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Are There Fewer RP Sites These Days?


Uaithne
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Are there fewer RP sites these days?

 

I've been browsing through RP directories and it seems like that there are fewer RP sites than there used to be.  I also noticed that sites seem to be clumped into "small town / big city real life" or "vampires/werewolves."  Obviously that's a matter of opinion based on observation and isn't backed by hard numbers or statistics, but I don't see the variety that I used to.  Or the numbers in general.

 

Yes or no?  I might be completely wrong.

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No. 

 

It has more to do with sites increasingly adopting the habit of affiliating with similar genres, because that's how you expose your site to the audience that's most likely to join. 

 

RP directories are great and all, but Google is your best friend if you're looking for a specific kind of RP. If you try to just browse through aff links all you'll do is run a circle. 

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3 hours ago, Dragon said:

If you try to just browse through aff links all you'll do is run a circle. 

I have indeed traveled the circle for many laps, looking for a new "vein" of sites to place an ad on....yet 95% of the sites all have the same ads and 3% of the remaining 5% are closed sites. 

But I HAVE noticed that board-genre/fandoms go through trends. So where as..... Vamps vs Wolves might increase, but Kingdom Hearts will go down. Or, Slice of Life spiking in popularity only because whatever-reality-show-is-popular is on its off season or something. 

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You can learn how to navigate affs/ads so you find different things. 

Don't look at just the first page of ads. Wait until the end of scrolling affiliates to see them. 

 

You're going to get a lot of closed sites and a lot of the same, but hitting up link backs will show you which sites are active and actively trying to recruit.

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To add to this, if you look into the top click/top RP sites, you'll find a greater diversity of genre, and some sites you can less frequently come across on directories.

I am not guaranteeing they'll all be brand new places, but the dynamics of what's popular can be really different.

Same goes with looking for RPs on Tumblr: you have a number out there popping up, but hard to see if you're not seeking RP played on this particular site.

 

Otherwise, yeah, I think directories only show a limited view of what's out there, they cluster some players with sometimes similar interest, but they can leave out many other players having simply not come across it.

 

Another way to view the situation would be to check into how many players stop playing, and how many new players start playing. I know I started at 14 or 15, and was playing back then with new players of 14-15 too. Now I'm in my late 20's and I tend to play with people in their late 20's and 30's. I am mostly disconnected with the batch of brand new roleplayers, from having kept with friends and sites including people my age, so I couldn't say if we still get enough new folks in need of sites to balance out the veterans deciding to stop playing.

 

As for the theme we see currently? Back then, some 10-13 years ago, the most sites I would see were Supernatural roleplays (the tv show) and X-Men roleplays. Maybe they never were that popular and it was only a bias due to me looking specifically for them. Maybe the current players potentially interested by such themes go toward vampire vs werewolf now that the Supernatural fandom's less popular, since there lack other unifying universe for modern fantasy. Maybe former Buffy the vampire slayer fans moved to SPN sites when the Buffy sites started closing too, who knows! 

 

Somebody should do a google search interest query on that. See how the key word "roleplay" is doing

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Granted I have not been in the forum world for long, but I feel like there is an ebb and flow. Always new sites popping up as other sites die. 

 

I agree with Rune. When I don't have a home, I feel like there are so few sites, and of course none of them are up to par.

 

My suggestion is link backs on boards you're vaguely interested in and then take a gander at top sites too! Sometimes if you've got a specific genre in mind that can help you have a pretty solid list to click through. :D

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Think there's definitely a lot out there! My advertisement "master list" is brimming usually! 

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I think the creation of sites has slowed a bit over the last few years, and I think it just has to do with lots of people RPing on social media instead or in lieu of starting out in a forum environment.

 

That being said, I do think forums in general are not as popular as they were five to ten years ago, and since there's more RPers every year... Maybe its just a smaller slice of the RP pie.

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Glub glub.

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I think @Deep Sea is right. Not that the rest of the advice in this thread is wrong or out of place. I think that it's getting harder to create forums since it takes so much time to get the coding right. We didn't need the super fancy skins or dohtml-heavy codes back in the day, so setting up sites was much easier. Now they might not have lasted long, of course, but there seemed to be more.

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I'm going to continue to disagree. 

 

Sites are a dime a dozen. They just don't last or aren't advertised properly so we never know about them. (Never posted on directories, drops 3 ads and decides they're done kind of deal.) Finding a skin isn't that hard and most come with banners you just shove text over. Skins aren't a new development and people know what they are getting into regarding them on forums.

 

It goes in phases. Wait until June and there will be tons of new ones popping up. It's a matter of when people have free time to dedicate to rp. Which is usually the summer and winter. We're in spring/fall right now and things are slower. 

 

It will start picking up again in about a month.

 

 

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5 hours ago, Uaithne said:

I think @Deep Sea is right. Not that the rest of the advice in this thread is wrong or out of place. I think that it's getting harder to create forums since it takes so much time to get the coding right. We didn't need the super fancy skins or dohtml-heavy codes back in the day, so setting up sites was much easier. Now they might not have lasted long, of course, but there seemed to be more.

It's easier to set up a Tumblr or Twitter for RPing than to set up a forum, especially for people who are independent RPing instead of joining groups. I don't doubt that lots of new forums go up every day, but maaan.... content management systems are much easier to personalize for newbs.

Glub glub.

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I personally believe that many role-plays are disappearing.  The example I'll use is the ani-manga niche.  To anyone in the mentioned group, I do have ties.  Nowadays, almost people expect instant gratification.  When I was exclusively in the illustrated face claim community, hiererarchy kept games (me).. for a month or two.  It frustrates me to this very day.  I ultimately recognized that I couldn't be an otaku like my twin sister.  Distressful for a twenty-nine-year-old invalid.

Edited by Jacob
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I think it depends on what community you look at. In the animanga community, we could advertise to like... at least 150-200 different animanga boards. These days, I struggle to find more than 70 while advertising (and some of the places I advertise to are not animanga, so there are likely less than 70 active animanga forums). But then, there  may be some hidden in the dark depths of the internet that hundreds of people know about but I do not because... different parts of the sea, I guess.

 

I've noticed there seem to be fewer HP boards over all. The forums seem to fluctuate on trends. Can't comment on RL boards cuz I just... don't interact with them enough to see a difference.

 

But then, I am thinking of forum RPs. There seem to be a lot migrating towards other protocols, like chat or tumblr. Maybe there aren't less, they just moved to different platforms?

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I'm not sure about a lack of sites but...there definitely seems to be a lack of variety. A lot of roleplay sites nowadays are all similar to each other in one way or the other. Lots of city life, high school based ones, and supernaturals. It's kind of depressing.

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