I'm the Spider-player, meaning I hold one of the biggest rogue's galleries and supporting casts, so I feel like I should speak to Hex's concerns, too. Claim culture is a very tricky area to deal with because I think we all pick our characters because we have some amount of passion for them, unless your name is Simple Unicycle. We tend to know these guys back to front, and we have a perfect little story built for them in our heads -- at least I do, for me. It's hard because we're trying to simultaneously strike a balance between telling a cohesive story that touches on all aspects of our character, but also leaving things open for newcomers. I've tried my best, but some things can't be avoided. My Peter is year one, so there can't really be a Kaine as one person wanted, and I had to shoot down Silk for another.

I guess I big question is, to what extent do we need to be open to this kind of thing? I think there is absolutely a problem with claim culture as Hex has said, but I think we need to be very precise in our handling of it. Maybe each of us can organize our supporting cast into 'tiers' based on importance to our story? And those tiers would essentially indicate how much someone would need to work with us to get an app for a given character accepted? But then, that might be asking much of the current player base. We could also maybe do a thing where we ask each player to throw together a list of some popular NPCs within their wheelhouse that they'd consider apps for? I know I have more than a couple I don't have any plans with that I'd be willing to give away.

Speaking to the larger issue of player retention, its probably really valuable to ask ourselves what things draw new players here, and what sort of things drive them away. I think that we should have a serious conversation with our newcomers that [i]have[/i] stuck around, like Dblade and Ceta, and maybe Uni and I who only came around last game, as to what kinds of things were motivating them to stay and maybe what sort of pressures they felt that were maybe pushing them to leave? I think right now we're having a lot of old voices trying to deduce the problems that new players are experiencing, but maybe we should ask new players themselves. Hell, maybe stick a few feelers out into the wild and see what people think.

Personally, I was attracted to this group for the quality of writing and the subject matter of the game. I was almost never on the Guild at that time, so I wasn't really aware of any 'reputations' or anything. I was just a lone agent looking for a fun game. The GM team seemed strong and the OOC looked like a good time, so I threw my hat in the ring. Myself, one of the things I really didn't like is that it was hard to feel connected to the group. We do very much have a club of old hands here, and back in UOU, I felt like my stuff was mostly being ignored and that my contributions to the OOC were more or less glossed over. I ended up being fine with it, as I was having a lot of fun writing Vig and I enjoyed shitposting with Nightrunner and Uni, but I think really getting to know the group and feel like your stuff is supported is a huge part of what makes people stick with these games. 

On that note, I don't think we necessarily play well with others as a unit. I still don't know very much about many of the people in this game, new and old alike, and I think that's maybe a problem a lot of us have. Hex is right -- strong games are made on the backs of strong groups of players. But so is Bounce, we need new blood. This game we're more or less missing Morden, MB, Sep, Ersatz, Eddie Brock, and more. They're missed I'm sure, bvut those losses haven't necessarily hit as hard because I think we're building another core of people who have stuck around. I think we need to make a bigger push to find people like that who will stay with us, and a huge part of that is being friendly and open and just trying to honestly get to know one another.

So this post has been rather long and rambly, but I just woke up (after royally fucking my sleep schedule), so hopefully it makes sense. Dog bless, love you hot boys.