool you know how to do it, but its not practical or useful. Its actually bad design TBH if it takes someone longer than 10 seconds to figure out and use your layout it's bad. Hidden scrolls inside a 300 x 500 pixel box is bad. Narrowing down the reading width is okay, I find the default on most sides to wide and I lose track of the line I am on. But don't restrict the height on a forum let ppl scroll for crying out loud we gotta scroll to read the next post.

AND I can't say much I have spent HOURS like a whole month setting up a group RP just to have almost every person who wanted to join ask the same question . . . a question answered within the first two paragraphs of background information . . . so I know most ppl don't even bother reading most of what I wrote (which could be that I'm a bad writer, but I don't think my prose are THAT terrible to read ppl been RPing with me for 20 years aint no one left me because I wrote badly XD XD XD) . . . so why bother? Could be just my bad experience / the "level" (???) I roleplay at?

I don't fandom RP so I can't say shit to that.

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