[FEEDBACK] Roleplay Events and Character Enrichment

[skinstealer]

here comes another feedback thread- i'm looking into trying to get things a bit more cohesive around here in terms of community involvement when it comes to fan characters, and want to know what y'all think about both some new ideas and how things currently are. we have a ton of characters in the community, and some are more developed than others- some people are more content to collect, while others like making more extensive stories for their characters. some people prefer buying designs made by official team members, and others prefer to make their own. some people prefer to make their own morbit fan species and regions, and others prefer to stick to canon. it's very important to us that we make features and events that accommodate for community members of all kinds, so your feedback here is really important no matter what angle you take! 

we're definitely interested in more roleplay events and chatrooms, but our current issue is that we are busy with projects and our own lives- but getting people to remain consistent and engaged with our existing ones as is seems to be a challenge. we want to find ways to motivate people to stay engaged with the existing roleplays that we have going on both on the forums and on discord, but in addition, we'd like to encourage people to make new threads of their own and help enrich the community. we know this is kind of a "you can lead horses to water but cant make them drink" situation though, and as much as i say that i want this to happen, i can't force anybody to make threads. it'd be especially helpful if people could tell us Why they either are or aren't motivated to make or post in roleplay or game threads.

to help motivate roleplay in the forums, we're considering making some utilities to help generate prompts that we'd be posting on a daily and weekly basis. the daily prompts would go in the public broadcasts chat, and would be very simple and flexible in nature, meant to be ideal for sparking ideas for roleplay for those looking for something new to do. the weekly prompts would be much more complex and would require a bit more setup and fine tuning on our part, and would involve setting up a "room" thread- a setting open to a specific number of players with a prompt for being in said setting, as well as a set of prompts for interaction, and perhaps some set pieces to interact with while there. an example molasses came up with while we were developing the idea was a cafe that characters could stop by along their respective, long roadside journeys, with a waiter host character and questions for discussion amongst themselves. upon meeting a goal set for the room, a reward could be given to all participants, typically in the form of unlocking something for the canon such as a new object design, flora design, fauna design, location, etc.  

we want to organize sales, raffles, giveaways and games that involve prizes so that they provide the best community experience possible for people. currently, the plans for events and features that allow you to win/acquire things relating to characters involve characters themselves, clothing, and objects/furniture. worldbuilding elements and illustrations/other art are obviously other things that you can also purchase and obtain, but for the sake of focus, i want to center this on things directly related to what a character would have in-universe. the current setup is that people can get new kinds of outfits and objects designed both for personal use and as designs that other people can get custom recolors/variations of (similar to commissioning TCP types/species morphs), and we're going to continue with that- but we're curious about what kinds of other ways people are curious about obtaining and displaying these goods. 

following up on that, we want to encourage people to use character profiles/character hoards more, but we're not sure how to do that/how to make it more engaging or enjoyable. we'd like to someday down the line make a proper system for this if not a database of our own, but that's a long way away and not within our current reach, so input on that would be great.

forum games would also be a great way to enrich and distribute characters if we could figure out new ways to do so, such as mystery gift or things like the advent calendar raffles- we are very open to ideas, and encourage people to introduce and run their own as well. 

you can answer as many or as little of the questions as you like, and all of your feedback is very appreciated!

• how do you interact in the community with your characters currently?
  
• how would you like to interact in the community with your characters?
  
• what do you feel like the community is lacking in terms of character activity options?
  
• what kind of roleplay events would be most interesting to you? (official OR fan-run)
  
• what kind of sale/raffle/giveaway/other acquisition events of characters/outfits/items/etc would be most interesting to you?
  
• what kind of character-related forum games would be most interesting to you?
  
• what ways could we improve the character profile/character hoard system?
  
• would you be interested in the weekly prompt idea? what stands out to you about it, and where could it be improved?
  
• would you be interested in the daily prompt idea? what stands out to you about it, and where could it be improved?