I think it’d be neat if you could set a tag on yourself that shows up in +where that suggests your Looking for RP. This could be used to sit in a grid room, set the tag, and let people who check +where know that you are available for a public scene there, without having to open the actual scene (and just sitting there open with just one person in there).
I think a lot of people are hesitant to open a scene without knowing if they’ll have any bites (and also maybe don’t feel comfortable poking in the RP Requests channel).
I’ve seen a lot of comments in games and forums about how people look at the +where and just see a lot of private scenes and no one waiting for RP so this might help, even if it’s mostly an appearance thing.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve coded LFG systems in the past, though, and they didn’t really get any use. The RP Requests channel is the intended vehicle for connecting for random RP in Ares. I don’t really think it’s an issue with people being uncomfortable using the channel so much as people being uncomfortable putting themselves out there for random RP with any old stranger who wants to pop by.
Except there’s repeated instances of people opening scenes and sitting around for hours with no one biting, myself included, over at least five games I can count by myself. So I don’t know if it would fix the issue but I also don’t see it being a detriment.
All code comes at a cost. Not just the time and effort to code it, but the mental tax on players having one more thing to figure out, clutter in the +where display, more buttons on the web portal, etc.
My pre-Ares Penn softcode has had a “looking for RP” flag built into it since about 2002, so once upon a time I, like you, did think that it might help. But since I can count on one hand the number of times since then I ever saw it used, I no longer see any value in the tool. Everyone’s mileage may vary obviously.
