I'll definitely admit that my dropping for a week or two was a partially burnout for me, partially frustration that no one else was pursuing things, and partial work obligation. Part of it was also to see if anything would happen at all if I wasn't there to push the wagon. And I know where you're at, with putting work into something and not necessarily seeing it go anywhere. That's why I'm starting this dialogue, to make sure there's an interest here and that people are willing and able to pursue storylines in this environment, because if we don't have a willingness as a community of writers, then nothing that I can do will fix the activity problem that we are having.
It seems like a lot of players are in the same email boat, where they prefer to have things done via gdocs, gchat, and email. And from what i understand there are many people tied up with Sloane at the moment, and maybe the tying up is contributing to the lack of scening and things will become more normal and regular when she returns to the country.
EV at least had a decent activity level for a few months, enough that we could keep it going for a bit. EV also had 3 or 4 moderators who were actively pursuing scenes in the community to force it forward and maybe that's the momentum that's missing-- i'm only one person and one person chasing people down to scene is a whole lot less effective than three, and feels less satisfying as a web of stories because there's only one basepoint in it. It feels like Masch started slow and then only ground forward because I was slamming my face into people trying to force it to move, and if that's the way that it will continue being, then it's not personally worth it to me, you know?
if we all had a similar chat system that we all regularly used, I'd say that we could do a weekly dialogue on the environment and what people are thinking of it, what people think would be cool to pursue, what we want to do with our environment as a community-- but with everyone's schedules being so wildly varied, it's difficult to orchestrate this kind of dialogue that would fix the non-cohesive environment and the shyness that are occurring. Maybe a regular journal post where we talk about these things and people can comment and chat with each other would help as well? We just need to find a way to bring people together where we can talk about the world and how our characters connect to it.
Everyone definitely seems on board with the idea of random character scening, so I'll probably work on assignments soon. 8D