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I'm not a fan of this change. The rules we had were fine. They weren't perfect but did the job, all we needed was adding context for each rule specifically and additional explanation of the more complex ones. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the goal of this rework creating less confusion and helping new players in understanding the rules? If yes, both were a step back. Grammar mistakes aside (which there are plenty of), the rules are way too unclear, even compared to the "old" ones. Cutting the text short and making it open to interpretation backfires more often than not.
(06-09-2016, 02:38 AM)Drrobe Wrote: The idea was just to use common sense. If you shoot someone, RP first. Don't troll people. Make one demand per pirate encounter to be fair to others. The rules were meant to be a simplified not to create confusion, but to allow people to use common sense instead of feel like they're walking on eggshells.
A key thing to note here is that "vets", or people who established themselves as a part of the community, don't really need the rules. Sure, they lurk in from time to time to make sure they don't break any just in case, or if they have some doubts, but overall they play the game by instinct, in a natural way. For them the rules are here just so that there are some limitations that prevent them from being total dicks to other players. They know how the game works and how interaction goes more or less, which is why they rarely get sanctioned (and when they do it's usually by accident) and why 95% of the sanctions are on new players.
So what does that leave us with? Newbies. A lot of people don't understand how important they are to our server. Without making a huge wall of text about that, I'll just say that without them we'd be stuck with three or four times less players in-game. If you log at any given time and look at the player list just judging by the names you'll find that at least 60-70% are new players. And that's just by looking at the names, let alone interacting with them.
The rules, aside from providing limitations, are mostly for new players. They are here to guide them in a way to understand how this mod and server work, ensure they treat other players nicely and establish themselves as solid members of the community. The "old" rules were pretty complex. A lot of newbies had problem understanding them, granted. Not because of their complexity, but rather because they had no CONTEXT. How is someone supposed to know what OOC, RP, metagaming, powergaming, reasonable demand, pvp-dead, reengaging etc. means? Without context or a clear definition they can't. They'll have a vague, self-interpreted definition to which they'll stick which is wrong more often than not. Look at the first paragraph for my proposal to solve the problem.
By cutting the text short and making the rules open to interpretation, new players get even more confused. They lose the guidelines that were there before when more text was added for each rule, and for some rules that are now "common sense" to vets such as "Cheating" which isn't clearly defined anymore, how is a new player supposed to know what exactly is considered as cheating? Same goes for any other simplified rule. This is a complex mod and having detailed rules isn't a bad idea at all, in fact it's better than having as short as possible definitions with no context or examples which is why it backfires greatly on new players. A big problem is that it's almost impossible to notice that until it's too late (when a newbie breaks the rules), and then we have to punish them through sanctions.
In addition, a version of the rules in different languages should be a introduced. There are plenty of people, more specifically new players, who can understand and write English just enough to play on the server. When reading the rules, those same players won't understand a lot of it because of their not-so-good English on top of having barely any knowledge about the game which inevitably leads to them learning it the hard way via sanctions. We can't afford to drive away any new players that don't understand perfect English anymore, we don't have 200 players daily. Adding a multi-language version with the emphasis on "2.1 Everything must be in understandable English" to make sure they still do talk in English as much as possible would help those players understand the rules significantly more, I'm sure. If I joined Discovery 2 weeks ago and had average English skills, I'd have a great problem with both understanding the actual words in the rules and the rules themselves. Were they in my native language however, one of the problems is automatically solved. I'd propose adding a version in German, French and Russian for starters, as the most of our non-UK and non-USA population is from countries speaking those languages.
My 2 cents on why I feel this change was more detrimental than beneficial. I'll be commenting the new rules and how good/bad each of them is specifically in another post. Don't get me wrong though, the current ones have potential and can be fixed to be good overall, but it'd be a lot of fixing to do.