The Invisible

A community scale

It's been a long time since I jumped in to a big community. Back in those days, when I was a 10 year old wandering about AOL for something to occupy my weekends, I used to spend most of my time at the old Sonic Zone forum. I'm pretty sure that place died a while ago, but I've never looked in to it since. It was there that I got into RP, and it was RP that got me into the community. So when I finally took my leave of that place, many forums I wandered on to were RP-specific forums of varying genres but it was here that I started learning something.

Community scale heavily affects your chances of becoming a 'proper' member of the forum. The typical logic I saw was that in sites with vast quantities of people, the veteran members would typically shun the newer ones and their opinions. Nobody would make any effort to look towards you, unless you desperately begged for attention, in which case a couple of members might give you the time of day. The begging came in the form of basically accepting what they wanted the most and rolling with it. If someone would only RP vampires with you, you would have to RP vampires, else you'd lose credibility with that member and that would damage your chances even more. So you kow-tow to them. I never usually accepted this, so forums with a big community were usually a no-go zone for me.

Sadly, those were in plentiful supply, while the more close-knit RP forums were as rare as diamonds. These places were either new and upcoming or slowly dying. Both places had their small share of members who were eager to take on new players. They'd do their best to RP with you, they were more open about what they'd accept and generally, if you had an opinion or point, they'd make an effort to take notice of it. Of course, there was one problem with forums like this. When you join one, if they aren't already receiving a slow but steady supply of new members, they're already dead on arrival. No matter what the members do, slowly, they'll become bored and leave. And the forum would die with just you left looking around in confusion, asking yourself "why?". So if you're like me and you crave RPs by the bucketload, you'll have to head on into the big world of mass community.

And then it's a case of russian roulette. The veterans wont look at you beyond a welcome, unless you speak out against them in some form. You just have to hope there are enough newish members there to give you a good RP.