itmeJP Community


itmeJP Community

About This Website

As for me, I don’t really have the time/energy between like april and october to participate on the forums (high tempo/time consuming seasonal job). But I loved sourcing 80’s trivia for the Tales from the Loop-oneshot, as well as throwing in the occasional crackpot theory based on the consequences of whatever went down in the latest episode (regardless of system played, I watch them all).

I expect to be able to put time in here the further into the winter months we get, I enjoy the FAQs, even though I kinda get more of my “talking about the finer points of RPGs” from Adam’s Office Hour-show. But I do think the post-show stuff serves as a good way to discuss the events of the episode, potential fallout of various actions and so on.

I really like the homepage, but least for me as an EU person with the new launch times for CoS/Jazz its 100% impossible to see the shows live. As such, it takes a day or two to catch up on the two shows and as such by the time I’m up to the newest episode most things has been said on the forums. I 100% get why the changes were made, and I hope the overall numbers are better. Another reason could be that having split up sertain content on Pateron that some don’t have access to might also have made the overall use of the forums less.

I’m mostly going to chime in with what others have said. I see a few main reasons.

  1. Patreon split the community. It split the community in terms of who has access to which content, which limits discussion to certain groups; it moved many reddit/forum discussions to patreon videos (post show videos, announcements, Q&A’s); and it moved where people can respond to that content (patreon posts vs. this website). As a result, I feel like now the only good way to interact with the community is through live chat. Patreon’s comment system doesn’t really encourage back and forth discussion as well as a site like Reddit does…and feels more like Youtube comments. On this website, it feels weird to discuss Patreon-only topics…but that’s where most of the interesting/discussion generating content is.

  2. Rollplay feels less accessible now. The live show times are bad for EU and, at least for me, they are bad for east coast US. In addition to that, the shorter form/jump-in-whenever shows of R&D and West Marches no longer exist. When One Shots happen, they help fill that void, but I watch a lot less Rollplay now because I can’t always keep up on a weekly basis, and it seems like the channel is primarily focused on longer shows that benefit a lot from knowing what came before.

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To get out few things that have made me not to come here anymore, here are some:

  1. Even on topics like this, where feedback is being asked, there are next to no replies and they do not seem to affect anything. When the Patreon changes rolled in i asked about ways to give feedback on the free map/Zine and there was no answer.

  2. Patreon discussions on videos like character creation and such are rather lively. When it happens there few days before it can be had here it has pretty much been discussed trough.

  3. I was going to make a Wiki type topic for CoS with character stats and such like Blades had. Problem was that it actually took me some time to find the Blades topic even when it was well made. Things just get pushed to archives and they die there as they get pushed down. Wiki type topic could be a really good place to talk about shows or to give accessibility to the shows as people could check up on information that is hard to come by in any other way than watching a great deal of the show.

  4. The site is not promoted enough. I really don’t see how new people would find this place as something they want to come to and have discussions. They might click the link on twitch site, but rare people scroll down and actually press those.

There should be more of a reason for someone to come here and then the discussion could start to happen organically. Off the top of my head one way to get people to come to the site and a sneaky way of promoting it would be to add a small discussion topic to DF from the site. And the discussion topics could be given way before the show and not 15 minutes before the show. This way the discussion on the topics could be had before the show and then taken in to account during the show.

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as valid asa lot of the replies are in this thread I think message boards like this or similar sites like this aren’t that “active” because people really just care about the content or the influencer…

In this case, we’re talking about JP. It’s like when you’re in a twitch chat and people are just typing things to get the streamers attention and ignoring what the rest of the chat Is saying.

I also think there’s the problem that it’s not “instant” and people like immediate replies, the type they get from a live chat, or Skype or any other messaging service. I don’t think people want to keep coming to a website to see if someone replied to a post of theirs, or waiting for a notification that someone did.

I’ll agree with the poster that said time zones, patron locked content etc are probably issues as well for some people. They might not want to be spoiled or feel like they can’t participate in a discussion if they are behind on shows and not available to see all the content related to a RollPlay show.

I’ll also reiterate that I personally believe a lot of people probably care more about getting direct replies from JP or other cast members and aren’t interested in actual “discussions” any more, and JP for many reasons can’t reply or answer every single message that comes his way, as much as he might want to, or try to. People probably feel ignored when that happens and then just stop posting all together.

  • the wiki threads are placed in the wiki category so that they can be found easily

https://community.itmejp.com/c/rollplay-past-shows/rollplay-wiki

  • 2 CoS style wikis were made but have not been maintained.
  • the blades wiki is listed in that category as well.
  • the category is not that big that topics are pushed down that far.
  • pinning a topic will always keep it at the top of any category.
  • feel free to make a thread about any show you want and contact anyone in the mod team to make the post a wiki post.

Edit: I forgot to mention feedback on the organization of the community site is always welcome

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this is the other thing i hate is when the community gives an opinion and we get snarky replies from mods/gm’s about how wrong we are

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At least for me the Blades wiki is not listed on the RollPlay: Wiki list even when it has been tagged as one. If i search for it on search bar with “blades wiki” i can find it but i don’t seem to be able to browse the categories and threads and find it. It is also named in a confusing way where the topic or the first paragraph doesn’t mention Blades at all. :stuck_out_tongue:

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My main thing is that I don’t really know what’s meant to be discussed, really. If I want to know more about a show then there’s the Patreon vids and Adam’s GM streams. It’s not like we can get spoiler answers for anything in the Q&As. There’s always a chat going on the live show that I guess gets most of the ‘in game’ discussion happens there (though I’m VOD only viewer so don’t really consume the chat). The shows are pretty static at the moment so it’s not like there’s any meta-conversation to be had about new system or players. It’s not like this is positioned as a general roleplay discussion forum either.

If it’s any consolation though, most of my comments would generally be ‘I liked this show and want to watch the next one’. :slight_smile:

How was that reply snarky? He answered the question, with links and some useful notes. If that’s being snarky, i’m fucking flabbergasted.

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Feedback:
I decided to lurk this space and limit my participation for personal reasons.
The new stream times (shows) do not help (I’m a EU person), however I maintain my twitch sub because I have never rarely been able to watch a full show live in the first place and I just realized that this was not the question.

Comment on others’ feedback:
A lot of the issues people have with this place seems to fall back on the fact that navigation is not the same as on other places. I feel like there was a post that explained the use of categories, tags and bookmarks, maybe that should be pinned? Can’t find it…

This is actually a very silly problem. Makes me wonder what the tags are for? Are they not being searched for? Do they have low priority? “The Crew” post has exactly two tags… “blades” and “wiki” …

Edit: Fixed, the title now says “blades wiki” instead of “wiki”. It’s the number one search result for “blades wiki” now. Still wondering about the tag functionality, though.

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Been struggling for something constructive to contribute. More and longer A’s for the Q’s in the threads is easy to say, but comes down to cast time. And the monthly Patreon Q&A videos have addressed my desire for general updates. Making those public afterward would spur more discussion if that’s the goal (there’s definitely fragmentation between Patreon and Community threads). Barring concrete participation mechanics like the Mirrorshades polls, I’m not sure what else can be done on the RollPlay side. Contests of some sort?

i think back when the subreddit was the most popular and had a bunch of people posting was during Swan song(atleast thats what it felt like to me).
I did not watch the show so im just speculating here.From reading the posts on the reddit it felt like alot of the content during that time seemed to contribute to Swan Song in one way or another.
Now that the popularity of the website has gone down,the website feels like a QnA, Help forum and the occasional fan art. There is not much to discuss or to attribute to a show.As mentioned before in this thread a lot of the discussions already happen during the show and sometimes on discord.

With the Patreon QnA’s being as awesome as they are, they might have a negative effect on this forum too because it takes alot of the questions that would be asked on the forum away from it.

The website needs to get something that will bring people back to it. i have no clue how though, Could be a weekly discussion/poll on small decisions for CoS/NJ but i dont know how a GM/DM will feel about that because it might not go with certain planned stuff.

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I wasn’t a huge fan of the format of the topics in this site from the start, I gave it a chance and thinking back I essentially just stopped reading stuff.

Take this thread for example. I read(or skimmed) all 33 posts above me - most of which were people saying the same thing. In a site like reddit that’d be under one thread on the topic and you could collapse that and see other discussion points, or dig in further if you wanted to get people’s opinions on it.

I understand the benefit of having a site you have more control over - from a consumers perspective (mine) though, this format just makes things harder to follow.

Edit: Also I didn’t even think that splitting conversations with patreon was an issue, but yeah… especially when you consider that there are videos that are patreon only - that essentially discussing on here I would imagine is taboo (if not against the rules).

But mainly… I just don’t feel like the current site is in a format that I can consume easy… but the patreon split is interesting.

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I was not being snarky in the least I was trying to answer to the best of my abilities, and I am sorry you took it that way.

Yeah, I agree the name is confusing. Not sure what to rename it to.

Not really clear about this. What do you mean? It won’t show up in its category for you?

edit:

The master of wikis to the rescue :smiley:

When i press the link that you gave that goes to the Wiki tag this is what i get:

Blades thread doesn’t show up.

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That is so odd.
Not sure why that is happening for you. I will look into it

The biggest problem i see, is mentioned a couple of times already. The community is split between too many platforms. This site, Reddit, Twitch, YouTube and Patreon.

For example when people are getting a new video game, where do people go and look for it first hand?.. Steam. The main videogame hub. In this case, what is the Itmejp/Rollplay main hub? I’m sure you have the numbers JP, and can see where the split is. What platform has the highest number. I am by no means an expert in twitch, but as i see it, the perfect situation, for a community like this, would be if everything the above mentioned platforms provide, would be included in twitch, or centralised around twitch. They already have the live shows, and old videos to watch. Does it require a sub to see them? Can’t remember i mainly watch Rollplay on YT. For me i was most active back in the old sub-reddit. That worked because everyone including the castmembers, already spends too much time on reddit. How many of the viewers that watch the shows, also comes here after the shows? If the numbers are low, then why do people not go here? Are the viewers not aware of this site? How well do they know it?
I remember when this site started, it was not easy to navigate (on desktop). The responsive version on mobile is fine.

Maybe there would be something for the Itmejp/Rollplay brand to get, from making a main hub, for roleplay with the other roleplay channels/host around the web? (Dont know how big you are in the roleplay community. I saw it mentioned with Adam on Wizards mothership-site, along with Mercer a couple of times.)

People are lazy today. We want one place to go to, to get everything. Easy and convenient.

I study Online communication and want to work with it when i am done, and i love the content you guys provide, so i am really interested in where this goes, and what you come up with.

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I agree. It’d be cool if Patreon posts could somehow be integrated here so people can get everything in one spot.

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