"It used to be better!"Have a good long think about how the 'golden days' you lot seem to consistently reminisce about took place when Kishi hadn't introduced the plethora of admittedly-OP concepts and abilities so commonly utilized today. Those 'golden days' will never come back, there can be 'silver days', but they'd never live up to the past's rendition.
"New Players Suck!"
New players feel like they need a head start. Well, maybe we ought to direct them to a page here that explains how you need to build your character over time and with RP.
Maybe we ought to be more strict, forcing people to have witnesses to them getting and claiming things so that people don't just meta-take stuff. Maybe we should show them the ropes instead of stepping on them because they suck. If you don't want to do that, then don't complain about new players. End of story.
"There's No Community!"
Maybe because we're all jerks to each other whenever we try to have a discussion about anything? How about we try and prevent discussions from becoming aggressive and spiteful. Stop each other from being mean when we don't like someone else's opinion. And for god's sake stop with the snide, snarky comments that make you feel cool and tough and tuff and kewl. Nobody on SL has ever taken one of your rude and witty comments to heart, and nobody ever should, so just stop. Just grow up and stop.
"Everyone's Lazy!"
Lead by example, whether you're a kage or a genin, just choose not to take the easy way. This isn't something we can just "fix" with glue and paint, people are lazy because we let them get lazy, because we wanted to get lazy too.
I'm lazy. I'm the laziest person here. I bought my account, I just claimed random stuff that I made up, I don't have a consistent story for my character, and I never commit to a single thing.
Well, allow this to be the first thing I'd like to commit to. Like Yumei said, there might be no more golden-days, but we can at least get silver for now. And I'm gonna bet if we all actually made an effort to make SL better, the golden-days of yore would be in reach again.
Sorry for the sappy, but it's true.
Becoming more strict and starting to restrict things now would actually put new players farther behind, as they will have to go through hoops that many of us troublesome players did not have to go through to get certain powers and abilities.
It is just the way that it is now. If we were to place restrictions, we would need to do some back tracking, or else, we'd create an even higher staircase for the new players to climb.
While I would not say we are all "jerks" to each other, I think it would be better to argue that most of us (myself included) are very self-oriented.
As far as my character is concerned, I am not going to be going out of my way to attack a village just for the sake of creating RP simply due to the risk. I have invested too much time into custom, non reset stuff to have my character unceremoniously die on me because I wanted a high.
And not everyone is lazy. That is a generalization that I partially resent, becuase I put in the time to work on the backgrounds and (at least for Eric) many of the powers that I possess. I believe you are making the generalization out of convenience, but not everyone has taken the easiest path(s) to power.
Now then, as for some suggestions so I don't just sound like a critic:
End the sensation with death. The easy paths can be redeemed much more easily than the hard ways becuase of permanent death. New players get some cool jutsu, go out and fight, then find out that they're dead dead. And they have to basically start over with a new character.
Nobody wants to do that. I don't wanna do that (especially this late in the game) unless it is blazing glory or on my terms. If my main chars were to die, I would just leave. Period.
A community that prays and eats together... Well, let me not go there, but when was the last time we had a community wide event where we were not setting each other up to fight, or discussing some fight, or chatting about some problem that needs a few miracles to fix?
I am not talking just village-wide stuff, I am talking here on the forums kind of thing. We are a community, those who come here anyways, and even those who don't come here are also a part of the community. All some see is bickering, political jerking, and sometimes legit discussions.
Maybe we could all play a massive card game or something together. Maybe read a common story together. Maybe just have some RP on here not related to the SL site. Distribute and read sketchy materials Ya know, bond.
We hardly even have discussions over the newest chapters anymore.
