I haven't noticed a change. There is role play I think is utter crap, there is role play that is the norm, and there is role play I think is great. This will always be, because I have my opinions and others have theirs on what is good and what is bad role play.
I'll agree that some of the tech requests I've seen are clear examples of poor role play. I'm to the point now where you'll be hard pressed to get me to give you permission for Zoner technology without some damn good role play or a damn good story to warrant the technology, of course by damn good and good story; I mean in my opinion and that of the other OSI leaders. In the past I handed tech out fairly freely because people complained that restricting it was wrong. Most of those same people are the ones who put no effort into their tech requests, so I've said frack 'em.
Posts: 6,335
Threads: 331
Joined: Aug 2007
Staff roles: Story Dev Economy Dev
Nothing has changed over time, quality wise. All that really differs is the trends and bandwagons, which prosper or die based on the alignment of the stars, the moon's orbit, Zelot's temperament and a handful of even more subtle indicators.
Most of the people who think things are steadily getting worse are the ones who suffer from a nasty case of nostalgia. People have got more uptight, sure, but actual standards haven't gone up or down.
I dont think you can really measure the quality of ones RP.
What exactly is the quality?
for me it would be a story, request, transmission etc that entertains me. Something i enjoy reading, makes me smile...pretty much like a good movie.
But there are for example some RP stories where people wrote a whole bunch of pages...spent hours creating it. And when i read it, i will most likely close it again after 2 sentences because to me it is like some news report...but not about the world i actually live in but from some place that doesnt exist...so why should i care? But it would be unfair to say the story has no quality, it simply has no value for me. Other stories might have been written in a few minutes and make me burst out laughing, cause it had a brilliant idea in it or a funny picture etc.
So the short funny story has more quality for me than the long and serious one.
But i think it depends on the reader.
so all in all i would say a RP story has good quality when there is someone who likes it.
Perhaps time has an effect. You, as a person are getting older and as that happens your opinion changes. Perhaps your view has changed. If someone's RP improves (that is relative again) over a time span of a year things that seemed excellent 6 months ago seem complete rubbish to that person now.
Just as a random post would have seemed grammatically perfect to me 3 years ago and it now seems a work of an idiot. And this weary post I have written now will hopefully seem utterly incorrect to me 2 years from now.