Find out IC - Make it more pallettable.
Newbie's Perspective.

When I was new to Sindome, they did the exact same thing. 'Find out IC' to things that really, any sane human being should know how to do, if it was in real life. Finding everything out IC is just going to turn Withmore City into a game even ICly, and that's awkward. I thought it had gotten better since, but then I don't use the xgame channel much anymore. That part I totally agree with you on. People being a little too scared of being accused of metagaming, so much that they throw a 'find out IC' without really considering how dumb it might be, in some instances. I don't really have a lot of opinions on the other stuff.

I don't want to sound confrontational at all, I don't really like that sort of thing on OOC mediums but I feel like another perspective would do this thread some good.

I am a new player too, 22 days as of today. I read every help file suggested to me by the system generated notices and examined everything I could find as instructed by players on game-help and as recommended by system messages and quite frankly, I have had to ask very few questions on game-help as a result.

I think maybe that you may feel like "FInd out IC" or "Read the help file" may seem hostile, or, blunt, or uncaring, but I think it's supposed to be a "for your own good" type thing, like it's to encourage good behaviors from you, to be self-sufficient as a player, to respect the game and the work that goes into the help files and the IC and OOC explanation of features and functionality.

Good players want to play with other good players, and the best way to make a good player out of a new player, is giving them the tools to survive on their own.

Give someone a fish, feed him for a day, teach someone to fish, feed them for life, etc.

On the note of RP and time invested, I do not want to say too much because I do not want to 'out' any of my RP, but I have been involved in so much just by talking to random people, that it has blown my mind how much value I've gotten out of Sindome in the past 3 weeks.

I've made and lost what I think is a fair amount of money, I've had positive and negative things happen to me, and it's all been fun, I could have easily gotten upside at how some RP played out in contrast to my expectations, but it was fun, bad things happened and it was fun to RP it out, that's awesome.

Setbacks can be good for the gameplay, a bad for your character, I believe the cure for getting caught up in the negativity of "bad for the character" is by investing more in the gameplay value of Sindome, and less in your characters overall progression and powerscaling.

I hope this helps a lot, I can only wish that people enjoy the game as much as I am right now.

So you had several different things you bring up in your OP @Volo, so I'll try and address them in turn.

1) FOIC: This is a thing that the community has to get reminded of from time to time. A few years ago it got to the point that xgame was a contest to see who could spam FOIC the fastest. Some things should be FOIC, but at the same time, help for basic questions like verbs and the like isn't FOIC material, in my mind. It's like telling a character that has a significant UE expenditure into driving that they have to FOIC how to start a car :(.

In most cases EXAMINE HERE or EXAMINE OBJECT will give you the basic details to start getting yourself into trouble, but sometimes you'll want to either make and ask an IC mentor "Hey, my car's computer is acting up, who out there has experience with those things?" and other times you'll have to ask on xgame.

2) Money making: You can work your ass off IC to make tons of money but in the end, money is a fleeting thing, and if you work yourself to death trying to make it, you're more likely to just quit when you lose it. Try not to focus on the material and instead work on the RP aspects of the game.

3) Sky's the limit (RP): This is something that's perpetuated, but doesn't often happen in practice. Any kind of plot that is going to have a major impact to the game is going to require staff approval, NPC interaction, and potentially code changes. As a result, these things aren't on the timetable of days/weeks and are instead more like weeks/months/years. I won't be a negative Nancy and say they don't happen, because they do, but they're rare. One of the overarching themes of SD is that players don't have a ton of agency in this dystopia setting. That's both an IC and OOC thing.

4)Pacing: SD is a slow, slow, SLOW game. I can't stress this enough. It can be hard to keep up with the insane volume of shit that's going on in-game, because SD has an active playerbase of around a hundred people or more that log in at least once or twice a week, so the pace of the WORLD can be crazy. However, the pace of your character and their development is going to be in terms of months/years. I really want to stress the following point the solution to wanting faster character development is not to play a combat character. Combat characters who are not veteran rerolls take months of initial UE investment before they start being capable of doing even relatively simple things. If you're wanting a more active and engaging lifestyle for your character, try running in circles that are extremely active day over day. Examples of this would be things like gangs, or running jobs for corporations who are looking to add people into their spy networks.

I am also fine with people sharing help files I did not mean to imply I was against that, I was just trying to share that I felt the game did a good job directing you to them itself when you try to use a feature.

I think it's great that people help one another on game-help, they've cleared more than a few things up for me, mostly around proper ways to conduct yourself OOC/ICly about a few different topics.

I guess if they wanted to improve the experience of game-help they could make it a moderated system where someone poses a question via a command to the channel rather than just talking on it, and players with a special flag that's authorized to respond to these questions could give an answer, and these people would be expected to give meaningful and thoughtful responses that are appropriate for the question asked. Given enough veteran, patient players with this ability, it may possibly improve the game-help experience.

That's just a thought, I don't want to step on any toes or suggest that there needs to be a change, just brainstorming.

I have done nothing but hustle, put effort in, and run the streets without anything coded other than crate work and I believe I have been more successful than someone with an actual job that hands out a paycheck.

I sincerely think that if you try not to be so caught up with whats going to happen in the future for your character and just live the moment and make snap decisions as things come up, you will find more enjoyment out of the randomness of the game and RP than any other type of single player or multiplayer game.

That's the great things about MUDs, they're slow, and give you plenty of opportunity to develop and experience really detailed stories and experiences on your own or with other players.

One thing that really caught me and dragged me in was the help think file, learning that there is IC cybernetics that let you read thoughts made a lightbulb go off in my head, I now think it is meta to not use think religiously, if I am standing in a bar and I need to do something important, I use think to tell myself, because that makes sense to me, and doing things on that level for my character, has made me even more immersed in my RP experiences than I had expected. It puts me at risk if my thoughts are read, but hey, thats literally what mind-reading equipment should enable you to do, catch people off-guard by snooping on thoughts, that's awesome!.

I hope this helps but I do get the sense that you've already decided last night that you may not want to continue on.

@Volo

SD is slow to develop your character, yes. It takes about 2&1/2 years of playing daily to hit the XP cap. You'll need about 2-3 months of focused UE expenditure to become halfway decent at something initially, but things tend to get easier as you go due to the way that stats and skills interact with one another.

Consider that MU*, your actions will break down into consuming RP, Generating RP, or some mix of the two. So far, you're focusing on consumption: "I want to get a job doing this, I want to get hired to do runs, I want to hustle this thing, etc." Sooner or later, you'll want to try giving RP creation a shot. For some of us, consuming is the most entertaining aspect of the game, and for others it's making RP for others and seeing how it plays out. Experiment some, and you might be pleased to find yourself enjoying new things.

When I said originally to try not to focus on material things, it's simply because the effort required to make things is much greater than the effort required to take things. You might hustle all week for a couple thousand chyen, and lose it in an instant to a mugging. By focusing on that materialism (Good for theme, maybe not good for RP/enjoyment of the game) it'll be harder to recognize that getting mugged is essentially a RP prompt. You just got mugged, and lost a week's worth of 'chyen progress' now what do you do?

Just try and keep in mind that you don't need UE to have a good time in SD. And for the most part, you don't need UE to get RP, consume plots or generate plots. And that's really, at the end of the day, what the game's all about. Storytelling.

Correction. I shouldn't say many things. There are one or two skills that can be learned from zero in a few weeks that you can make a living on with hard work (easier still to start with them in character creation), and improve as you work.

Most things take a while to get good at and to develop the stats to support them. But then you're good at them forever, which is why Sindome favours the long game.