>>42
This is an overwhelmingly excellent reply, honestly. A little hard to come up with a response to something this concise and on-point, but I'll try.
>the other matter is also encouraging it among the playerbase too
Right now I see two factors that could stand in the way of that, with the first being the state of /vg/ (since that's where the server mainly gets its audience from), and the second being (at least partly) me. I'll elaborate on that in a bit.
The first one is, I think, glaringly obvious: /vg/ just doesn't endorse or sometimes even enforce roleplay at all, and often it feels like the server does quite the opposite. Any character idea that isn't a throwaway gag or a silly little gimmick gets either completely disregarded or outright ridiculed [to be fair, the latter was more of a concern when thread was actually alive and people were discussing the game on there]. There definitely are exceptions to this, though. Still, not a great starting point. Then you have to take into account that people who will want to migrate will generally dislike something about the state that /vg/ is currently in. That's mostly banned people and other faux revolutionaries. It's nigh impossible to make someone leave the server they like already, no matter how much you promise, especially if you underdeliver on that.
I don't think there's a solution to this issue right now, not one that keeps the imageboard audience focus. I'll consider maybe talking to people I know from some other boards to see if they'd be interested in something like that, but not only is that not a permanent solution, it's one that's highly likely to fail.
As to the second one... You have probably noticed by now that I'm an ESL. No two ways about it, and I'm the worst kind of, since I'm also Russian - which is why I'm this verbose... I'm a refugee, yes; my first codebase was /vg/ when it was hosted on the long gone Soviet Station, which is why I'm so nostalgic about it (and also the fact that it's the only one that hasn't made the game entirely unplayable yet), but more relevant to the topic is the fact that even if I'm (barely) able to hold a basic conversation on an imageboard, I completely fold when presented with a complex developing situation, and the only response I can give is to just stand there and bat my eyes like an idiot. So, I myself am just not fit for the kind of space I proselytise. This wouldn't be noticeable at all if the server had more people, really - right now every player counts and has to do something to make the rounds more memorable, though.
>I do like the idea of the station being a death trap where you have to keep your wits about you though.
Hard agree on this one. I really didn't understand the point of removing shelters until I saw the effects of that in action. I still think there's some utility to keeping them in, because having a plasma flood be a guaranteed way to instantly depop an entire server is fun maybe once or twice at most and gets stale after that, but we don't have people actually antagonising the station right now anyway so who cares.
>I guess I want to reduce noisy/gunk style random events