Potential Transfer Here!

[Cobra174]

Hello!

My friend and I are looking to escape Balmung possibly. We've always been people who just like to have fun, chat and are easy going. We like to help people out and the congestion of Balmung is taking its toll. Long queue times, almost no hope of getting a house, etc. etc.

I'm curious if there are any housing plots available and how the community is over all.

I'd appreciate any input!

Thanks!

[Cetonis]

There are, as of my count last night, 40 Goblet plots remaining. I would assume that Lav Beds and Mist are now full. Plots overall are, obviously, moving quite fast.

The community is now a hodgepodge of long-time Mateans, Gilgamung refugees, new players coming for the preferred bonus, and RPers coming to the server as an agreed-upon Balmung overflow.

Before ~3.5-3.55, there was a clear skew towards high-playtime casuals, since serious (and/or "serious") raiders had largely left, or never came to the server in the first place. For people who play the game for the more casual stuff, the smaller size meant housing availability, more familiar faces, smoother hunts, and more incentive / reward for being self-sufficient in terms of the economy. Hard to say to what extent that all will continue to be true going forward.

[Istaro]

I was getting set with moving (from Balmung) to Mateus but I get many friends spelling rumors that the RP community gets heavily harassed and that one FC in particular was buying off as many plots as they could to keep RP players from having housing, is this fact?

[Cetonis]

I wouldn't know about harassment, first because it's not like I've been paying attention to the RP scene, but also because I wouldn't know what constitutes harassment in the first place.

If people are RP'ing in the adventurer's guild, and someone starts interjecting commentary in /say, is that harassment? Is there a bar for a certain level of harshness, or is any interaction that invades RP immersion considered harassment? What about just kind of fooling around, like there was a joke about challenging RPers to Triple Triad games for their souls?

I would assume that Balmung is hardly free of that kind of stuff. But to the extent that it is, it'd be because after some amount of time of being on Balmung, people get used to having RPers around. And anyone who transfers to Balmung knows what they're signing up for.

With the Mateus situation, anyone transferring for RP purposes will have to keep in mind (a) the average Matean has no clue how to or not to interact with RPers, and (b) the average Matean didn't sign up for this. Some of them may have even left Balmung to get away from RP.

So while it's not terribly rational, of course there are going to be those who are mad about having a bunch of RP blowing up their chat box. They'll have to get used to it, or leave, but either way that's going to take some time. Or, they'll stay and just be jerks to RPers until if and when they get bored of doing so. Who knows.

And even for those who welcome or are at least mostly-okay with having RPers around, are we supposed to act like they're invisible? Is it fine to kid around about their RP-ness? To be joke-mad about RP? What does one do about someone who's ERPing in public? Is handling these situations "improperly" going to be considered "harassment"? Why should non-RPers be super sensitive to what the RPers define as harassment in the first place, if they don't think they're doing anything wrong?

I'm happy to see folk coming to Mateus, RP or no, but there's no way around it - if we're going to have this influx of RP all of a sudden, there are going to be adjustment pains. Issues not really seen on a Balmung where only a small portion of the population at a given time was new and most of them tacitly agreed to being on an RP server by virtue of choosing to transfer there.

So far as the FC housing conspiracy goes, that'd be news to me. I wouldn't necessarily be surprised, but you could equally just have a lot of people (or an FC full of people) concluding that they should have a little more urgency about getting themselves a house, since they're apt to be bought out before very long.

Might be hard to believe, but there are likely many Mateans that have taken a non-committal "maybe someday I'll just go buy one" kind of stance to housing, fully expecting the option would always be there. With that being challenged I'm not surprised that plots are starting to fill, in tandem with a lot of folk coming in specifically to get a house.