Ideas to Boost Activity

While I see your point, the problem still for me ends up being balance. The current system is designed to prevent casual role players like yourself from being completely outclassed by someone who has the time/drive/ambition to S-Rank all of their skills. At the end of the day though I don't care if we lock them in at D-Rank so that people can still app certain jutsu in that class to use in battle or E-Rank so they're stuck using the premade or very simple techniques. The idea with E-Rank was so that you could only use jutsu from the three categories you chose. It's a game mechanic more than it is true to the canon.

I realize in the anime that a jounin may be proficient in most if not all of our combat skills but this does not translate to a role playing setting unless we openly decided to make them that much more powerful than every other rank on the site. Which in my mind would exacerbate the very problem you have with the current system in that no one wants to be a genin. Am I opposed to doing this? Absolutely not, as it is truer to the original media but it's one of those things that I think ends up hurting more than helping.



I do see where you're coming from and I'm trying to work out a solution. This may end up being one of those things where an entirely new system is required to fix the problem.



I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. We've not "done away" with the teams. All we've done is chosen to not automatically stick people into teams when they get approved. I'd still like to see genin teams and we have every intention of creating team missions. The difference is this time we left it up to the members to group together on their own and plot that out. Honestly, the only thing that has changed is whether or not staff make a post about it.

As for making a template for you to use yourselves, I don't imagine it will be difficult to reformat the one we previously used for all teams so I'll see if I can't put something together.

Also, regarding your wanted ad. I was under the impression that we'd agreed to use Yamada as the team leader via cbox.



Organizations existed previously, but they are not what we're looking to implement again. In the old system we had 5-6 groups per village that were different in name only, save for one or two. They all functioned nearly identical, had no requirements for joining (again, save for one or two) and didn't offer any sort of incentive or unique role playing opportunity for being a member.

The groups that I have in mind would be less of a novelty and instead would be a distinguishing feature of each village. Each would have a functional purpose, would have a defining trait and would receive unique missions/items/jutsu for being a member. There would also likely only be 2 or 3 per village because with the splitting up of members in the village system it is hard enough to fill up a single team as it is.


Just to round off my group idea above and touch on this point as well, these groups would likely have entry level positions. I see why some people could look at the suggestions I gave (such as the police force) and see an immediate need for a tokujo or chuunin minimum but that's not my intention at all. While it is likely that there will be a prerequisite for all of them this might come down to things such as fighting style, personality, goals, backstory or as Devro already suggested some sort of trial or perhaps an "initiation". These groups will be designed to be open for all ranks, even if that means that your role in one would be somewhat diminished (you couldn't expect a couple of genin police to arrest a violating jounin from the village).




My problems with delving into small things like barrier teams and a research division are that if we introduce too many things for members to be a part of then it can make it difficult to find other players to interact with. For instance, if we use the old organization system we had (5 villages with 5 organizations each), even with 100 completely active members to go around, that only works out to 4 members in each organization. This is assuming that all 100 of those people role play and no one has taken a missing nin position or chosen to not be a part of a special group.

As I've said before though, just because there isn't a staff post dedicated to a research division roster list, that doesn't mean members couldn't plot to be a part of one IC.



In response to these issues we've been brainstorming possible solutions, so I figured I'd give a couple here to get everyone's input on them. What I'm hearing is that in some way or another people are disliking the rank system. Last time it wasn't hard enough, this time it's too hard. The ranks don't make sense when compared to the show and essentially people are finding the way it's been laid out to be daunting. Here are three possible solutions that are being considered:

1. Scrap the stats and rankings (of combat skills, not genin-chuunin-jounin) and return to the freestyle roots that I know and love. Obviously this is how I prefer to role play but we run the risk of god-modders and the like. This puts pressure on staff to really scrutinize new techniques and abilities as well as make up pseudo-rules as new situations crop up. Naruto sites tend to suffer from what I like to call the "neener-neener confrontation" when this sort of system is in place though. Two opponents of relatively equal skill levels are in battle but it ends up being more of a thread to see who can dodge better. With that said, if everyone is fair and reasonable IC this can be (again, my opinion) the most fun way to actually role play as it gives you creative freedom to do what you want without having to worry about what's plausible or meets the guidelines. Essentially this would solve everyone's problems the fastest but does introduce some new ones. The best thing about this system is that there is nothing you need to know. You create your character how you want and start role playing. The only rule? Don't be an asshole. You'd still need money to buy new skills and items but your actual power level would be an IC thing, fueled by the power of imagination.

2. Scrap the current stat/ranking system and start from scratch. Build a new system that addresses the concerns here as best we can while still making sure that there are rules that dictate how an encounter should go.The problem here is that you can never eliminate the issue of heavy posters getting ahead, while casual role players are left to hide in the village because they can't compete in a fight. It's much easier to gauge a character's skill level with some sort of rank system in place though and it relieves the burden on staff of having to try and assess the exact power of a technique or item in every situation when going through applications. It also makes fights between players more calculated as you're forced to rely on the skills you do have instead of role player ingenuity. Though this can also be a bad thing, as it forces lower ranked characters to lose on purpose because their stats don't match up.

3. Reimagine the current stat/ranking system. Adjust the prices for lower ranked characters while also increasing their rewards for completing missions. If we keep the current system we'd also have to give consideration to the other concerns you guys have brought up such as E-Rank skills for jounin not making sense, and the process of learning and using the system being daunting or overwhelming for new players which could result in them just leaving instead of trying to get into it.

Now obviously each of these has their benefits and drawbacks so I'd like to know what you guys think. Do you have any other ideas for how we could fix these problems or do you have something to add to the ones I've already listed? If we end up divided among which direction we should take I may just put up a poll to address this one concern, as a system overhaul does take work and I don't want to have to do one without knowing it will be at least kind of well received (or at the very least, address the concerns and problems people have with the current system).