[quote=@Forsythe]
I for one do not really mind the collabs. Regarding the lack of OOC activity it was more often an assortment of random stuff completely unrelated to the RP which frankly is better suited for a skype group or somesuch, from writing perspective I'd rather have the option to do easy inserts and edits on stuff like missions because it just makes it look neater, and from a readers perspective it took me a couple of days of convincing myself to actually catch up with other missions than our own just because it's so easy to lose thread in such plethora of posts - I find it much more enjoyable to read a couple of larger chunks.

I don't really see the problem with the illusion of the thread being dead because we do not need to attract new people. IMHO it should really be a common courtesy to notify others if you are going to have an extended absence and to check the RP for progress. If people can be bothered to click that subs button once a day, where's the problem.
[/quote]

Except a Skype group for Beacon as a whole doesn't exist, which means the OOC is the one place a sense of community forms. Community beyond the fragmented subgroups, that is. When that begins to wither, the community withers.

And collabs are detrimental because, ultimately, RPGs thrive on interaction. A collab every now and again can be very good. But where I come from, they're referred to as jams (in the sense of "jam session"); in keeping with the term, they are what you [i]add[/i] to food to make it better. You don't build your sandwich out of jam. When everything is done in collabs, games fragment and disintegrate because you aren't all playing one game anymore. You're playing half a dozen separate ones that don't overlap in any way.

And as we've seen here, that leads to dying games. When the first OOC post in a week is a comment on how dead the activity of the game is, you've long since crossed over into "too many collabs". I can cite a list more than half a dozen entries long of games that have died this way.