"Realistic World Responses"

Well, animating NPCs and creating plotlines are two very different things. I readily believe that they don't write up plotlines for the express purpose of getting a PC killed. They most certainly will animate with that intent, though. Join the Byn or the Garrison and you'll experience this on a weekly basis. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the problem is that aside from rote cameos by clan NPCs or Vennant, animations are nearly always used as a "gotcha" thing. You were doing something a little dodgy or you went somewhere dangerous and someone animates something just to say "we caught you doing this." Meanwhile, I can't count the number of times I've stricken up a conversation with some NPC or something like that and found no response. Never had an aggressive NPC spare my life or an NPC soldier ask for a bribe to let me go, never had my unit stumble upon something cool and helpful. It's always a soldier who beelines to your location and ignores your succesful hide, or twelve gith charging over the dune. It's very predictable: staff sees what you're up to and makes your situation worse than it was without their interference. You had the audacity to backstab some rinth NPC at 7 in the morning when nothing's going on anywhere, suddenly Twitchy comes running and acts like you committed alley treason. But he'll never visit some assassin who's obviously bored to death and offer 20 sid to kill some mugger for him. It's always punitive or dangerous to the player.

This poll isn't formulated so well, though. When you ask players if staff has ever animated something that wasn't negative, everyone's answer will be yes. Nobody experiences exclusively negative animations. The better question would be if one finds animations to be more negative than positive, and I expect a lot of us would say yes to that. Sometimes it isn't objectively negative, like the endless packs of gith that seem to track the Byn's movements with the precision of modern military technology. Many times it is, though, when you did something sliiightly controversial and the otherwise dormant world springs to life and hurls rotten fruit at you. It ends up being a game world that only responds when what you did warrants a negative or perilous response. All stick and no carrot makes players feel like staff is just waiting around for opportunities to punish, which I think is actually the case with some staffers. Not as bad as it once was, but certainly still a staff trend. They probably don't realize how it looks from the mortal perspective.