TwoDee

I gradually came to this same conclusion over my time with City of Heroes roleplay. Shakespeare said that "brevity is the soul of wit," and nothing gives you a better sense of the fundamental core hooks of a character than trying to compress their entire appeal into a mere 1,000 characters. A character with twenty gimmicks is never going to be as interesting as a character with two very well-executed gimmicks. A dirty little secret of not just City of Heroes roleplay but all online roleplay is that people generally aren't in it to care about or read bios. Sure, I like a well-written bio, but that's a tangential side-appeal to the actual main appeal of engaging in active roleplay with an interesting character written by another player. The less wieldy a bio gets, the less likely it serves the purpose it's intended for as a facilitator and entrypoint for roleplay. If other players already know everything about your character, why interact with them?

To qualify my own prior statements about "the heroes should always win," since it's clear the principle ruffles feathers: it's not my opinion that your roleplay is Bad, Wrong, and Invalid if you're running some storyline and want the Council to massacre the King's Row PPD precinct, or Miss Libby to get tortured, or whatever (if I had a nickel for every VG I was a part of that had a roleplay that was explicitly about capturing and torturing a canon NPC, I'd be able to cash it in for 15 minutes on a parking meter). If antagonists don't get their wins in, then there are no stakes to a storyline in the first place. However, what I do hold "the heroes should always win" to be is a statement of best-practices "in the wild," when there have been no session zeroes and no discussions of consent. If I initiate a conflict between my villain and a hero without a robust OOC discussion of intents, I play the heel and then "do the job," because the expectation of shared RP spaces like Pocket D necessitates a return to the equilibrium. As @Redletter alludes to, things start to sour real quickly if you roll up into a space with superhero players (who vastly outnumber villain players) like "damn, it felt so good to eat the still-living organs of that screaming Longbow Sergeant, now it's time for cocktails:" it's telegraphing a threshold of villainy that beggars immediate and active response from heroes, and especially when there's no always-on PvP and so adjudication of conflicts has to fall onto roleplay, it sucks if a villain player drops something like that and then doesn't budge on "no, if we fight my guy wins because he's like, WICKED powerful." That doesn't mean that the same can't happen in the inverse -- a hero player rolling up on a group of villains and going, I don't know, "Longbow is great! I just beat up eleven jillion Arachnos!" -- but even that isn't really equivocal, just because antagonists are active and protagonists are reactive; it doesn't break the fiction of the shared space for the villain to just shrug that off and go "yeah sure buddy, I killed eleven jillion Arachnos before lunch, I'm a villain" or "Why do I care about Arachnos? I'm literally a black dragon," the way that it does for a hero to be nonreactive to a villain doing something appalling in their presence. Anyway, this is a lot of words to reiterate that I don't think you're wrong for wanting the redsiders to notch a few Ws. My policy is for interacting with the roleplaying public when outside of curated spaces that are more towards personal sensibilities. It's not "fair," but it's a good fallback when the alternative is either a robust Session 0 before each roleplay. or a flaming blowout where everyone blocks each other and starts insinuating about godmoders or edgelords on the forums. Think of it like wrestling: people love heels because they provide menace for the baby faces, but at the end of the day regardless of who wins the heel should be working with the face to create an interesting narrative arc, rather than fighting to win for the sake of the villains notching a W alone.

A cosmetic issue, but a gnarly one: whenever my Defender, Second Light, uses [Accelerate Metabolism], it doesn't visualize on my or any other player's buff icon bar. Mechanically, the buff lands, but nobody sees it and we can't track uptime.

Starting page 6, we'll be instituting a formal program of exporting three-quarters of the roleplay spoilsports from Everlasting who lecture you about how "actually, there's no such thing as a fully nonlethal weapon so you're totally a murderer." This way, all four shards can achieve equity, with every AR/, DP/, Katana/, Broadsword/, War Mace/, and Fire/ user on Homecoming receiving equal treatment of buzzkill parade-raining.

I was dancing around responding to this thread, because metadiscussion of MMORPG roleplay drama can itself be drama. I love playing peanut gallery, but it's hard to resist the urge to just wade in and start throwing bigger projectiles than peanuts when confronted with some of the most awkward, most deviant, and most cruel behavior that roleplayers can visit upon other roleplayers. So, I committed to not responding until I felt that I had a point that I could make. In my hubris, I think that I've found that point in an appeal to scope and perspective. To build off the points above -- and I recommend that folks go up and read them if they haven't, as I was just quoting the most immediately applicable passages! -- when I experience the sorts of teapot tempests that MMORPG roleplay communities inculcate, I often feel that MMORPG roleplayers suffer a lot from the Narcissism of Minor Differences. Let's get the elephant out of the room: the Narcissism of Minor Differences is a Freudian psychoanalytic concept. Freud was, in many aspects of his work, a hack and a fraud and terribly off-base, and this observation is not meant to go pop-psychology and diagnose roleplayers as pathological narcissists, nor to attempt to use roleplayers as a tool to "prove [Freud] right." However, I think that when one familiarizes oneself with the broad strokes of the concept, a lot of social conflicts both macro and especially micro, as in roleplay feuds, make a lot of sense. The pithiest summary is that most humans desire to be perceived as a unique and thinking individual that is more than just the mechanical sum of overlapping categories on a balance sheet. Thus, we are psychologically incentivized to make qualitative differentiations between ourselves and others, because being able to point to someone else and go "I am not that" is an easy way to define the self. In the time since Freud coined the term (to examine how the most bitter wars have historically occurred between cultures and nations that appear very similar to outsiders), the Narcissism of Minor Differences has become an ever-keener aspect of daily life. Globalism streamlines us into an interconnected monoculture with shared media, consumer goods, and economic outcomes. As differences between individuals become smaller and smaller, the need to define ourselves as unique and unlike everyone else continues to burn ever stronger for it, and the differences that are required to create that definition become increasingly granular. Thus, the political phenomenon referred to bitterly as "The Left Eats its Own." Thus, gender-coded shaving razors and shampoo, because you wouldn't want your curly hair to be mistaken for curly girl hair. Thus, Playstation and XBox fans bitterly warring over whose expensive DVD player hits 60FPS. Trekkies and Star Wars, Call of Duty and Battlefield, DC and Marvel, Leo and Gemini. A million little festering tiny resentments based around the fundamental human envy of "I know who I am, because I'm not them," coopted by interests that can provide material signifiers to prove our uniqueness. Not to put too fine a point on it, but MMORPG Roleplayers, categorically, have inscrutably minor who-gives-a-shit differences that are about five steps removed from any distinction that a sane outsider could possibly make by observation: 'Gamers' Video Gamers (this is where your parents stop caring) PC Video Gamers (this is where most people stop caring) PC Role-Playing Game Players (this is where other gamers stop caring) Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Players (this is where anyone with anything else going for them stops caring) City of Heroes Players People Who Pretend To Be Their Character For Fun Those Other, Bad Roleplayers Who Roleplay Wrong And Aren't Like Me Because I'm Different (you are here) That is the level of scope we're fighting over. That is the small town that @McSpazz described as the "small town effect." 700 players at peak hours, charitably a third of whom are roleplayers, and you bet your ass that I'm being charitable. Even @Shadeknight's City of Roleplay Discord, which ended up as the most populous Discord for dedicated City of Heroes roleplayers by dint of being first past the post, has 1,600 members total from the entire history of Everlasting's existence, and only 30 of them are active enough to have posted in the roleplay channel in the last month (#general-chat, for discussing anything and everything, had 48). If every topic in the Homecoming Roleplaying Forum were posted by a totally unique individual, and they sure as hell aren't, we'd still be smaller than half the size of Block Island, a Rhode Island town that looks like this: We're not even a "small town;" we're not that impressive! What we are is a middling-sized air force base, or one of those technical incorporated townships that exists only to provide a gas station on a long stretch of highway. Or, to make for a salient comparison that ties us back into the original point, we're the size of a middle school. Middle school is a terribly awkward time, and I suspect that a not-insubstantial plurality of the people in this forum remember keenly what it was like to be an ostracized teenage nerd before "nerdiness" was cool (which is yet another thing that so many of us have in common). At no period in our lives do we feel more keenly the need to separate, to carve out our own identity, than when we barely qualify as a sapient life form and are suddenly lumped into a system of behavioral streamlining with all of the other socially maladroit tweens. That's what creates middle and high schools' legendary cliquishness and exclusion. Roleplaying, too, is a terribly awkward community and a terribly awkward pastime -- informed by the insufficiency of text-based communication -- and so too do we, in our transcendental awkwardness, feel that drive to set ourselves above and apart from the other roleplayers, to make a qualitative differentiation that separates this subcategory of a subcategory of a subcategory of a subcategory of a subcategory of a subcategory of video gamers into the 👿bad👿 camp and the 👼good👼 camp, the latter of which we all belong to (obviously). Lest it sound like I'm placing myself into some kind of untouchable patrician overseer role by making these observations, I'm going to dime on myself, here: I talk shit about other roleplayers. I talk mad shit. I feel hurt or invalidated by an interaction, and then I flee to my echo chamber of like-minded friends to bitch and moan about how the other participant wouldn't let me get a word in edgewise. I repost anonymized screenshots of ERP characters that I think are tasteless or obscene, to elicit "oh no!" reacts and gauge whether my own reaction was overzealous or appropriate from the social validation I receive. I laugh when roleplayers who gave me a bad time once get caught in byzantine e-relationship blowups that eviscerate entire guilds with their parasocial shrapnel. And I suspect that I'm going to get a lot of "golly, I could never!" responses to that disclosure, but I would ask in turn that who among us hasn't suffered through an interaction with an awkward creeper, or a pushy stranger at the checkout, or a bad boss, and then bitched to a spouse or friend rather than escalating it into a conflict? Radical acceptance and love for everyone's idiosyncrasies at their face value is aspirational, but it's also a good way to build a house from broken stairs. So, okay, with that grim recognition out of the way, what's actionable? What can we do to mitigate the fallout from Drama, the inescapable Original Sin on the tiny, myopic planetoid that is MMORPG roleplay? Personally, I think that it's just about setting reasonable expectations about what's a 'name-and-shame' or brigading offense that really, truly necessitates touching the poop, versus just thinking that somebody's kind of a jerk or Has a Wrong Opinion. Have the presence of mind to look upon yourself from an outsider's lens, and ask "would I look like a completely unhinged fucknut pulling out my knives and escalating to total war over an incorrect interpretation of the fictitious lore of Praetoria, an alternate-history AU setting from a video game that died a decade ago?" (yes) I personally try to remain fundamentally decent - if imperious, pretentious, and pedantic - to other players in public spaces like this one, because that sets a tone for baseline civility that most people will honor, and the rest of the drama can all be isolated and transitory. I have a bad time, I whine and scream, I get back on the horse, and maybe next time I can have a good time. At least in the end, most roleplay is typically fun, or we wouldn't all be here.

BROKEN The flyers beneath the decorative sugar-skull mural read “GOTHABILLY NITE.” Behind the text, printed in cheap ink that was already starting to fade, the multicolored craft paper boasted the image of a voluptuous model in gothic alt-fashion, a ten-gallon hat crudely photoshopped onto her head. Skyway’s Ocultista bar, nestled gloomily beneath a looming overpass, blared thrumming baselines and twangy string chords from somewhere beneath the foundation. Gothabilly Nite had complicated an already schizophrenic crowd: cybergoth slapped over latin streetwear, too-tight black tees and jeans with elaborate punk-modded jackets. There were periodic glimpses of the nominal theme - a pompadour here, a pair of wranglers there, a polka-dot dress hastily cut into a miniskirt for clubwear appeal - but most of the line was cultural and aesthetic anarchy. Billi B was keenly aware of the sum of her life’s decisions as she was bombarded by muffled banjos and insipid conversation. Escape was a distant prospect even for someone with her towering mass, sandwiched as she was between a twiggy throuple with matching eyeliner and a man who resembled nothing so much as the unholy spawn of old, washed-up Elvis and old, washed-up Bela Lugosi. Billi fit in as much as anyone here did, with her denim jacket and leather trousers showcasing her stocky physique. She wasn’t dressed for partying, but for her kind of business, serving as supermuscle for a deal happening inside the club. She eyed the front of the line and caught sight of a pair of yuppies in cowboy boots getting carded by the bouncer; an ogre whose face smoldered with spikes of burning stone. She dimly recognized him as a former cape-turned-Outcast named Mantlepiece: he was wearing a suit and gloves made from some kind of tacky metallic fabric that was probably fireproof. These kinds of establishments liked to have metas on payroll; it set them apart from other dives, gave them some personality, and served as a deterrent to the local bangers. It was a common sideline for a lot of Outcasts and ex-Outcasts trying on the straight-and-narrow. Billi groaned aloud, setting her square jaw and recommitting herself to going through with the gig. She’d already been through that phase of her life, or really all three: the cape part, then the Outcast part, then the ex-Outcast part. She’d been sixteen when she first discovered that the interaction between serotonin depletion and trait empathy that generates feelings of shame in ordinary people also made her stronger, smarter, and tougher. The stigma of running away from home to seek her fortune in Paragon as a young Mutant had allowed her to support a burgeoning rookie-superheroine career for months. When she got comfortable and her powers had started to wane, a rebrand from “Bad Girl” to the more vulgar “Billi Badass” had sufficed as a holdfast, though she wasn’t able to maintain equilibrium until that scanty little costume she’d hated and a questionable further rebrand into “Bad Bitch.” When she’d gotten inured to those indignities, a streak of high-profile losses had kept her in the lower brackets of the caping world, always maintaining just enough embarrassment at her own failure to avoid becoming entirely unpowered. That lasted until an old rival from the Outcasts looped her in on an armored car job, and her cut of $2 million cash and more shame than she’d ever felt in her life had rocketed her into prime-time high-power supervillainy, then as “Billi Beartrap.” These days, after two Zig tours, several ill-conceived relationships, and a boat-load of therapy, she contented herself with the grey market of powered-muscle work. The pay rate was good for the low risk of just standing there looking intimidating, and the smoldering disappointment of knowing that she used to be a ‘proper’ cape was generally enough to chuck goons around and shrug off small-caliber fire when things went bad. “Wilhelmina Byczek. You gonna start trouble in there, Billi B?” Billi pulled herself out of her spiral to return the fiery gaze of the bouncer, her muscles cording with fresh puissance pulled from the bad memories. She affected dismissiveness, keeping her expression comfortably in the “resting bitch face” spectrum. “Just looking out for a girlfriend who’s already inside, Mantlepiece. I’m out of the life, just like you.” “Uh huh.” Little shards of crystal obsidian, protruding uncomfortably from Mantlepiece’s brow ridge, clinked together as the other ex-Outcast squinted at the ID. After a few more moments of scrutiny, he turned it over, holding it gingerly between two Nomex-clad fingers. “You’re lucky that places like this run a single-lady deficit, Billi. Far as I’m concerned, your history throws up more red flags than a Hellion wearing a sports jersey with a bulge at the hip. But quotas are quotas. Behave yourself.” “Thanks, Duane,” Billi growled, using his real name out of petty spite and earning a carbon-chrome middle finger for her troubles. She stomped down into the wall of noise and brickwork, coasting at a good power level, now: strong, durable, alert. Pity that it had taken getting judged by another ex-Outcast to achieve it. The faux-speakeasy interior was nearly as deranged as the crowd outside. Mantlepiece’s careful cultivation of the line could only salvage so much of the theme night’s dress code, but at least the goths that clustered around a too-small bar had made some small, grudging concession to hoop skirts and updos. Isaac Rother and the Phantoms blared over the speakers as Dracula’s Own Trailer Trash set up the power cables for what would doubtless become a live act closer to the Witching Hour. Halloween-store cobwebs and anatomically-dubious rubber beasties hung from exposed ductwork in the ceiling. Billi found her girl in a maroon VIP booth just past the stage, sipping at a brackish cocktail with a film of blood-red grenadine at the top. Rachel McKidd - or more accurately, Doctor McKidd, PhD - had come up in Paragon around the same time as Billi arrived, when she was interning at a pharmaceutical start-up called Bioxcel. They’d hit it off as friends and then roommates, and grown apart as they lapsed into their respective shady doings; Billi into supervillainy, Rachel into mad science, a common pitfall of the aspiring chemist in the City of Heroes. Billi vaguely recalled something from the newspapers… a scandal? “Long time no see, Rache,” Billi grunted, sidling into the booth across from her contact. “How’s Bioxcel?” “Doctor Oxward turned out to be an unregistered clone coded with genetic memories that made him steal research from Crey,” Rachel shrugged, amicably, her glossy black lips still maintaining contact with her cocktail. “The lawsuits are still ongoing, and SERAPH is having a hell of a time figuring out if Oxward qualifies as a sapient actor for the purposes of his rights.” Billi cringed. Yep, that was the headline. She changed the subject. “What the hell is that you’re drinking?” “They call it a ‘Grim Ripper,’” the doctor deadpanned, swirling it in the space between them and causing the red splash to shift. “Kahlua and I want to say vinegar. It’s a little sweet for my liking.” Rachel had aged about as gracefully as a mad scientist could be expected to in the years since they’d last caught up. She had the characteristic shock of frizzy white hair that every PhD seemed to spontaneously develop when they delved into the dark side of superscience, but a white blouse and black corset had turned that into an elegant Bride of Frankenstein riff, appropriate for the season. She asked, daintily gesturing forward with the glass, “Want some?” “Eugh, no. I don’t do sweet cocktails,” Billi insisted, holding two callused hands up to ward herself from the witches’-brew on offer. “So, what, do you think Bioxcel is going under? Trying to build up a nest egg?” “Bioxcel’s gonna be fine,” Rachel drawled, with a roll of her eyes and a slight rise in her voice. Though the booth was a fair bit away from the speakers, the background track had just hit the guitar solo, which required special consideration to communicate over. “If we can get Oxward ruled as a sapient, then he can take the fall for all of it: the thefts, the contamination, the Verge prototype making it out to street gangs.” Billi nodded along, feigning more familiarity with the company’s woes than she actually had. Rachel continued, “If we can’t, though, there’s going to be an inquest, and you know how it is with superscientists on the East Coast, Billi. We all cut our own corners to get to the big breakthrough. So I cut a deal with one of the capes who busted Oxward. If it comes to it, he’s gonna be my character witness, get me a sweetheart ‘good behavior’ thing. And he had a side commission, too, so I can still make some money while we’re under investigation.” “Side commission–” It took Billi a few moments to put together what Rachel could mean by that, before considering the other woman’s research specialization and the nature of the job. “Fuck, Rachel, is that why you have me here? You’re dealing designer drugs to capes!?” “Not just any cape,” Rachel crowed, lowering her voice to a stage whisper and putting her drink down. “HardLight, with the NPI. Mister redeemed-villain himself.” “What the fuck–” Billi saw red for a moment, and the lowlights-reel of mistakes replayed itself in her head for the second time tonight. Her jaw set and her teeth ground together as she leaned over the tabletop, hissing through pursed lips. “Rache, I cannot fight HardLight. Especially not in a nightclub! He gets his powers from sensory overflow, right? If he double-crosses you here, he could punt me to goddamn Atlas Park in one shot! And that’s before we even get into the politics - the guy’s an icon! A checkered icon, sure, but can you picture how fucked all three of us would be if somebody snapped a candid!?” “It’s nothing that I haven’t factored for,” Rachel protested, sourly, crossing her arms like a scolded child despite being older than Billi. “He’s not even paying for this month’s batch. It’s just a hand-off.” Rachel fished in her purse for a small pill bottle and discreetly wiggled it with her fingers so that Billi could see, but Billi scarcely noticed, her mouth hanging agape at the new information. “Paying… months… You’ve already been doing this! What happened to your muscle before me?” “Hasn’t been necessary,” Rachel insisted, shaking her head vociferously. “Wasn’t like that. He’s pretty obvious with the glow, y’know? So before these deals he pops painkillers to turn his powers partly off and wears chunky sunglasses to cover up the residual glow. That’s what the drugs are: they’re sensitizers: I started with a dextroamphetamine base, but I’ve tried to get an efficient CNS cocktail that minimizes the neurological side-effects while keeping the touch sensitivity. If you saw the footage from that big fight at Portal Corp, his powers were probably boosted twenty to twenty-five–” Billi held up a hand again. She’d already gotten the gist and didn’t need the exact chemical composition. “Performance enhancers. You’re using your limitless scientific genius to deal performance enhancers to a middle-aged supe who wants to stay in his prime.” “More or less,” Rachel admitted, waggling her eyebrows playfully and and brushing that white shock off her forehead before picking her drink back up. Billi recalculated her threat radar, her unease with the whole situation keeping her flush with super-strength. “Okay, yeah, if he’s depowered I can definitely manhandle him. But why do you need security now? Why not months ago?” Rachel showed her teeth in a grimace, the first display of something approaching conscience in the entire interaction. “Because of what happens any time an addict starts taking stimulants, Billi. He’s gotten erratic. He got into all those scandals… that bunnygirl sidekick of his did that B&E and they had to review her record, and I’m sure that turned over a bunch of stones. He started confiding all these grisly Praetorian war stories in me one meetup… then back in August he kept buying me drinks so that I’d stick around and listen to a three hour rant about the ‘nihilstic separation of romance from sensuality in French midcentury arthouse literature.’ Last month, he prepaid for three refills, and then when I reached out to him about the second dose he completely freaked out on me and said that he’d gone cold turkey so he “wouldn’t be needing my services anymore” before blocking my number.” “Good for him,” Billi deadpanned. “He’s got a whole team… it’s been a long time since I’ve caped, but one of the best parts of working on a team is that you keep each other accountable. It helps you avoid situations like doing hard drugs to compete. Maybe this is just part of a graceful retirement plan, letting the younger bucks take point.” She paused, and thought that statement through. “...Or as graceful a retirement as you can get, anyway, when you’re a Praetorian bad-boy powered by partying.” “Yeah, yeah, good for him, but not good for me,” Rachel scowled, quaffing the rest of her cocktail despite her professed distaste of it. “This is my leverage, Billi! The money’s been nice, but what I really need from him is insurance, and if I don’t have him hooked then he can sell me out on the Bioxcel investigation! I need him to show up tonight. I don’t care if it’s a relapse. Boo hoo for HardLight.” Billi looked out over the club floor. It was beginning to fill; more of the line from outside had filtered in, and the band was just starting to warm up. Some overeager ghosts and ghouls had already taken to the mosh pit in anticipatory roughhousing. She straightened her denim jacket at the lapel and stood up from the booth. “I really don’t think he’s gonna sell you out. You’ve got your leverage already, Rache. He was buying supermeth from you, wasn’t he? If he doesn’t show, I say more power to him.” “Easy for you to say, when I’ll be paying you $200 just to sit here doing nothing for a few hours. Where are you going?” “Gonna hit the bar before it gets too packed. I think it’s gonna be a long night. You want another Jack the Ripper?” Rachel sighed, leaning back in the seat and tilting her head to one side to crack her neck. “Grim Ripper. And no, just get me whatever you’re getting.” “Beer it is.” Billi B’s combat boots momentarily stuck in something as she trod across the dance floor, shouldering casually through a human surf of leather jackets and pattern dresses, tattoos and anachronistic shoes. She didn’t bother to look down as she flagged down a bartender. Despite herself, she found that she was wrapped up in the hope that HardLight wouldn’t show. She knew, on an intellectual level, that all that rock-star bullshit about being the worst of Powers Division breaking good was just a brand, but maybe if he could dodge his personal demons tonight, then that would be evidence enough that even perennial fuckups like Billi B could someday go back to being superheroes, too. And she couldn’t hide the smile as she pocketed her 200 dollars, when HardLight never did.

100% agree with @TorrentYed here, so I'm going to add to the 'echo, echo' effect. I'll lend my own spin to the four Very Correct posters above in my typical way: with a massive screed of overly granular best-practices opinions. This is a little cynical to voice so directly, but generally speaking, roleplayers like to showcase their character first, and learn about other people's characters second (if at all). Roleplayers want their characters to be perceived as credible and competent experts in whatever large or small thing it is that they do -- superscience, magic, lepidopterology, extrajudicially murdering Skulls -- and they want other players to react to them in a way that upsells that character concept. So, without a player's permission or explicitly-stated buy-in, situating oneself in a position that would dictate elements of another player's character is a quick way onto the shit list. If you're a cop from Brickstown, that's fine. If you're a police Captain, that's fine. If you're the Precinct Captain in charge of Brickstown, that implicitly forces you into the backstory of every other theoretical player playing a cop from Brickstown. If you're a professor, that's fine. If you're faculty at the Salamanca campus, that's fine. If you're the department chair of the magical studies department at Paragon University Salamanca, that shoehorns you intrusively into the character concept of every character who says they study magic in Salamanca (and there's a lot of them). This doesn't mean that these 'hierarchal/authority' concepts are unplayable, merely that they won't survive contact with 'pick up' roleplayers who feel like you're intruding on the headcanon that contextualizes their character. Making up your own esoteric or experimental subdivision of a canon group is one way around this: "I'm the decorated admiral in charge of Vanguard's mages an experimental thaumaturgical-warfare unit within Vanguard." Super Groups are another great way to build up stories that are more collaborative by nature and thus more willing to accommodate "laying claim" to broad swaths of canon, provided that you don't expect the RP community at-large to show quite the same deference. More than anything, though, and to return to the great points above me, a lot of it just depends on how you treat your character's presumptive in-universe authority. If you use it constructively to lend credence to the shared world and upsell other players' concepts, they'll let you get away with calling yourself the chief finance officer of MediCorp, or whatever. If you treat authority like a blunt instrument and perniciously nettle other players about deferring to you, you'll eat away at the good will necessary to play that concept.

It is perhaps the nature of the era and place of the internet that I came up in (to wit: Newgrounds, SomethingAwful, 4Chan, circa the early aughts) that I don't often make use of ignore functions, because the level of overt and visceral filth spewed by contemporary internet posters is fairly milquetoast compared to my own jaded baseline. I tend to take a very 'Thunderspy' attitude that there is no perfect means to absolve oneself of the responsibility of taking an active role in one's own self-care, which can include avoiding distressing interactions on the internet. Tragically, we cannot reasonably expect to never, ever have to deal with the malignant fuckwits who make up a not-insubstantial portion of the human species, especially not on cesspools like "General" chat channels and "Official Forums," and so good netiquette demands both a reasonably thick skin and a good gauge for when there's nothing to be gained from engagement. Aspirationally, would it be good to not be confronted with a Boschian hellscape of rhetorical vomit when entering any wide-audience internet forum? Certainly. But the Moderators here are doing about as well as we should expect volunteer tone police to do when confronted with the slavering tide of primal human Id that is opinions on the internet. That is to say, I highly endorse the use of proactive tools like the ignore function, despite making very little use of them. Unlike others in this thread, I will not intimate that maybe people on the internet will change their minds and become better so you should give them a chance. Those are not Vegas odds. If they were improving and growing as a person, they probably would be outside doing something worldly rather than getting in circular fights on an internet forum about an old MMO. Misery loves company, and despite how Misery acts, Misery isn't entitled to your or anyone's eyeballs. The responsibility falls on you to curate your own experience when imperfect moderation fails.

I should put my cards on the table before commenting: I run a closed-recruitment RP supergroup (I'll leave descriptors like "heavy RP" or "mature RP" more to people who differentiate such things from "baseline" RP) for years, albeit not the one in the OP, and we do have an interview process, or as I often call it, the "vibe check." With that out in the open, in my experience a formal interview, meet-and-greet, "session zero" or other onboarding process can be crucial to getting people in a roleplay group aligned on anything heavier or more directed than Pocket D Pickup RP. It's not that we're going down a list of "tick these boxes to be an objectively high-quality roleplayer;" it's more that roleplayers are by their nature a community of high-drama individuals who are poorly socialized by the lack of nuance inherent to text communication. That includes the people in the guild already, and making sure that someone is going to mesh with the existing IC and OOC culture of the established group saves both sides a lot of grief in the long run. To use my own guild as an object example: the surface purpose of the interview is to make sure that the character concept fits our in-text gimmick of "Praetorian supes after the fall of Praetoria, with a polemical slant." But that, in and of itself, is just a vibe check. If a player rolls into Session Zero with an Arachnos Bane Spider, or a Primal-born superhero with no Praetorian theming elements, that tells us a lot about how much the player is willing to engage with a theme or make room for others in their roleplay (to wit: they won't). If the player reacts to our list of commonsense rules in any way other than acquiescence, say, by feeling out the boundaries ("Okay, you say don't post porn in the Discord, but could you define porn?"), that's another failure of the vibe check even though they technically "agreed" with the rules. It's all about mitigating the potential of harm to everyone. And unfortunately, that does include feeling out for if the player isn't doing anything wrong, but could be a flashpoint of conflict anyway. They could, for instance, over the course of the interview, evince outspoken beliefs or associations which we know would provoke hostility from existing supergroup members, irrespective of the "objective" justice of those beliefs and the (inapplicable, but frequently cited) First Amendment of the United States. The character could have some element that gives us worries about meshing with the group; say, an element of their bio draws on canon characters or orgs in a way that directly or indirectly invalidates other players' characters*. If they hail from a group that has a gnarly history with our members, that's also a factor... as in the OP's example, and even in specific cases like the OP's example where the reality is something nuanced and complicated. This is because roleplayers on the internet don't do nuanced and complicated, by-and-large. They're tribes, cliques, enclaves of precariously-balanced social loyalties, like every human social group up to and including these forums. My job as admin is to make sure that my tribe stays on-target and avoids drama, and sometimes when working with unknown quantities I'm going to be ruthless. * (Most typically, this manifests as being the only-child son/daughter/sole inheritor of some canon NPC that other characters in the guild draw from, although typically we broach this topic directly with an appeal to scale back or clarify rather than going "REJECTED!") For what it's worth, I'm sorry for what you went through, OP, and I think the specific phrasing that you link in your post, assuming that it's a direct transcript, was out-of-line. Lines like "we're not alone in the community" and "actual, non-gaming problems" are themselves hyperbole, high-drama, and bait, and those folks conducted themselves poorly, imagining the sins you could be guilty of and then externalizing them onto you. But I think that you should consider this rejection to ultimately be a service to both their supergroup and you: the risk that you would be the subject of aggression from roleplayers with a viscerally-negative reaction to your history was well-articulated, and now you don't have to go through a firestorm of incendiary nerd drama. My purpose in commenting wasn't to refute OP's experience, specifically, because it seems like it was an ugly situation with inappropriate aspersions about the player's intents. But rather, I wanted to push back against the idea that "interviews" or "Session(s) Zero" constitute elitist bullying by default. I think that the HC Discord and HC Forums are example enough on the kind of explosive drama that can erupt from non-curated "big tent" roleplayer spaces, and why some players might be very careful when adding to a small group of known quantities.

This is where I tend to land on this issue. I don't make a habit of going around "claiming" spaces in the open world, but I love seeing players roleplaying outside of Pocket D. Grounding player fanon with the game canon feels, to me, to be a good thing provided you're prepared to accept appeals to verisimilitude like "this is my stop! I live in that building at the end of the street." Players like to feel integrated with the lore and with the world, and building fanon off of the many interchangeable polygonal buildings in the city is laudable in my book, provided it's not some egregious violation of the pretendy-times social contract like "Yeah, I'm the head of the FBSA, everyone out of City Hall! No talking to the 1-5 contacts!" A comparable phenomenon is that it's against terms of service to claim to be the, definitive group, but several supergroups past and present on Everlasting are based directly on canon organizations: more Vanguard groups than I can shake a stick at, the fabulous <Hero Corps Founders Falls>, the Arachnos VGs <Ivory Tower> and <Arachnos Espionage Division>, my own <New Praetorians Initiative>, and even the controversial <Crey Corp's The Watch> (though they also wear the outside-text canon of The Boys on their sleeves). In the absence of competing "claims" like we saw with the two ill-fated <Paragon Police ______> supergroups who hated each other, I tend to be perfectly happy to take 'canon group' player characters at face value rather than going "nuh UH, you're not a REAL Paragon Police officer, like I am!" If the player or group demonstrates an extreme disconnect from my expectations of what's appropriate of a canon group -- as in one "New Praetorian" I encountered who was also the commander of a Rikti army that had singlehandedly defeated Tyrant, or a "Crey Representative" I encountered who had absolutely no 'Public Relations Voice' and mostly seemed content to hurl vulgar obscenities and threats of violence at every superhero she encountered -- that's my cue to simply disengage. There's nothing for me there, but it's not worth starting a fight over. Occupied spaces are an analogous situation. To reiterate my general vibe-check, if it's a 'high traffic' space like Kallisti Plaza, City Hall, or the Atlas Boot (all of which I've seen players claim "belongs" to them), that's ridiculous. This is especially true of Pocket D, which already has a textual owner (DJ Zero) and is metatextually a 'neutral space,' so the assertion of ownership violates literally everything about the intended usage of the zone as a facilitator for lightweight, no-strings attached social RP. Were such a supergroup (maybe even one of the ones I mentioned above!) hypothetically claiming to own some or all of Pocket D, I would consider that a display of extremely poor roleplay etiquette, but write it off as the cost of doing business and bounce my RP to somewhere nearby after making clear OOC that I did not want to be involved. The only situation in which I'd consider involving the mods is if the infringing roleplayers pursued after I made clear OOC that I wasn't interested in participating, because that's when we start getting into actionables like 'harassment'... and even then I'd probably just Ignorelist before I involved an admin in an RP fight. The admins exist to police definitive rule infractions, not to serve as babysitters for the adult children who like to shit in Everlasting's roleplay sandbox. To end on a point of encouragement, though: If a group asserts that the Up-N-Away Burger next to the tailor in Atlas is where they go for those promotional pumpkin spice shakes, or that they live in the Hotel Geneva location south of the New Sparta marker in Talos Island, I think that's awesome! I'd be a pedant at best and a douchebag at worst to insist "No, you can't lay claim to the world like that, that steps all over other players. No saying things about the world that we can't verify in the lore." They're not stepping all over other players by squatting in that little park with the arches in Steel Canyon. They're not making sweeping declarations asserting their own, clashing canonicity. They're adding flavor and depth to the world we share. Dollars to donuts, I didn't have a very strong impression of what that Up-N-Away burger served on its shake menu, anyway, and my personal roleplay is likely reconcilable with the idea that they serve pumpkin spice shakes. And if I absolutely NEED the ice cream machine at that Up-N-Away burger to be broken or else my entire character concept will fall apart into a mess of contradiction, that's the point where I just don't interact with those roleplayers, like in the more extreme cases above. At the end of the day, it isn't hard to not roleplay in the cavernous open space of Everlasting, where there are only 300-500 players at peak hours, maybe thirty of whom are roleplaying at any given time.

Yep! Just hit it in Gordon Stacy, as well

I've been going through Philippa Meraux's non-arc "pool" missions, and there's a weirdly-leveled pod that I keep running into at level 34 (+1 Difficulty). It consists of 2 Infiltrators at +1 or +2 level (so, yellow or orange), one of whom is emoting a walkie-talkie, and one Field Agent, always emoting talking, who is -3 to -2 level, 4 levels offset from the Infiltrators. It feels like they're very common spawns, too - almost the entire first floor of the map consists of this trio, and I encounter them about every-other-fight afterwards.

Encountered just now on my end.

Hey, Homecoming folks! Just a very minor-impact bug report. While I was running through the Faultline missions, I encountered ambient Longbow spawns down in the Arachnos base, chattering away happily as if they weren't in the middle of an Arachnos digsite surrounded by Arachnos. Looks like something might have gotten screwed up with that area pulling from 'hero base' associated assets, potentially? It was pretty funny to spot them deep down there. Coordinates: approx. [677.6 -76.0 2221.6]