I’ve been a long time Mander player for a while. Those of you that know me probably catch me playing my spider mime/CE semi-often[1].
I can tell you that Mander has gone through many significant phases or up/downs in its roleplay quality, and 99% of the time, it’s based on how people are let in through the whitelist.
As you’ve heard previously, for the longest time Mander whitelisting was done by a simple discord channel. You’d put your in-game username in, follow the pinned messages, and wait a bit to be whitelisted. The turnaround time was about two weeks.
Mander wasn’t a super popular server back then and didn’t have a lot of playerflow. Usually every whitelist phase or batch someone did, there would be about 5-10 new players. These players could be exposed to and interact with MRP, and recognize that environment change. A good 90% of them would then soak up that environment and thus the MRP environment would continue.
This started to change when Mander became increasingly more popular due to LRP servers generally decreasing in RP quality while becoming full more often, and Mander’s popularity as a safe haven grew. Playerflow increased and more people were brought on. The problem started when these players started seeing the behavior of similar players just generally behaving like they’re still in LRP. This had the problem of normalizing this behavior (“well I guess MRP is just LRP but closed off”). Monkey, see, monkey do. This became an even bigger problem when the ratio of MRP behaving players to LRP behaving players reached critical mass and was inverted.
Mander started to die when Grasshopper was brought online with its shared whitelist mentor system. On Grasshopper, you were blocked from playing if you had above a certain playtime. This was bypassed if you were whitelisted. The idea is that vetted MRP players would come down to Hopper and mentor new players on the game and what it is.
This soon started being abused when people were applying to be whitelisted for the sole purpose of bypassing the playtime block in order to hang out more with that community. This presented its own set of problems[2].
Grasshopper was killed after the problems on there reached critical mass. Miros was also killed as well as it never really had a massive population, admins were short-handed, and players would just go there.
Mander roleplay quality died instantly when Grasshopper and Miros were killed. Players started treating Salamander as a second LRP server when all other LRP servers were full. This got so bad that Mander hit its previously untouched 130 player cap, which was never changed when we lowered the player cap across all other servers[3].
This got so bad that the previous MRP playerbase simply left and formed their own forks with their own admins, whitelist policy, and other special rules, generally clearing up what Mander fell short of.
Thankfully, the admin team put together a new system, and to be honest it’s been working. I’ve been noticing a good improvement, and there have been really good people coming along. It’ll take some time though for Mander to reach that same level of RP quality it once had though.
The entire point of the whitelist system is to signify to players that they are playing on MRP and making sure they can recognize that. Their simple test is to read the rules of the whitelist application and follow them. If they cannot read the rules of a whitelist application, then we cannot possibly expect them to read Mander’s rules and MRP amendments. Same case with creating a simple backstory for your character; if you aren’t interested in creating a creative, believable backstory, how do we expect you to roleplay on MRP with your own original character?
If you make a mistake, then you can try again in 2 weeks. SS14 will still be here 2 weeks from now, it’s not going away.
I took a break for a while to focus on studies and just making engineering/atmos better after I became a maintainer and head mapper. I’m getting back into it though. ↩︎
Certain players were powergaming and curbstomping new players who just wanted to play the game and see what was it about. It was horrible. ↩︎
12% sure that Mander’s server cap was left unchanged because people thought it could never possibly reach 130 players. ↩︎