I love to write well-thought-out roles and have won a number of roll contest in the past, but the one thing that irks me about shifters is putting together an awesome role only to get sheisty forms (not wanting to get into the forum balancing debate, just knowing not all forms suit my playstyle).

So my question is, what is the imms perspective to late role entries in general and for shifters. Late being real late like final form late for the first entry. Does that sort of meta information play into awarding an RC win? Do you rate roles for lower XP because of it? Or if you come across a good roll it doesn't make a difference...

Ishuli and Rahsael have said it, but to only kick the dead horse once or twice:

In terms of an RC, I rate based purely on the role that is offered to me. If I enjoy the role, then it gets a good ranking. The roles I feel are worthy of reward, get rewarded.

In terms of late adding: If you have the role in mind, and you RP that role without adding it, I will not fault you. If there is a difference in your role and your RP? Yes, it can hurt. So, my suggestion is to RP from the beginning based on that role, and add it when you are ready.

Late roles don’t bother me in the least, with one exception. Generally speaking, I don’t care when you enter your roles – level 1 or 51 – so long as you generally RP in a way that isn’t blatantly contradictory to that. So my only gripe would be, hypothetically: you roll a guy and RP him like he’s kinda dumb, then at 51 enter a role about being a genius. So as long as your general character behavior/attitude fits what your “past” role eventually is, I’m entirely unbothered by you entering it super late.

I’d rather you enter it late than not at all.

Re: Role contest. I only rate the role, nothing else. I don’t rate roles lower in the role contest or otherwise based on when they are entered. Roles are roles, and I treat them in isolation.

-Ish

As the current RC judge, I will say that I try to focus purely on the content of the role.

HOWEVER...

If you were to play a shifter without a role for a few dozen hours, make it to hero, without every really roleplaying or developing your character at all, and then suddenly enter a massive role out of nowhere, it would probably bother me.

Conversely, there are a lot of players who enter 10 chapters at level 1, play 200 hours, and then roleplay incredibly generically/without mention of or texture from said role, and never enter another update indicating any milestones or development like cabal inductions, religion, etc. That also bothers me.

For better or for worse, shifters have a very unique mechanic of randomness. If you want to play a shifter without getting invested until you get your final form, then why would you want to play a shifter at all? Playing 30-40 hours to rocket to hero only to delete sounds absolutely miserable to me. I would never want to encourage that.

You could just as easily play a druid and get a guaranteed OK air form and damn decent offensive form, plus some beefy supplications and other fun mechanics to boot. Or you could play a tailor-made warrior and get exactly what you want out of it.

So, the short answer is that I might be sympathetic to your plight on some level, but I would not hold shapeshifters to a lower role or roleplay standard than anyone else because of mechanics inherent to the class.