How I Feel Sometimes On Sigil

[*Mr_Otyugh]

Factions aren't a hivemind, nor are the actions/views of some of the factions representative of all of the members of the factions. It's a matter of core point of view, rather than the rumor mill that's going on in the bazaar most often, and generally has an unrealistic perspective of the factions. I mean these are the same guys who are generally rooting for demons and devils and claiming that paladins are the bad guys. :P So take whatever the "popular opinion" seems to be with a massive amount of grain of salt, because it's incredibly inaccurate... people just like to hate things that constrict their choices, or people who have standards, because there are no consequences for rooting in for the physical manifestations of evil, or staying buddies with literal terrorists and so forth.

Yeah, staying on the fence is fun... but that puts you in the same gray crowd as just about everyone. Start picking sides, and you'll start making relations, both good and bad.

[*orcy11]

Thanks for all the help I have actually done things like this before and Rexxer is a xaositect at the moment I just sometimes feel alot of downtime is the problem for me and my abilty to try to talk to people who are whispering IC at times overall its been better!

[*Embersworn]

Factions aren't a hivemind, nor are the actions/views of some of the factions representative of all of the members of the factions. It's a matter of core point of view, rather than the rumor mill that's going on in the bazaar most often, and generally has an unrealistic perspective of the factions. I mean these are the same guys who are generally rooting for demons and devils and claiming that paladins are the bad guys. :P So take whatever the "popular opinion" seems to be with a massive amount of grain of salt, because it's incredibly inaccurate... people just like to hate things that constrict their choices, or people who have standards, because there are no consequences for rooting in for the physical manifestations of evil, or staying buddies with literal terrorists and so forth.

Yeah, staying on the fence is fun... but that puts you in the same gray crowd as just about everyone. Start picking sides, and you'll start making relations, both good and bad.

That's a nice condescending opinion you got there, but this time a "personal opinion" came after some play and bailing out of faction, so...

You might not be as right in your judgement how and why other players are making their opinions as you think you are.

In general views about factions come from how said factions are RPed.

[*Mr_Otyugh]

So you're saying every faction and all of their members are literally only full of psycopaths, malevolent, moron and corrupt? :P Because you seemed to suggest it quite strongly.

Gets tricky if your character can't subscribe to any factional ideology, which is not very strange... All it takes is being sane and good-hearted. :X

Or maybe we can just agree that it's definitely not so.

[*Embersworn]

Majority of factioneers is what constitutes the faction. If the majority is different from what your character would roll with, then there's no point to roll with the faction as a whole, at least not whilst taking the character beliefs and ideology seriously.

So yes, it's tricky.

[*Mr_Otyugh]

True, it's much easier to be "the lead person" in the faction if you're of the same opinion as the others. But that's not to say that everyone should roll up and quit at the sight of opposition. That's neither healthy for the faction nor the server. What factions need is an absence of open in-fighting which would prevent them from acting at all, but an opposition is not an unwanted thing on my opinion. If they can co-operate when it matters, their difference of opinions doesn't matter much.

And on my experience a large amount of the so called "valid" concerns people have had about factions, are often made up events entirely and never happened in game. "I once saw a Hardhead kill a child out of blue for stealing an apple!", "The Mercykillers hired serial killer who is also a cannibal" and the likes. They use those to justify their characters background hatred for faction, but those events actually never happened in the game, nobody in those factions ever had a choice in the matter, someone decided that they were the baddies and then it clearly must be so regardless of what players of those factions might do to dispel those beliefs.

That said, there are real events and real characters who also are causes for dislike, and generally on my experience, it's EM or DM controlled NPCs that tend to make much worse image of factions than PCs. Mostly since they're one off cast away NPCs whom just happen to be part of a faction in some event... and because those NPCs almost only ever come up when there's problems, and sometimes they are the problem in the set events. You never see those NPCs come up spontaneously to do good things, so people easily come up with negativity bias since they're only counting every negative thing that happened while nobody ever does anything good to counterweight that, "because factions are too evil to join".

The point is, factions aren't evil, and it's only a disservice for anyone considering to join a faction or maintain a character in a faction, to dub them so. What they are, are opinnionated. The factions have thousands of people in them, what you've seen or heard about have been a tiny fraction at best.

[*rapsam2003]

Fact is, a Faction is merely one way to get involved. There are numerous other ways. As I said, imagination (maybe time as well) is the only limit to one'a involvement.

Now, maybe instead of arguing, future comments should be designed to help the OP?

[*Tomekk]

IMO The issue here is similar to that on BG which is that there is a lack of player driven events with direct conflicts against large amounts of other players.

Player versus Player conflicts never, ever end well unless its between X people who've basically discussed the outcome OOCly beforehand. We should avoid those.

However, more chaos in the town would be a breath of fresh air past the 'Harmonium shield' everyone keeps using.

[*Rayanne]

As a new player I, too, have had some difficulty establishing contact with other players. Especially since most of my characters are not the most social types - an aspect in which I have been very succesful in. :P

Another thing that's been of note to me is the amount of extraordinary beings walking around.
On most other servers, you just get dwarves, elves, humans and the occasional lizard-beings.
Here, in Sigil, there are demi-gods and deities casually walking around the bazaar. Supernaturally-gifted humans(according to their bio), werewolves, vampires, illithid and golems are the norm, not the exception.
It's all a bit intimidating, if you happen to roll a (non-Sigil native) regular humanoid, to be surrounded by all these beings that, in "normal" realms, are considered extremely rare and powerful.

Unfortunately, I think it largely comes down to having a relatively low playerbase. I've never seen more than 35 players online at the same time.

I really love this setting though, and PS:T is one of my most favourite games ever, so I'm just going to keep trying. :)

[*zethrenx99]

IMO The issue here is similar to that on BG which is that there is a lack of player driven events with direct conflicts against large amounts of other players.

Player versus Player conflicts never, ever end well unless its between X people who've basically discussed the outcome OOCly beforehand. We should avoid those.

However, more chaos in the town would be a breath of fresh air past the 'Harmonium shield' everyone keeps using.

Now-a-days this sadly seems to be the case. Idk why people take things so personally now and cant just have fun in the story.

I'm not really sure why, but didn't really have that issue on Astoria and there was plenty of vampires murdering random players, elves being kidnapped and worse by drow and such without much complaint. Different times I guess?

Anyway, Conflict doesn't almost mean PvP, people can have different ideologies or negatively effect each other without need of mechanical combat to resolve it.