On the other forums there's a discussion about role exp. My experience reflects what several people seem to be saying, so I thought I'd ask.

In the past, it seemed like 1k-2k for a solid role in the first 10-20 hours of play could reasonably be anticipated. Now it seems rare to receive role exp. Is this any kind of intentional shift? Or is it just that a previous role-maven got bored and isn't doing the rewarding anymore? I understand that role exp is not something to be taken for granted, but it is something that was awarded very consistently before.

What does the staff think is a reasonable guideline for role exp?
Is there ever a point at which someone should pray to ask to have the role looked at. To pick make up an example, if someone has 100 hours, a backstory and a half-dozen updates, but no role exp, would that warrant requesting a review of it? Or should we consider role exp strictly a special treat?

Any imm reward should be considered a treat. People get busy and they may not be able to check all of the roles.

I'm fuzzy on the timeline -- I want to say 2-3 years ago because I think it was around the time edges started to go in, but at some point we decided to try to standardize our role flagging a bit. While there's always going to be subjectivity in judging how good a role is, we found that in practice one or two imms would give out 3-4k XP for a role they liked and for other imms it was hard to hit a 1k mark.

As getting XP for your role began to have more value than was previous (edges) it didn't seem fair that a character and role that we as a staff could mostly agree was of "good, but not great" quality might get 20k XP if they followed imm X but 2k XP if they followed imm Y.

I think we've also, as a whole, tended to be less willing to give XP for role updates than 5 years ago. If I read an update and it tells me something that's useful to me in understanding your RP, I will probably toss you some XP. If I read an update and that's not the case, I probably will not toss you some XP. We want to try to reward people who use the role command for its intended purpose without encouraging anyone to write very slowly write a 20 chapter role that essentially says nothing.

So, yeah, probably in a lot of cases you get less XP now than at one point, but that XP is also worth more in the sense that it helps buy edges.

In most cases, we won't be looking at roles on pre-PK characters. It can happen, but generally the systems we have in place to call our attention to roles won't pick up on them. Therefore, you can mentally subtract that time from how long it took anyone to notice your role.

I wouldn't request a review of your role; I don't think anyone's going to respond to that well. I read a few roles when I can; if I'm not, it's usually because something else is taking priority. It's something we like to have done because we think it helps encourage more interesting characters and roleplay, but we each have several other jobs that have to take a higher priority.