Posts tagged with “roleplay”
RolePlayGateway Meetups!
Are you interested in meeting other RolePlayGateway users in a public (safe!) place and talking about roleplay, writing, and general madness? Look no further.
I've set up the official RolePlayGateway meetup group for those of you who are interested. You'll need to register on Meetup, but we'll be announcing and posting all official meetups there.
Since I'm based in the North Carolina area, our first meetup will probably take place here -- if you're in the state, you'd better register!
Why did tonight's "Maintenance" take so long?
Well folks, as you might have noticed -- we took a planned downtime this afternoon for what we called "Maintenance". What we didn't tell you was that we were in the midst of an epic lag-fighting battle against all odds--lag demons had us cornered! Queue raging power metal here... (P.S., I recommend Hammerfall and Kamelot.)
Most of our previous trouble with the server has to do with the massive number of users that we have here on RolePlayGateway. As of this moment, we have over 25,000 registered accounts, over one million forum posts, and nearly one thousand roleplays registered in our latest hybrid play-by-post roleplaying system. We've been running a combination of three different servers for the larger portion of this year (Nginx, Apache, and MySQL, for you gearheads...)--which for the most part, kept things online, but they were slow at times, and even crashed entirely during others.
For the epic battlers of Sparta RolePlayGateway, this was madness. Something needed to be done to fight back the hordes of lag demons that constantly assailed the server room with wave after wave of laggertack--and it was with the force of a million suns that the RPG Staff fought valiantly to bring this war to a close.
a mysterious bard wrote:...It was the bloodiest battle the world ever saw,
With civilians looking on in total awe.
And the battle raged on for a century;
Many lives were claimed, but eventually...
The champion stood, the rest saw their better...
After the battle was waged, only one side could prevail. As the dust settled on the battlefield, the winner was clear.
Without further ado, we are proud to present das wünderserver 9001: the latest in anti-lag technology brought directly to you by the cloud. Lag times in chat should be next to nilch from this point forward, and the rest of RolePlayGateway will be in lock-step with the pace of the modern web.
We'll be spending the rest of this week tweaking and tuning the site to accommodate for this amazing new techology; so don't panic if there's something broke. Head straight over to the Help Forum and make yourself heard so our expert team of Coders can give that part of the site some extra training with this new comrade-in-arms.
Now, how's about that Valhalla-esque celebration? :)
What I Do In My Spare Time...
Between work, my social life, and training, I play a game called EVE Online. It's the first game I've ever shelled out a monthly fee for, and it's well worth it. I came across this fan-made video for one of the in-game factions on CrazyKinux's blog.
Full screen this and play it in HD, while keeping in mind that this is made entirely of recorded gameplay video.
I'm the director of a group of players (called a "Corporation" as opposed to "Guild" in other MMORPGs), and if you're interested in playing with me, shoot me a line or message me in game as "Baeryn". You'll never find a game so perfect.
A Brief History of Freeform Roleplay
Warning: Strong nerdery follows. Please be cautious of your fragile mind.
Since late 1997, in all of my pre-teen glory, I have been involved with something my friends and I simply called roleplay in our own little vernacular. Of course I've since learned that roleplay doesn't only refer to the peer-driven world of online roleplay, it refers to all sorts of real-world tabletop games, live acting, and various amounts of storytelling, but this particular post is written with the word roleplay referring to the freeform online roleplaying that I have always been so close to.
Freeform roleplay, or the idea that there is no GM (game master) or storyteller (as in Vampire: The Masquerade), and is instead driven solely by the players, with no concrete rules for battle, statistics, or progression of the story. Rules and guidelines were driven by common expectation, which developed as a sort of social justice system that remains effective, even today.
The very roots of this sort of roleplay stem from early chat systems, where one could adopt a simple moniker and create a personality around the idea of an "avatar", which in most cases consisted only of this name. Players, without defining themselves as such, would interact in an imaginative world that coalesced out of their collaborative imagination. Each would react to the other characters' actions and dialogue in a fashion that suited their own character's theoretical personality, and this would create a constantly evolving story arc.
As the web (and the young teen's perception of the web) evolved and grew, so did the concept of roleplay. Online forums became an entirely new beast, allowing users to write more and more into their in character posts, instead of being limited to the single lines that chat provided (of course, some chats had enough space for people to post a full paragraph, or even two - but this was limited at the time), they were able to expound upon their writing and even proofread their copy before sending it across the web for the other players to view.
Freeform roleplay had also grown to be very competitive at this point, with groups of players forming groups known as clans, guilds, or otherwise, and expanded their IC competitions from chat to the forums and message boards now provided by a few enterprising organizations (or individuals). It was this competitive banter and challenge that defined what many now call the golden age of roleplay, which is what really drove the forefront of this gaming medium.
There were plenty of players who had entered their late teens (and some even were adults at this point, *gasp*!) who moved away from chat, and who moved away from the conflict-driven world of this type of roleplay. They went on to create storyline-oriented games, with a small and select number of players in more of a collaborative fiction setting. These players often went on to become writers and editors, being driven more by the literary aspect of relaying a fiction onto the internet, and often have their own private niche where they can continue to do this with their long-standing playergroup.
And... that's where we are today. The freeform roleplay community is growing and changing, barely 15 years old at this point. We have the chance to nurture it, just as we have the chance to neglect it. Those of us who've been involved since the beginning have the greatest opportunity to influence the course of growth, and that's exactly what I'm hoping to do.