[Feedback] Data Center Travel Changes

[voidlorn]

I'm thinking a small implosion is happening. Before Endwalker, there were venues but nowhere near as many. When Empy came out for extra housing and DC Travel unlocked, the community got flooded with venues, with, ironically enough, nightclub clones that later got memed on. Everyone wanted to open a venue, later on everyone wanted to become a DJ, and both have seen reputation/quality decline over the years in the non-rp community eyes that don't know how widely they can swing in variance. Now that DC Travel is locking up people, you have all those extra venues without the population that fueled them to be alive in the first place. I would assume that over time, most of the smaller one's that don't have a strong core community will eventually close and things will semi-go back to how they were pre-Endwalker.

The vast majority of venue-based rp isn't just nightclubs and DJ stuff. It's story-driven events and locations built by people and communities who dedicate a lot of time and energy to the stories and connections created by writing together! Generalizing everything into "ew nightclubs, good thing they're dying" is demeaning and dismissive of other people's experiences and the passion we collectively put into this game's roleplaying community.

[VoidsentStatus]

Generalizing everything into "ew nightclubs, good thing they're dying" is demeaning and dismissive of other people's experiences.

Listen, you're talking to someone who has talked to and been friends with venues owners since 2019/2020 and earlier, some of which ran venues 3+ years before that even. I don't need a history lesson that venues aren't just nightclubs when I ran a venue before they even existed, before DJ's even played at venues. Before giveaways even broke 5mil. My point, is that things got worse, objectively over time for the community as a whole, and generic stereotypes from the bad apples has ran over to other areas of the community. Nightclubs are not the vast majority of the rp community, but they are the worst offenders of having unncessary additions. There are unncessary cafe's, there are unnecessary bath houses, there are unnecessary lounges, there are unncessary gambling locations. Every RP venue community has clones, nsfw and sfw alike. And if you talk to OG's, a lot of these places shouldn't even be open to begin with because they added nothing unique to the community. They added PF bloat, they added giveaway spam just for opening sake and never contributed to the community outside of openings. They added staff wage competition inflating the cost of running a venue to over 4x what it started as. So no, I am not going to shed tears over venues that fall into that category. The one's that survive will be the one's that were actually unique and have the resources and community backing them because they added something important to the community or the one's that don't care about having a smaller population at their openings because they did it for fun like how roleplay originally started. When you would go into an immersive roleplay venue that barely had 10-20 people and you were happy and cozy and people didn't mind making alts to go to venues. You have multiple housing wards fully empty on Dynamis, and pfff 30-50% of OCE wards completely empty. If you have a "community" that happened to be on a congested world that's hard to get to like say Balmung and you can't afford/crowdfund 10-25mil to relocate, something is wrong. You rebuild/relocate like other venues have already done. What's going to kill a lot of venues is that they cared about the traffic that isn't free anymore. If people manually decorated, I'd have a little more sympathy, but knowing people can click copy and paste designs in 10min for any house, that's just a gil check at this point. Even the leveling process is only level 50 which is 1 day of work given the XP buffs. You may be inconvenienced, but you aren't killed by any means. The only people killed are the clones that didn't build a community during the time they had or the people that cared about numbers and not the actual roleplay.