Removal of Combat Ability

[Vad]

I use Toma and Luna's story a lot. =(

[Celena]

Going back to cannons isn't such a bad idea. This custom regime seems to be a turn off to new blood. I remember in 05 when there was a new joining app every 2 day or ss. Shit got so intense we had to introduce a roleplay school. Good times..

[Belle Hibiki]

Maybe we should just go back to using the canon characters. I mean, like Sophia said, it's not like the stories of the old set means anything. How often does any of it come up anyway?

This is kind of a backwards way of looking at it. The reason why none of it comes up is because we're forbidden from interacting with our previous characters/canon characters; that way we don't screw up the 'history.' Of course, the result is that no one references the history, either, because THAT might screw it up, and really who cares about writing about characters you're forbidden from interacting with?

The only time when we have referenced previous characters is, like, people that were still around at the time remembering battles (like Belle), or when people have gotten around the non-interaction rule - such as in Kill Town when Kaden fought Raditzu.

At some point I'll get around to actually commenting on this change.

Going back to cannons isn't such a bad idea. This custom regime seems to be a turn off to new blood. I remember in 05 when there was a new joining app every 2 day or ss. Shit got so intense we had to introduce a roleplay school. Good times..

Yeah, and four out of five of them were probably fucking terrible.

Going back to canons is absolutely not going to help beyond an - at best - temporary injection of activity. You guys are thinking about things to relieve the symptoms, not treating the disease.

[Vad]

As much as I want to increase the activity of the site I'm really bugged that the two years of development I've put into Vad are slowly becoming worthless.

[Tyr]

I don't get this decision after thinking it over one day when I could not sleep. This move seems counter-intuitive if what the decision was aimed for is to make people roleplay more. Before people could roleplay to get their story on while gaining some on their character for doing it, now it's only for getting their story on and it will now create confusing gaps of randomly obtained power due to powerhouses having roleplayed way more than newer people or (in my case) lazier people.

If it's because you miss OOC activity, I don't know what to say. How does this affect that anyway?

Also what's with the crazy ass love for canons? I mean is it because you like roleplayign those characters (and by far, they are interesting characters in each their own right) or is it because you just want their looks for your own story to shape them into something they are not? I mean, where's the line for the roleplaying and where's the line for writing? What is the aim for this update?

As always, if my post is confusing, I will attempt to fix that.

edit: Bottom line, I think that what CDBZ needs to do in order to regain its' momentum is decide what it wants to be, what you guys (the adminstrating team) wants CDBZ to be. Do you want it to be a roleplaying game (that means roleplaying with game elements) or do you want it to be a place where people just write to write, either to get out a story or to just use your creativity? I think that if you want a RPG, this is a step backwards. If you want a writer's club, this step should be taken further.

ed2: Also if you want to keep this, food for thought would be how to handle combat. We can make it just pure writing that decides how it is, but people will feel incredibly cheated. Right now I predict the future battles will be decided by 8 levels of power: Standard, power up 1, power up 2, power up 3. Then these power levels can become "new" again by fusing with someone, so that it becomes fusion standard, fusion power up 1 and so forth. But with this change, you either need to make fusion different or reverse this change, else people will rip off. A prime example would be Viper who's currently here. Both roleplayers have spent a good time roleplaying to get the nescessary EXP to get all the power ups. Now what if Victoria, in theory, has the same power ups as them. Now she can just fuse with anyone. Let's say that she diggs me and we fuse. I have not nearly enough EXP as Viper combined, but it does not matter, Victoria has all the transformations and now essentially Leotoria is as powerful as Viper with less than half the work. People will just feel cheated if this carries on.

[Sophia]

I don't get this decision after thinking it over one day when I could not sleep. This move seems counter-intuitive if what the decision was aimed for is to make people roleplay more. Before people could roleplay to get their story on while gaining some on their character for doing it, now it's only for getting their story on and it will now create confusing gaps of randomly obtained power due to powerhouses having roleplayed way more than newer people or (in my case) lazier people.

I can understand the power gaps thing, but then again, I'm not sure it's so big a deal. I've explained the suggestion in so many different mediums that I have no idea what's been said here, but it was made based on the assumption that the thing holding people back was feeling hopeless when compared to the strongest characters because, let's face it, the strongest characters get most of the attention.

This was said as an alternative to my initial suggestion, which was to just tell everyone to shut the fuck up and write something.

Roleplaying has always been the aim of this site, whether intentional or not, and since CA hasn't amounted to shit since we restarted, why not ax it if it was holding even one person back? Maybe we can rebuild our member base and go from there, but we can't really make what you'd consider to be "intuitive" changes with a dead site and still hope for it to be successful.

As for canons, the problem is with perception. The only real difference between our canons and our customs is the names and play-bys. While I wouldn't fight going back to canons, I agree with Belle's assertion that it won't help, but I'll add that it only won't help because our canons aren't actually canons. I hope that makes sense.

And frankly, I don't want to just rewrite the DBZ saga. That seems pretty pointless to me.

EDIT: The more I explain the idea, the more it sounds like a stimulus package. <.<;; It's not perfect, but it's better than doing nothing.

EDIT2: Like I've said about a dozen times to only a few people, I sincerely don't care if overwhelming demand brings CA back. My only problem is that with CA, the amount of work involved isn't worth it if the site will just end up dying. For the people opposed to it, give me a reason to believe that Chubbs isn't just going to sink like the Titanic and we can have all the flashy stat gadgets you want.

[Tyr]

I believe CA actually gives an incentive to roleplay. I know it sounds strange, but even just seeing a number steadily increase at least feels like a little reward to you, as an added bonus it lets you feel like you've accomplished something finally getting up to the person you're aiming for. Honestly I don't think just re-adding CA will spring Chubbs back to life like shock paddles. It's the bottom line. If you want more activity on Chubbs, I believe we need to cater more to the "target audience". If we want it to be an RPG, we need to add more game elements (there's PLENTY ideas to go around, Rod had his own entire forum section for ideas for a while) and if we want it to just be a writer's club, we probably need to remove more limitations by game elements.

[Sophia]

The point wasn't to just re-add CA, the point was to get people interested and motivated again and go from there, either to make a broad-sweeping change or to just stand pat. Maybe just a few tweaks here and there would help. I don't know. But really, just this topic alone has generated some interest again, so I guess the plan worked at least halfway.

Also, my second edit still stands. Watching the numbers rise doesn't amount to much if the site dies halfway through my goal.

Either way, I don't necessarily think you're wrong, so I'll stop here.

[Tyr]

No no, I'm not trying to win a discussion here, but I fail to see if why CA being there is killing the site. What is CA preventing, in your eyes? As mentioned before, CA was mostly discounted for in sagas to enable the most people to be involved and since there hasn't been the big dragonball fight yet which was foreshadowed, there has not been a case of CA being actively used in a long while. What is it that CA does that you find so negative? "Hold one person back", how?

[Sophia]

No no, I'm not trying to win a discussion here, but I fail to see if why CA being there is killing the site. What is CA preventing, in your eyes? As mentioned before, CA was mostly discounted for in sagas to enable the most people to be involved and since there hasn't been the big dragonball fight yet which was foreshadowed, there has not been a case of CA being actively used in a long while. What is it that CA does that you find so negative? "Hold one person back", how?

I'm not really even arguing. I only stopped because I have nothing else to add. xD

I'm not sure I can explain it much more than I already have. The big gap that needs to be filled between the high powers and the low powers isn't worth working towards if other people aren't roleplaying. I could have been posting like a madman to make up lost ground for the last six months, but at this point, where would that have gotten me? The site really looked dead about a week ago.

[Tyr]

Perhaps then it is not Chubbs that is at fault, but World of Warcraft and the Christmas hols. Actually one of the reasons I'm writing here is because the queue to do anything in WoW atm takes 30 minutes. z_z

[Vad]

This whole discussion makes my writing feel worthless and I'm not alone in feeling that. As Leo said which was glazed over is that Viper is now pretty much worthless other than being a merger of Vad, Trixie, and Piper. With everything that entails.

To be completely honest and I'm not blaming anyone, but me and Piper were stalled this summer because it took more than two weeks to get a thread graded. We were halted by the fact that I was the only active staff member willing to sit down and grade something.

I understand if life may have gotten in the way, but that's a problem even if it's justified.

[Kaden]

I believe CA actually gives an incentive to roleplay.

And a year's worth of only two people being active at a time shows that it's not enough of an incentive. People still earn XP for RolePlaying, which is still a method of "statistically" shaping your character. I understand what you're saying, Leo, but all it takes is a short look back to see that what we had wasn't working.

@Vad: Why was none of this brought up during the discussion about removing CA? You didn't say anything about feeling like you, or anyone else, was feeling like you're writing was "worthless." There are people who lost a lot more than you did with the removal of CA that haven't voiced these concerns. I understand that's not your point, but put things in perspective. Changes need to happen, and not everyone's always going to feel like they're fair; fact of the matter is that, to the people who are active and happy with the way the RPG is set up now, changes aren't fair. That's simply the way it goes sometimes.

[Vad]

@Vad: Why was none of this brought up during the discussion about removing CA? You didn't say anything about feeling like you, or anyone else, was feeling like you're writing was "worthless." There are people who lost a lot more than you did with the removal of CA that haven't voiced these concerns. I understand that's not your point, but put things in perspective. Changes need to happen, and not everyone's always going to feel like they're fair; fact of the matter is that, to the people who are active and happy with the way the RPG is set up now, changes aren't fair. That's simply the way it goes sometimes.

It wasn't really an issue until the discussion got more in depth with talk about the radical changes to the site. I started feeling like I had put work in for nothing. I understand that my losses might be nothing compared to others, but I still feel the way I do. And I want more activity and as staff I am willing to do whatever the members see fit, as well as us, to right the problem.

I'm on board no matter what, but my feelings about the change will remain the same.

[Kaden]

It wasn't really an issue until the discussion got more in depth with talk about the radical changes to the site. I started feeling like I had put work in for nothing. I understand that my losses might be nothing compared to others, but I still feel the way I do. And I want more activity and as staff I am willing to do whatever the members see fit, as well as us, to right the problem.

I'm on board no matter what, but my feelings about the change will remain the same.

Ok, well you're bringing a completely different conversation into this one, and it's really not productive. If other changes happen, they'll happen. If they don't, they don't. In the mean time, we're a long way from knowing what will happen in the future.

[Vad]

Ok, well you're bringing a completely different conversation into this one, and it's really not productive. If other changes happen, they'll happen. If they don't, they don't. In the mean time, we're a long way from knowing what will happen in the future.

I was hinting toward the resets discussed in here and the "going back to canon" statements mainly, but I'll digress.

[Belle Hibiki]

People stopped roleplaying because other people stopped roleplaying. It's not necessarily CA.

It varies from person to person, but I can't think of anyone who likes to 'rp' into a vacuum. They come to this site to write and interact with others, and if the site is quiet, it starts an inevitable failure cascade. (Less people roleplaying means there's less of a reason to roleplay, which leads to even fewer people roleplaying.)

Me? I stopped roleplaying because Karin (I THINK?! I can't remember) completely raped what little ego I had left by eclipsing what had taken me two years to build in two months. Then I got distracted by other shit, and by the time I was done with that I had fallen off the writing wagon.

Will the removal of CA help that? Probably not. If I do post, it'll be because I was spurred into action by this thread, not the change itself.

[Kaden]

To respond to the canon comments, I see it very unlikely that we'll go back to using canons. Let me preface this by saying that this is me talking as a player, not an administrator.

I greatly appreciate the decision to try and keep the Chubbs history as intact as possible. Its a nod of respect to the people who put a great deal of time and energy into the characters and settings that had been crafted over the years. Yes, I know I was involved in that decision, but I was simply one voice out of many.

That said, the decision was poorly executed. Everything Belle pointed out was exactly correct. The Chubbs "history" is in its own little bubble that everyone is either too worried or apathetic to touch. Why reference a past battle, running the risk that you may do it incorrectly and break "canon," when you can simply make one up to serve your purposes at the cost of maybe two extra sentences?

The proper course of action would have been to chronicle an "official" timeline of events that would be the Chubbs canon. That certainly wouldn't have been a magical fix to the current issue, but it would have helped. Of course, that's said in hindsight, so take it for what you will. I still make references to Raditzu zipping about the galaxy getting himself into various kinds of trouble, though, and I enjoy that.

The RPG is facing a number of problems. The primary one is that there are no new people. How to deal with that is a thread in its own right. Equally problematic is that the people who are here simply aren't RolePlaying (with a number of exceptions that I can count on one hand). Unfortunately, these two problems compound upon one another: if a new person shows up and sees inactive forums, they say why bother and move on, whereas existing people don't want to simply fall into the same routines of writing through the same overarching actions (Rad runs into Vegeta -> insert witty dialogue -> kung-fu fight!) with the same people.

As Leo pointed out, there's an argument to be made that removing a potential incentive is only going to make people more apathetic, but when you only have two options (with CA or without CA) and one of them isn't working...

There are lots of things that could be changed or added or removed, but it's very difficult to tell which ones will bring things back to life and which ones will be the final nail in the coffin.

Of course, discussing and speculating about problems and potential solutions can be helpful, and I think keeping a line of dialogue open like this is helpful.

Gah. Ok... I said I was talking as a player, so I need to stop there. I think there was something else I meant to say, but I started rambling. So... yeah.

[Dehan]

Whatever you ladies and gents decide I'll take as is.

At the moment the rules of the rpg are the same as far as only two abilities unless wished for by the dball and XP still earned to buy techniques through rping? Combat Ability/Level of Power(for the moment) is out entirely unless people want it back?

If that's how i understand things being I don't mind trying them out. Vad you may have someone hunting you down soon.

[Tyr]

And a year's worth of only two people being active at a time shows that it's not enough of an incentive. People still earn XP for RolePlaying, which is still a method of "statistically" shaping your character. I understand what you're saying, Leo, but all it takes is a short look back to see that what we had wasn't working.

My point exactly! I reckon we need moar incentives to make people roleplay. I don't think removing anything will solve this problem, I think we should add stuff. moar stuff.