Posted by Kim on February 20, 2016, 2:30pm
Didn't have time to drop in for both office hours this weekend? Not to fear, here's all the questions that were asked, and the answers that were given! Epic week excitement, what's in the next few updates, and what exactly are the details of all these pesky rules were popular topics this month.What exactly does Epicness offer to people who aren't interested in epic-only templates and extra editing to profiles~?
Upgrading to epic membership has a ton of perks! The most popular of which is the ability to house 10 more characters on your account.
Many others really enjoy not seeing ads anywhere on the site, and also the fact that no one, even non-epic members, will see ads on their character profiles.
You also get to upload 30 extra gallery images per character. So if you have ten characters, and maxed out all of their galleries, you could upload 500 images to your character profiles.
I might also add: Being an epic member contributes to keeping the site open and free for all members, contributes to our funds for throwing events and creating new features and templates, and generally means that for the price of a piece of pizza and a drink you're helping to ensure the RPR can exist, continue to be awesome, and get even better! So, I know a number of epic members who would count "warm fuzzies" as one of the major perks.
I was thinking yesterday when I was looking at other people's characters that I really liked some of them and if there was a way you could favorite them so it's easier to get to them again.
We don't have this, although it's definitely on my radar! Usually this request comes in the form of a "watch" feature, so people can keep track of what a cool character is up to, even if one of their own characters isn't ICly linked to that character. I *almost* added this to the big update to the character friends interface, actually, but set it aside again temporarily when it became clear adding it would through the revamp of the existing features way off schedule.
Does the next big update include search using categories tags on characters?
Grrr, I wish. It's really high on my list, but it looks likely that the only project I'll be able to complete before epic week (other than work on epic week!) will be the update to custom character template creation.
My guess is the updates for character category searches will be one of the first things to appear after epic week.
Also, you may have already guessed this, but as part of the site's b-day celebrations we usually release some big giant surprise feature meant to blow people's minds. So... there's that.
I keep trying to add the character categories thing earlier, but realistically, I gotta be honest with myself and bet on May rather than March for it.
Are we gonna have the big special events on any time other than RPR's B-day?
We do have events every few months, but NO event is as big as epic week (the site's b-day celebration). If we did more than one epic week, we probably wouldn't have any other updates most of the year.
To give you a sense of how much work it takes to get the epic week event ready, I have been working on getting ready since December, and in the next few weeks will switch over to only working on epic week until the event actually happens. I have another programmer helping since last month (this is the only time of the year programmers other than me work on the site), and there's been an artist working on it since January.
So, in short, we don't have the budget or resources to do more than one epic week a year. Maybe at some point in the future, when the site is bigger.
Are we gonna have another big dragonfight this year, Kim? (For clarity: they mean as part of epic week)
I can neither confirm nor deny the involvement of any dragons in this year's epic week event.
Dragon?
The Many Headed Cyborg Dragon was a "boss monster" that appeared during last year's epic week event, requiring the membership to team together and battle their way to sweet loot and awesome updates for the whole site.
But, this being the RPR, a bunch of site members also collected signatures to petition me to ensure that the dragon got proper medical and psychological care after we defeated it.
And how is our Dragon friend from last year doing?
Last I heard our dragon friend had completely recovered from his/her/their wounds (some of you may recall, the various heads have different genders and personalities), and was starting to look like it was wanting to be released from the care of the dragon ranch where it was being tended. I think there's some concern about its behavior when it is loose on the country side, and debate over how and when to release it.
(If anyone is feeling nostalgic, here's update #1 and #2 on the many headed cyborg dragon's progress after being defeated by the RPR members:
Dragon check-in #1
Dragon check-in #2
It has some lingering aggression issues.)
What week is Epic week, by the way?
Epic week begins on April 24th and runs until April 30th.
Some of the contests that are announced during Epic week have deadlines that extend beyond the confines of that one week, while the "plotline event" is usually timed to last just the one week.
Epic week, now I can ask questions about that! Did you have a general theme in mind for this year?
The plot line for this year's epic week festivities has indeed been planned, and work has been underway for it for several months now.
This year's plot builds on last year's, but that's about all I can say.
Are we going to have the Doubutt game again? (For clarity: they also mean during epic week)
Doubutt is gravely concerned for the future of the RPR, and likes to do anything it can to assist us in our time of need. More than that, who can predict what such an odd beastie will do at any given time?
The Doubutt Game?
The Doubutt game was a mini-game that was part of last year's epic week, in which members could play as Doubutt, the two-butted horse that lives on our site's 404 not found error pages.
You may have seen him around.
When does the jumble contest start again?
That is a fantastic question. The jumble contest opens on the site's birthday each year, i.e. April 24th. This is also the first day of Epic Week. Contestants generally have a full month to post their submissions.
Jumble.... What does it mean....?
The genre jumble mascot contest is a SUPER AWESOME art contest that we hold every year. Artists get to pick a genre of RP (such as fantasy, sci-fi, super hero, historical) and then they design and draw a character they think represents that RP genre. The winners are then assembled into the group of characters that grace our homepage for the year.
This is this year's bunch of winners.
For those of you who aren't artists, don't worry, there's usually half a dozen contests during epic week, most of which don't require any art skills.
i can imagine there's not going to be any simple solution to this, but when mulling over my own ideas for jumble entries i've been a bit ambivalent about what genre they'd be - i'm primarily an anthro artist, but i'm not sure if i'd consider that the primary theme in a drawing always? say i drew an anthro with historical clothing, for instance. would it be fair for me to submit that under history? my concern is that if it's all grouped as anthro, the competition for that slot is gonna potentially be huge, as there's a fair amount of anthro artists here.
(An awesome interjection from Sland: Good question. The way I've always interpreted the jumble is that it's an advertisement, i.e. it's aspirational rather than actually representative, which is why it has a bit of everything.)
Sland, that is a GREAT way to put it.
It's extremely common for mascots to be capable of fitting into more than one genre. I think a lot of people have that problem. But you're welcome to declare for whichever genre you wanted -- anthro and fantasy is indeed an extremely blurred line. We've had unicorn-based mascots win in the "fantasy" category two years running, one of which was quite anthro and wearing clothes and casting magic. We've had a antro cat win who was submitted in the "dice RP" category (D&D-like rogue)
Also, each genre doesn't have a single winner. We almost always have more viable fantasy entries than anything else, and are very low on the sci-fi side of things, so sci-fi entries often edge out mascots from other genres just based on scarcity.
im wondering about.. nto exactly "how" to rp, but how to get to one or when your offline do you still get messages? Sorry for being such a noob
I'm not sure I understand your question 100%, but, if you're RPing here, you have a couple options. You and your RP partners might choose to RP on the forums, in which case any posts they make when you are offline will just stay on the forum until the next time you log on and see them.
If you are RPing via private message, their messages will be in your inbox the next time you log on.
If you have your settings set up for it, you can opt to get an email about stuff you missed as well.
(Gamers actually interjected this part: I believe you can set it up so you get emails for certain updates. But people can still replay to forums when you're offline. This chat we are in connects to a forum, as do all the others to their own respective forum. So this chat is really just a quicker way to RP and get real time updates on it, very handy when you're both sitting down. Thanks Gamers!)
Gamers is absolutely right, you can turn any forum topic or private message chat into a real time chat that connects with the original topic/conversation, if that's more to your liking. Just navigate to the topic, and click the "Launch chat" button at the top or bottom of it. This works on both the public forums and on any group forum.
Or for private messages, look for "Launch conversation as chat" in the sidebar of your conversation.
But.. If your not on private messages, can anyone see?
If you're on the public forums, yes. If you've created a group with privacy settings and made forums in there, then no.
How do you find someone to private message? Do they usually say they are up for it?
A really common place to start looking is the Looking For RP forum. You can either just browse the topics, or use the search tool here: Find RP (There's a video that explains how to fine-tune your results, if you are curious)
There's no requirement that you reply to someone's RP ad on the forum. You can just PM them directly.
Sorry to flood the place in questions, but i do have to ask if you have to be a "professional" at RPing to get someone to enjoy to do it with you? Or do you just have to be good at least?
that's fine, this is the best time of all to be asking any questions you may have.
And goodness no! Different players are going to be different preferences and amounts of patience, but ALL of us started out as beginners. There are many people who are beginning or close to the start of their RPing "careers" on the site right now, in case you are worried and want to play with someone else who is on the new side, too. But one of the best ways to learn and get better is to play with someone who is experienced and see what they do.
A few years back we hosted a community discussion of more than 20 awesome RPers about what responsibilities all RPers had to each other, and whether/how much those responsibilities applied to new players. You might find it interesting and comforting. I summarized it into this article: The Responsibility of all RPers
(Another great interjection from Gamers: No such thing at being a professional RPer, Sir_Fancy! You just find someone who's a good match for you and go on some stellar adventures! If adventures don't float your boat, you go on something else!)
I have something to ask but I don't think it's quite relevant. It's about mature content. (Cursing, to be precise)
Questions about site rules are super relevant. Occasional mild swearing is ok. F-bombs, c-bombs, and racial or homophobic slurs tend to garner immediate mod cleanup attention.
English's not my natural language. What does an F-Bomb mean? Any explicit swearing/cursing? Because I really though it was excessive swearing, not swearing itself.
It's code for a specific four letter word that starts with F. I can PM it to you if you like!
Certain swear words are considered much more extreme than others.
Oh, that clears up. Anything containing those should be taken to the adult forum, right? It's just that I thought that offensive language wasn't on par with sexual content. It's because one of my characters swears a bit too much, and editing it off kind of negated that specific trait of him.
We don't have a public "adult forum" where extreme/excessive swearing or sexual content can be played out ICly. It either needs to go into a group forum that's properly flagged, or conducted via PM.
If you are advertising for a RP that is going to include swearing, you can still do so on the all ages LFRP forum, so long as you mention that only people who are ok with that should join up. Swearing in front of minors is not anything like the felony risk that sexual content is.
What about characters that curse swapping the f-words by asterisks?
Lots of people cover swears with asterisks! We accept this, if the word is completely starred out. If you leave some letters hanging out, a mod will probably come along and swap those letters for stars.
Just to be clear, if your character is occasionally saying stuff like, "Aw, shit," we super don't care.
W-Wait, "shit" doesn't counts as an explicit swearing?
It is a swear word, but it's so common it's considered "mild" as swears go.
If you compose posts that use mild swears every five words, we might have a talk about excess, but some usage is allowed under the PG-13 rating.
When you go to edit your character's template, would it be possible to have the template that's currently active being shown at the top of the first page? We have so many templates now, with more on the way, it can be hard to track down the exact name of the template and find its variations, or even the custom templates (I imagine newbies have a much harder time with that than I!).
That is a great idea, actually.
I'd really like to change a lot about the ways that people find templates in the coming months, including being able to search by keyword (and subsequently, tag each template with a ton of relevant keywords, not just their main color and a handful of potential genres.)
As far as I'm concerned, just about everything about how custom templates are stored, accessed and found especially needs to change. I think that's a step beyond what I'll be able to get into the next interface update, but it's for sure on my list for the year. Including, I hope, auto-generated thumbnail previews, so you can actually see what a template might look like before opening it, just like you can for the official templates.
Hey Kim, I'm curious, what made you decide to create RPR?
A lot of reasons, really. I had recently learned to code (I was quite green at the time, I admit) and eager to use my newfound skills to solve problems and make fun things.
I played a lot of Furcadia, and at the time, almost every RP character had a link to a site like Wix in their description for further information (since there isn't a whole lot of room to type in a character description on that game), and frankly, I found those sites to be terrible, frequently crashed my old computer, and I just felt like I could offer a solution that was so much smoother and so much more targeted to RP characters.
At the time I was also briefly between jobs and I thought maybe creating the RPR could become my full time job. I still have that dream -- I often put in full time hours on the RPR, but I have still not been paid for any of the work I do for it. It just turned into a labor of intense love.
would it be possible to either be able to roll dice without a message, or (this would be more ideal actually) to edit a previous post to add a dice roll?
It's actually very intentional that we only allow dice rolls on fresh, new posts. This helps to prevent cheating, and ensures everyone knows that 1) The dice roll shown is the one that was rolled - it was not removed and re-rolled at any time 2) It was not edited in after the fact to try and put more weight behind a previously freeform post if an argument is not going to plan.
Regarding being able to roll dice without making a post, this is allowable by the Server once (but not twice in a row. You have to say something different or something in between if you want to do it again, to prevent people spamming topics with endless dice rolls.) If you had trouble with doing that, please send me a bug report!
( funnily, I JUST made some edits to how that is checked this morning, so I may have fixed the issue? We'll see, though!)Kim, you still looking for errors on the revamped character templates?
I never stop!
If anyone finds any, please submit a bug report.How's your albino pig?
Mr. Truffle is doing very well, thank you for asking! I am in a bit of trouble with him today because I slept in and was an hour late feeding him breakfast. I will have to do some pampering after this chat to make it up to him.
Comments
Wow, all of this info about Epic Week makes me geared up for this year's event! I'm so excited! ;A;
Also, I did not know you had a pet albino pig. How cute!
Also, I did not know you had a pet albino pig. How cute!
It's kind of cool to see all the stuff about Epic Week... I actually joined right after Epic Week last year and all that celebration is part of why I stayed, because I could see how awesome the community was much more clearly than I could have the rest of the year. It's crazy to think that I've been here for almost a year already!
You should do one of these on a Sunday. Jus' sayin'.
Also, the update on Commander Truffle is appreciated. #spacepigmasterrace
Also, the update on Commander Truffle is appreciated. #spacepigmasterrace
I'm thrilled to hear it was helpful for you, Gamers!
This was the first time I've participated in the office hours. Now that I know what they are, and how helpful they are, I plan on visiting many more!
...I actually forgot about the office hours. Well, poot. Ah, well. Next time! 
Kim
February 22, 2016
11:04am
@brilziana - I am so happy to hear that you got a whiff of the awesomeness of it, even despite missing it! I really look forward to having you participate this year.
@Lightside-Lotus - It makes me incredibly excited to know that this event makes people so excited!! My "pig" is actually a guinea pig, just to be clear, though!