Newbies that app, get approved and then vanish.

[Dusty 55]

Hey all, 

 

I've seen this mentioned around and about rpg sites and it's something that seems to be rather chronic at the moment.

You advertise, you greet, you build up a rapport with a newbie in the Cbox, they are excited and so on. They may even post in a plotter and make a pinned residence for their character.

Then NOTHING. GONE. Crickets chirp.

 

I have heard of character factories, the player that love making new characters and once done, run out of steam and ideas. It's like they wrote their mini-novella and then they're done.

 

Thoughts?

 

 

[Anonymous 234]

Back before my like 3-year break from RPing, I never really had encountered this. However now I have but lucky me it's only with a handful of people right now. I remembered when we opened and this one member came and was super active in the box, every day she was there. Nice and friendly and creating characters....but then it got to the point where that's all she would do. She hardly ever posted yet it felt like every other day I was sorting a new idea she had. It got bad but we still didn't want to enforce the rule of you having a character max. We instead had to put on a posting requirement which stopped her in her tracks. Once we did that...she vanished, we're in the process of putting all 14 of her characters inactive through our activity checks. 

Anonymous poster hash: f47ea...d96

[CovertSphinx 710]

I've seen it over the last several years. Where it used to be one or two would vanish out of say....20-25 members that come and stay a while (sometimes 3 months, sometimes 3 years, but they actually contribute at some point). Now it's 20-25 for every 1 member that stays more than a week. 

 

Maybe its because I don't have time to constantly be around. Idk. I've noticed it, but I have no theories as to why. 

[Icewolf 258]

I do find it difficult to settle into a site if it doesn't appear to have what I want, it's not active, or if it's a multi-fandom site and there doesn't seem to be anyone interested in the same fandoms as I am. This is the only explanation that I can think of for it, other than the fact that they might come across another site they like better, or they simply don't have time for it.

 

I have noticed that people will take an interest in the site, hang around in the c-box and then vanish, or if they do make an account, there seems to be a problem. It's disheartening.

[FriedKilamari 46]

I create a lot of characters, because as staff I like having available characters for new members to rp with. A new member joins, I (or other members) offer to rp with them. Sometimes they bite, other times they vanish. It feels like it's a completely random chance on whether they'll stay or not.

 

This is always really disheartening, and unfortunately I don't think there's much that can be done to combat it. Offline stuff happens. Maybe they find a site they like more, there's an infinite list of reasons and you've just gotta keep advertising and trying.

 

[Uaithne 543]

I imagine it's something akin to buyer's remorse.  People love the shiny new concept and the thrill of applying for the character and getting the character accepted keeps them busy and motivated.  The thrill of the application dies down, and now the person has to figure out where to put his beloved character.  Integrating into a new site is pretty challenging, especially when it's not just making sure that the member fits in but also the character.  Perhaps the person now realizes that the character doesn't have as many opportunities that he thought he originally had, or that the thread topics which seemed sufficient initially aren't really as interesting once in play.

 

Then, of course, there's the fact that things aren't as clear-cut as they are when it comes to registering and applying.  You follow a strict path with registering an account that's pretty much the same across all sites, and you follow a more-or-less strict path when applying.  Sure the templates are different, the app sizes are variable, the questions you address are different, but it's still ultimately the same thing.

 

But when you're accepted, you've lost your training wheels.  Now you have to fend for your own as you've been dumped off the rails and into the great big field of elusive opportunities.  It's up to you to forge your own path, and if you don't have quite as good of a footing as you thought you did, you're going to slip and fall - and you'll probably get bored and wander away.

 

Finally, there's also the fact that real life takes over.  It doesn't have to be something dramatic.  Falling behind on homework means that the member has to decide (perhaps subconsciously) between spending an extra few hours on an assignment this week or checking up on the roleplay.  Or someone could be like me and get a bit of the good ol' fashion anxiety and not ever want to check the website ever again because [insert completely nonsensical anxiety-driven reason here].

 

Those are my thoughts and assumptions.

[Dragon 673]

16 hours ago, CovertSphinx said:

Where it used to be one or two would vanish out of say....20-25 members that come and stay a while (sometimes 3 months, sometimes 3 years, but they actually contribute at some point). Now it's 20-25 for every 1 member that stays more than a week. 

 

I feel like I've had the same experience. In the past the sites I've participated in averaged in the low-mid twenties for active users with about half of them being pretty hardcore active. Over the last couple of years it seems like that has completely reversed. It could be that the genres I'm interested in are either fading from popularity, or just have too much competition from other sites. 

 

One of my theories relates to the whole safe-space and overly politically correct wave that seems to have swept through a lot of the roleplay world, especially the last few years has a bit to do with it. I've noticed an increasing number of players, especially in the 25 and younger bracket, that expect their every dislike and self-proclaimed trigger to be respected without any consideration for fellow players; and if people aren't accommodating enough, they eventually have a tantrum and leave.

 

For example, I once had an experience with a player who had a fear of arachnids. They came into the chat forum during an ongoing conversation between myself and other players, in which we were sharing images of our pets (I keep scorpions, a few other players had tarantulas and the like) and types of scorpion/spider we found pretty or interesting. Rather than acting like an adult at 26 years of age, and just exiting till the conversation was over, they went to the admin and threw a whining hissy fit about it - the end result was that we were banned from sharing images or discussing such topics, and the admin went so far as to censor the words spider and scorpion to "olive with legs" in the cbox. There were a few other similar instances with this player until they eventually abandoned the site, but we also had a few players leave because of such instances. 

 

I've seen a player throw a small fit and leave a site after a civil conversation about feminism simply because I expressed that I wasn't a fan of the third wave movement and consequently neither supported nor identified with it. 

 

In a similar vein, I've seen a lot of contention in this sense that these kinds of things cause players to have to tread on eggshells, preventing them from exploring valid subjects and in-character events because someone might jump down their throat for it. For people like me who view writing and role play as tools to explore social stigmas, ills, and inequalities this over hyped sense of correctness is a huge turn off. 

 

So I think that the above causes problems both ways. Players will leave because their delicate sensibilities aren't being catered to, while at the same time players will leave because they're sick and tired of having to pussyfoot around that sort of snowflake nonsense.