Yeah, no. Every genre has its issues, but Gor's reputation for being a cringefest full of bad players didn't just pop up out of the ground one day because someone took a pop at it for no reason. The collective groan when someone lands on a new sim wearing GM isn't just prejudice born of nothing.
I played Gor almost exclusively for well over 15 years, through chatrooms and so on first and later in SL. I've played sporadically in other genres, from Star Wars to Modern Urban to Medieval Fantasy. I've played GoT now for about 5 years, almost exclusively. During that five years I've gone back occasionally for a little while, to have a look around the Gorean venues on offer - not because I want to slag them, but because I have a fondness for Gor's themes and keep hoping things will improve, somehow - and it's just a night and day difference when it comes to the way that story, conflict and lore are handled.
I also disagree that you should only have conflict with people you know and like OOC. You should have conflict with people it makes sense for your character to have conflict with. This may be helped along in GoT by existing enmities and alliances when your character begins, but I've had plenty of conflict these last few years, and barely any of it with people I knew or talked to OOC. With very few exceptions, I tend to prefer playing with people who I don't talk to OOC. I think the ability to play conflict with people who aren't your OOC mates - or lack thereof - says a lot about a sim.
And regarding Sasi's point? Sure, a handful of people are in Gor for the themes, but most people, as evidenced by the OOC treatment of women and amount of ever-changing lovey-dovey OOC picks, are there additionally (or exclusively) to get their kink on. And that's fine - but let's not pretend it's not happening, and let's not try to enter some collective delusion where it doesn't have a deleterious effect on role play.
Gor, generally:
- Doesn't have an application process.
- Doesn't have any lore in which to ground your story.
- Doesn't have any intrasim factions to create the conflict necessary for story to even occur.
- Doesn't have an admin population that understands RP norms (let alone a player population).
- Doesn't have any true IC consequence (limbs grow back, death lasts a few days at most).
- Has only a handful of people willing to take IC risk, despite the lack of consequence.
- Has no OOC consequence for poor play, because they can move on to the next Gor sim that's desperate to take them.
- Has such little success with intersim conflict that any war that goes on past a week without an RP ban is a notable and unusual success that has people patting themselves on the back for literal years.
And while I get what you're saying about other genres having issues - these aren't just the usual issues that affect other genres. This isn't just someone being a little bitch about their character's story going awry and committing suicide, or one player in a population metagaming and ending up banned, or a sim story going on for a year or three and becoming more convoluted than it's fair to expect new players to catch up with - those things can be worked into the story or remedied with new lore. The story can be recovered, and play can go on. These issues that Gor has are fatal to any attempt to get a story off the ground in the first place, without even considering what will happen thereafter.
Don't get me wrong, I've had some great stories in Gor - but they've been stories that were far more about internal conflict and personal relationships than anything that was farther-reaching, despite my efforts to expand them. If I weren't successful with that expansion in other genres, GoT and otherwise, I might be willing to concede that me and my wants are the problem. But I'm not.
I've never had anyone in GoT refuse to play with my character because I wasn't DTF, or because I was playing a whore or servant, or IM me to tell me OOC they should kill me for my IC actions instead of doing it, or react negatively OOC to my character being the tiniest bit cross. So that's where I play. Because that shit? Feels bad, man.