Rainbow Dash wrote:I got plenty of visitors with creative costumes but the return rate personally was pretty disappointing for me. Out of all the PMs I sent maybe a third would get answered with anything. And this is the first year I have gotten treats accepted without a thank you.
I get that people get busy so you're not gonna hit 100% but even then my rate of replies was super low. Unfortunately I really don't see myself participating next year barring any efforts to encourage people to reply or keep lights on.
I'd like to reply to this since its something I hear often. Apologies for how this is this going to get, I like to try and explain things as fully as possible.
If you have an idea of how to do this without restricting gameplay, please tell me because I would absolutely love to hear it. Its a complaint I hear every year but so far I've found no way I am supposed to enforce this type of thing without cutting out people from playing, or imposing rules that are going to make people unwilling to play.
Specifically, the problem of how to approach the problem of users who are playing who do not give out any gifts. Either by never turning their lights on or by turning their lights on but never responding or only giving tricks. I have been asked many times to stop these users from playing. My problem with this is that I cannot prove that they never turned their lights on, or did not respond to anyone when they did have their lights on. It is impossible for me to moderate this and no system I can think of would be foolproof in that manner. I even played with the idea of having players give me their lists of who they visited or who responded to them, etc. But those wouldn't prove they never got any visitors.
Which brings me to the next point. Some people are just busy and can't play very much. Unfortunately this year I've been extremely busy this month and with lolo piled on top I only turned on my lights a few times, and I still have pms I need to reply to. I only got a few trick or treaters. To many players it looks like I never turned on my lights. Some of these users that never turned on their lights could easily just be busy and didn't have the time. Maybe they only got a handful of trick or treaters, or they planning on playing but ended up not having the time. What about new players who just joined, and don't have any spare pets? Should I be banning them from playing because they never turned on their lights? How much am I supposed to restrict who can play and who can't? Even if I could prove who has had their lights on, or who gave out gifts, we don't know the reason behind why that happened. How many legitimate players will I be driving away to get rid of those taking advantage of the game?
But what my real dilemma boils down to is this: Am I supposed to force players to give out gifts. Because that is the basis of what is being asked. That I ensure that users who are playing do not just take and never give. Speaking personally, I don't really consider something to be a gift if they are being forced to give it. And a lot of what I've done with LOLO has been done to ensure that users don't feel they are being forced to give gifts. Yes, giving gifts is the point of the game, and yes I do find it horrible that some players use this game just for free pets, but I still have objections to forcing people to give out gifts, in any manner. Just beyond the fact that I do not have any means of knowing if players are giving out gifts or not, its still a question of if I should enforce rules that will be forcing players to give out gifts. And honestly, if they were forced to give out gifts we all know they would just do the bare minimum and then continue to do what they already have been, and it won't get rid of them.
It absolutely does frustrate me that users take advantage of this game, and they just see it as a way to get free stuff and never give anything. But unfortunately, I think thats just the nature of CS, of the playerbase here. To put this into perspective, I first encountered LOLO on Wajas. They had no rules, no regulations, you didn't even have to write a story. It didn't need any rules, players there did it on their own without being forced to. I tried that the first year I brought LOLO to CS and was very much proven that the CS playerbase is nothing like the Waja's playerbase c': Before I made it a rule to write a story, almost no one did. Before I put in a lot of the rules, we had a lot more players (ie. In the thousands. Now we average 500-600). I imagine a lot of those users quit because it was no longer easy to just get free pets. I get told all the time that there are too many rules. My point is, at some point it may need to be accepted that part of this is just the nature of the CS playerbase.
Whether you want to continue playing because of this is your choice. I fully understand not wanted to play because of this. I prefer to look at it more in that way that LOLO creates positive interaction between players, who get to share their creativity with each other and give out free pets on the side. I really enjoy getting to bring together a small community each year who for a short time can share and interact with people who under normal circumstances would never talk to one another. I like to think that LOLO brings a lot more positive than a few people taking advantage of the game can take away. As long as it has that I will still have a reason to run LOLO.
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