So I've decided to temporarily ditch World of Warcraft again and decided to pick up EVE Online on a retail basis. I tried out the trial version last year and while it was a decent little game, it just couldn't take the place of WoW at the time! But now that I've grown incredibly tired of WoW, I've switched back.
It's a nice slow-paced game. Most progression takes place through acquiring and leveling up Skills, which takes real time to learn. Like, for instance, you want to learn how to drive Cruisers. You'll have to load up the market, which is pretty much the core of EVE. The economy. Load up the market, check for prices of Skill Books. You buy the skill and, if required, fly to the station it's being sold from and then you proceed to "download" the skills into your neural net. This is what takes real time. Like right now, I'm studying Science Level 4 and it's going to take 1 day and 6 hours before I can use it. Now, the cool thing about it is that you can log off and your character will still learn. So to begin with, you pretty much log on, start a Skill, and log off. Not much to do at the moment, and I kind of like that. Incredibly slow-paced.
Your goal is just to be the strongest, the richest and the most renowned. You can be hunted by security or you can be the best person in the universe. There's no real storyline to follow and it's entirely open ended. The universe is gigantic, there's a single server with no less than 25,000 people on at any given time, scattered across the universe. Each star on the map is a massive solar system where you actually do your flying around, and there are... thousands of stars on the map. You could literally find anyone and anything hidden anywhere.
So, yeah. I've started playing that, which brings me to the reason for my post, really. There's a race called the Caldari which is pretty much a capitalist nation run by corporations with enough money to be heard. It's an interesting race and I picked it to see what it was like. Kind of fits my first character, too. A miner who's only interested in gaining money as quickly as possible to train skills to make more money faster. (Nice to have a money-making character to support additional characters.)
So there I am, flying amongst the asteroids, sucking up this rock called Condensed Scordite, when I start hearing a conversation... After listening for a while, it seems that a fellow Caldari citizen is trying to reform everyone in the sector. Telling us how horrible it is that corporations only see us as slaves to rake in the money for them and how we're all evil for not standing up for our rights and stuff like that. The roleplaying is nice, but seriously... I've noticed a trend.
We'll take this Caldari guy for an example. He wants to roleplay someone against the idea of a corporate state. That's fine, but there's another race out there. They're called the Gallente and they're a freedom-loving race who takes total freedom very seriously. Why didn't he pick that race? Maybe their ships didn't look good or something, and so he picked Caldari, I don't know... But his character was raised Caldari and the corporate state is all his characters knows. Granted, there could be that one fringe lunatic who tries to stand up to the government, but the Caldari description clearly states that anyone who does that is instantly exiled and excommunicated.
Bottom line: He's a Caldari and his character shouldn't be doing that. But, see, that's not the only case. It seems that amateur roleplayers can't accept surroundings and roleplay around them, they build a character, stick it in an alien environment and try to get the surroundings to fit around them. It happens oh, so many times in World of Warcraft. I once saw a human with Burning Legion heritage. That just simply doesn't happen... And if for some sick and bizarre reason it did, they wouldn't be telling anyone. Another example of creating a character and expecting the surroundings to bend around them.
When you run around roleplaying games as much as I do (it's a hobby, really... watching roleplayers), you start to see this trend. It's like they're trying to be different, but they go insanely overboard and nothing makes sense based on the world the characters are living in. If you DARE question what they're doing, you get blasted with lines like "there's no right or wrong way to roleplay!" or "you roleplay how you want and I'll roleplay how I want" or "if you don't want to roleplay with them, you don't have to". Wrong, wrong, wrong! That's the baby's way of coping with a disruptive character. "Ignore it! They're just having fun!" Yes, but it's so unbelievable that it makes no sense based on what your character SHOULD know simply by reading the race's backstory.
It would be like a Night Elf defending a Mage. Arcane magic destroyed the Night Elf's homeland and they shunned it completely, and then they see that the Humans are practicing it. The Elves probably wouldn't try to stop Humans from using it at all costs, but they would frown on it and discourage it and definitely not say "oh, that's perfectly fine, go ahead and use it. It's fine by me!" They feel the same way about the Burning Legion, and thus frown on all the Warlocks who are foolish enough to think they can control the demons. I have seen Night Elves who defend Warlocks.
Now, I might accept a random Night Elf who's totally whacked and goes completely against everything the Night Elves stand for, but there's too many who do, and that's screwing up the roleplaying environment for those, dare I say, GOOD enough to obey the rules set out in the storyline. No, there are no "rules" on how to actually roleplay, but there are rules on how to interact with the environment, and too many people ignore that and ruin the depth and realism.
So there you have it! If you want to be a freedom-loving race, don't create a character in the race that promotes the corporate state. If you like Mages and want to defend them from the verbal onslaught of those who dislike them, then don't create a character who's supposed to dislike them. You might like Mages, but want to try a class that's only for Night Elves. Okay, fine. But you NEED to adhere to the Night Elf backstory so you actually make SENSE... And that means... Your Night Elf won't like Mages.
