First, I keep hearing that Arkaz is an evil world that never lets good win.. I'd like to address this misbelief with what I told the DM's about it:
I'd like for someone to point out to me a mojor plot where evil beat good in the end. I looked and I cannot find one.When I first built Arkaz I had a vision and I had the world built to that vision. But I decided early on that I'd not lock the world into my vision alone. I decided early on that I'd let others help shape and guide the flow of the world. Arkaz isn't even close to how I had planned it from the start. Just look at the landscape, I let my builders put some of their own vision into the world and that vision changed the world's landscape. I let my DM's make world changing events that didn't fully agree with my vision. Hell take Helthor, I never planned for the things that happened to him....but that's okay and as for the players. I've allowed major world changing events to happen because players decided to do it. Arkaz is 20% DM driven, 10% Builder driven, 5% Terry driven and 65% player driven.
Do you want to know a secret. Evil is more visible because players like playing evil.....it's easier then playing good. However that being said, looking over the last dozen or so events....good has won 100% of the time. Which is sad if you ask me. Good and evil should be 50/50 or atleast 60/40 when it comes to winning....good should never always be expected to win.
I think the issue here is that players show up for an event or two and in those events evil seems to take the lead. Had they bothered to stick around for the end event of the plot they'd have seen that in the end good won. But they didn't so they just assumed evil won and good lost. I don't think we've ever had a major event where evil won out in th end. Even the Helthor plot cannot be viewed that way because it really only effected evil players.
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Second, regarding DM's only holding events for their friends and such. Most DM's play like I do. Either we post a schedule or if we have free time we log in and look for people. Now my free time is limited so I cannot always post in advance...and sometimes I have to cancel or change an event becasue RL decides for me. I've tried to make it easier by putting in a calender, I've tasked my DM's with posting all planned events there, some seem to be, I'll bug the rest to get to it. I also granted CoPaP DM's with posting access and we've even set up a private forum for CoPaP and Arkaz DM's to talk so we can work out schedules and cross world events, which should help with the double/tripple booking. Oh by the way I should also point out that the Arkaz DM's are good about reponding to player requests for events, as well as Guild requests. This again comes back to Arkaz being mostly player driven. If you have a good idea for a plot or you'd like to try and change something send the request in, just pm Dungeon Masters and you will get a response. Most of the time it will be a sure, sometimes a no but we'll give you the reason why.
Now I know we cannot please everyone all of the time and we cannot please some people some of the time and some people we just cannot please at all, but if you are going to sit around and talk about how bad things are atleast get the facts correct or better yet address your concerns to me and we'll figure out who's right and wrong and what can be done to fix it.
If anyone has any issues or questions please send me a PM.