Okay, so I read a lot about Bloodlines...

It is called a GM, they resolve disputes that players cannot resolve, the combat systems in SL are purely for combat, not roleplay resolution - you are completely wrong...again.

Wrong again, there is no such thing as "standard" and there may well be a vampire type that is closer to human strength who might for a second be blinded by mace enough for the victim to escape. Just because you are locked into cliches and sterotypes does not mean everyone else is.
There are fictional, roleplay and historical examples of so many types of vampires with such differing charactistics that your "standard" is just ludicrous.

Once again you just have no idea - there are SL roleplays in which vampires are a majority character type. I have played these games, I have also played these types of roleplay games in RL with dice and paper.



I never said that free form roleplay meant you could change your character all the time. If you read I said you could choose it to be anything and it will still be correct - once chosen though it should be consistent - as I followed up with.

This is utter garbage, a good roleplaying group will be able to incorporate the differences of any vampire character if they are willing and most are willing. Most of what you put here does not even make very much sense.

BS, Bloodlines arose because they saw potential profit. Effective marketing has made it popular as with all viral pyramid schemes.
Bloodlines is not a roleplaying game - the majority of its players do not engage in roleplay - just a lame type of combat.
Your assertion is baloney and if were true then all other vampire roleplays would be empty of players or suffering a lack, not so at all.

Yumi, you have confessed that have little successful experience of rp in SL, you have not been able to successfully engage roleplay at all by your own words.
What makes you think you are able to talk about these things with authority about these things compared to an experience roleplayer both in and out of SL?
You should learn to get experience of successfully roleplaying in SL and try to "get it" before you talk as if you know all about it, because so far every time you post about it, you only show how ignorant of it you are.

Right. But I'm saying that maybe it would be better to engage in the conversation fora bit beyond "they should just go away".

Yes.. which is just another form of the "OOC quest for permission" I've mentioned before, because doing things becomes a matter of second-guessing the GM.



Which does not match what I said. I said to find a piece of fiction, or an RP, in which a vampire's _victims_ are described as characters in as much detail as the vampire. I know that there are RPs where the majority of characters are vampires, and usually in those cases, the victims are either NPCs or bluebooked. Certainly that's how it tends to work in tabletop Vampire games.



Right, and I said that's not correct. The choice of form is made by the _entire group together_, and if an individual's character doesn't fit the form the group wants to go with, it can be rejected - no matter whether it's your first idea for your character or a change you're making later. As a trivial case, if everyone else is playing vampires you don't get to play Darth Vader; but that applies to non-trivial cases too, as in, if everyone else is playing Bram Stoker vampires you don't get to play an Anne Rice vampire.



I actually said that: "the selected form may be one that accomodates all forms of vampire". Nonetheless, it is not an intrinsic part of freeform roleplay that it must do so, which is what you seemed to be claiming.



Why would they "see potential profit" in it if nobody would want it? So all you need to do is to market your, more clueful, RP just as well and it will be just as popular?



Why? If there are so many vampire RPers around, more likely they are unable to handle demand, or people do not want the drama involved in the RPs they support.



I am experienced with roleplay, just not in SL - and in design of roleplaying games. And besides, how am I supposed to get experience with SL roleplay if I can't ask about it? You've repeatedly posted that you play a vampire in SL but haven't said how, and there's also the differing treatment of myself and Bella Posaner with regard to building. Folks deciding they don't like me around is OK if that's their choice but to say that because of that they can also screen me from saying anything because I "don't have experience" is another matter.

The difference is that you talk as one who has all the answers, not one seeking them.

I am not going to address your other responses to mine except to say I totally disagree with your viewpoint on them.

Unlike Bella you state things you know are false in order to get a reaction, you have admitted that much in the past. In my book this is a kind of trolling and it is tiresome.

I do not say things I think are false. I say things that I am not sure if they are true, to find out if they are or not.

This isn't trolling - trolls hope for an angry defensive reaction, but I only hope for information or instruction, just the same as if I'd asked a question. Unless asking a question is considered trolling!

Last post in your direction - frankly, you never have shown the slightest interest in information or instruction. Even when you start threads with a question, you seem to read only for the parts to reply to so that you can repeat your original and unchanging positions, even in areas you profess no knowledge to begin with. Phil D makes more concessions and more change when it comes to bots, where he has a vested and invested interest and some moderately developed points of view. So. no, don't use that as your excuse to not be a troll. The only difference between you and the average troll is your persistence.

Now, by all means, use this post to make the same points you've been making across threads and with little change across the days. Answering you beyond this point is obvious a waste of time and while my time is not all that valuable at 4:30 in the morning, it can be used better than that. Spoken as someone that has been known to waste a lot of time in pointless discussion, as long as the sub-thread progresses in some direction. Any direction...

I dunno wtf is yumi's problem but it's getting annoying to see her hijack threads and make them drift in nonsense.

How about we just ignore her?

Soliciting of bloodlines bites is increasingly being banned in more and more sims. People have had enough. In my regions, anyone caught soliciting for bites gets a perm ban and an AR. Play at your own risk.

If you want to do vampire play, there are plenty of legit sims dedicated to it. Bloodlines however, isn't RP. It's a money making scam. 95% of my encounters with bloodliners have ZERO RP - a bite request popping up without any conversation at all. This is an instant AR, with an IM to the landholder of the location I'm in (which so far has been a very positive experience with the spammer usually getting banned.)

I'm always interested in information or instruction; I just don't normally get it. "You are wrong, I can play a vampire" isn't information or instruction, nor does it offer universality or proof; "You are wrong, you can play a vampire and here's how" is and does.

But, to go back to topic, I'm still intriuged by Gabriele's claim that the only reason why Bloodlines is more popular than the actual vampire RP sims is because it is better marketed. And my real Bloodlines specific issue is that it shows up a major difficulty with SL's "freedom" policy, which is that there are now likely to be people paying money, even US$, for a product that gets them banned anywhere they use it. Now, no matter what you say about how those people ought to do research or whatever, that's wrong, and it's going to drive those people away from SL and away from trust in merchants and RP as a whole.

Now you could argue that the creator should never have created Bloodlines, but that doesn't quite seem right because as others have posted, taking risks is essential to create a popular product and Bloodlines was his risk. And you can argue that the creator could shut down Bloodlines now that it's proven to be unacceptable but I would suspect that he can't, because then all his paying customers would feel cheated and hold him directly responsible, and he would probably not be able to sell anything else. So the only way to proceed is for the Lindens to take action against Bloodlines and script-block it (ie, from the customer's point of view it's not the creator's fault), but (apparently) they aren't interested in doing that - although I don't know if people have been filing ARs against the creator as well as the users. I know that people have posted that some weapons have been script-blocked recently, but I'd really like to know if the policy for this is posted somewhere and/or open for discussion.

First, nothing has proved the creator cannot shut down Bloodlines. SUre, his customers would feel cheated, but hey, the rest of the grid feels taken advantage of, so how this sudden empathic response gets interjected is anyone's guess.

I don't argue that the creator shouldn't have created Bloodlines, but that (s)he should have done so responsibly. It should have been a product forced to stand on it's own merits as a RP tool or whatever, instead of a grid-wide spam operation.

Oh, I'm sure he _could_ disconnect the server if he wanted, but it'd devastate his reputation as a merchant. And moreover, if he did do that, you can be sure that someone else would write a similar system, because after all, the Bloodlines guy is making lots of profit, right?

SL just doesn't strike me as having a culture where "population-wide agreements" have much truck as opposed to enforced laws. It _used_ to, in the older days when it was creation-centric, but it doesn't so much any more - and the fact that the laws haven't really been updated much since then is a big issue.



But that's just the thing - before release, it was a social experiment. Maybe people wouldn't have minded getting bitten, or maybe people would have used it responsibly - you don't see people calling for huggers or pouncers to be banned even though they are just as capable of spamming permission requests, and I acknowledge I may be being rather over-empathic here but I can see the Bloodlines creator reasoning that a bite was just the same, so what would the problem be?

Now, I'm not going to defend that Bloodlines is a good thing, but if we are going to have a risk/reward system in business (and it's hard to see how we could go without one) then some kind of method of rectifying the case where the risk hurts _everyone_, not just the creator, could be valuable.

LMAO!

For every person posting here probably at least 2 are happily using Bloodlines. They're probably irritating everyone around them, but they're probably blaming the other people for that, not the Bloodlines creator.

HAHAHAHAHA! Are you KIDDING me!?



Oh, horsemanure. I don't buy that notion for a minute. This thing wasn't created as a social experiment, who told you that? "The Thirst" might have been, but the creators openly state that Bloodlines is *based* on The Thirst - it's its own product. No experiment, it's a spam game and it's worked quite well as one.

Just stop typing.

Oh, what's "The Thirst"? I tried to search for it, but I only found the claim that "The Thirst: Bloodlines" is the full title of Bloodlines and was a predecessor product. But how was it different?

I.. don't know. I just find it hard to believe that someone could put as much knowledge and effort as required to create a complex scripted system like BL, purely to cause grief.

It's referenced on the "about" page of the Bloodlines site. I'm not sure how it was different, but I'm willing to bet it didn't have the ability to affect people who weren't playing, or we'd have had our current problems long before this, as The Thirst (according to the site) has been around "since the beginning of 2007".

Be assured of that

To file an AR you simply need to click on the Help menu on top, then "Report Abuse". Depending if you want to file a report against the owners/creators of Bloodlines or against an attacker, the following categories are applicable:

- Fraud: Pyramid scheme or chain letter
- Assault: The bloodlines system is designed and used to attack people all over SL
- Harrassment: Soliciting/inciting others to violate ToS
- Disturbing the peace: Repetitive spam
- Disturbing the peace: Unwanted advert spam

You can choose one main abuse category and add the others to the body of the message. Don't forget to add some descriptive text why you file the report.

Sorry, it has EVERYTHING to do with it. Strip out all the nice little graphics elements and SL is nothing more than a massive chat room.

Simple fact: You do not get to dictate how a system works.

Another Simple Fact: Plenty of people use all of Second Life as a massive Role Play environment.

Ahem .... I do not remember what the Realm Name was for Yahoo, but Rhy'Din (The primary AOL RP realm) was and still is the realm that is assumed for all of AOL RP. If you wanted to use a different realm you had to find some way to mark either the room itself or at the ;least put it in your own profile. That is not an Opt-In process.

In addition if you are present in one of those rooms - posting of not, it doesn't matter - you are assumed to be there to role play or lurking at the very least. I see no opt in there either.

I'm just not understanding why those aren't examples of "opt-in". In both cases, as I understand it, one voluntarily enters a room or realm or whatever, which is surely different from having the RP foisted upon non-participants everywhere in the service. Wouldn't entering these rooms be analogous to entering a cluster of RP sims in SL? If so, then I don't see where there's substantive disagreement; is anybody arguing that an owner shouldn't be able to allow or assume vampire--even Bloodlines--RP in their own sims?

If that's not a good analogy, I guess I'm just not seeing why not.

If you remove any and everything from SL that would allow you to find exactly what you may be looking for, remove all of the nice visual elements (which removes the ability to walk from sim to sim) you are left with what RPers and normal chatters alike deal with on AOL (not so much with Yahoo these days): A simple list of places to go to.

Now, with AOL there are no truly clearly marked RP rooms anymore, the only exception to this being the IMRP rooms. This means that the average jow could 'wander' into one of these places and not know what is going on ..... and the same thing can happen to a Role Player (happened to me a few times).

Now then: Yes, much of SL is clearly marked ... However to some SL itself is nothing more than a game or RP environment, one with some areas dedicated to specific rule sets.

If "Your World, Your Imagination" is still held true by some users ... then those like the above are not wrong in their use of SL - which unfortunately makes such things as Opt-Out as an improperly marked Chat room.

Christ almighty, you keep this up. May as well say, "Strip away all the video and TV is just radio." A person doing graphical art in SL knows what you just said is crap, as does anyone that has had a moment in SL based on video. Some people spend most of their time NOT talking in SL. Welsh Falls was not just a chat room with pretty graphics (haven't been there in a while, so don't know if it still there).

But go back to your single-minded (being generous here) point of view. It isn't true for many and probably not true for most, but help yourself.

So true. I can spend hours in SL and never talk to anyone. I enjoy being there just doing my own 'stuff' by myself, have NO problem with it and am fine in my own company. Don't need to be entertained or chatting with others all the time. There's plenty to do by myself. As for 'plenty' of people role playing, well that's probably true, but just as many aren't. Those who aren't should be allowed to have 'our' SL without being forced into someone else's fantasy. I don't go out of my way to interact with Bloodlines members, why should they go out of their way to attempt to involve me in their game? I just don't understand the logic. If I am not bothering 'you' then just leave me alone, why is that so hard to fathom? (that's the Bloodlines 'you', not 'you' personally).

Beyond that, it is a deliberate commingling of terms. No one other than Bloodlines does RP throughout the general community in the heavy RP sense. They do it in one specific or several specifically related areas. If you are a captain of free mercenaries, you don't even necessarily play that role the same in two different areas - you adapt to the back story of that area in order to have the most fun, or at least show some modicum of skill. Any skill at all (something particularly lacking in people that impose Bloodlines into the general community).

Those that 'RP' throughout SL as if SL were one large RP area, do it in a form that can interact with any sim they enter. But the general RP of being a furry across sims, or being in Elizabethan character in general and dress (or a furry Elizabethan), is not the same as sticking swords into victims, shooting people with a Colt .44 or playing Bloodlines. Mixing the two definitions is just a sophist way to try to disguise oneself by hiding among the victims. Contemptible.