I keep saying you're done, and random people keep convincing me to give you one more chance to save yourselves.
' Wrote:Plus, the whole "stamp out individualism" is something I dont agree with at all.
This is the best thing I've seen on these forums in ages except for...
' Wrote:It is called "Freelancer", after all. Not Starlancer. It's not frackin' Wing Commander, it's Privateer. It's Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction, not Call of Duty.
That's the whole bloody point of the game. It's not Red vs. Blue.
But we'll see how it plays out in the update.
That.
' Wrote:From what I have seen, most people who disagree with the new system listen up to a point and then get stuck on one aspect of the change. Once the understanding of this aspect enters thier brain, all thoughts of other implications are forgotten or simply ignored.
1) The new system is impartial. The computer cannot be swayed into allowing or disallowing changes to the rules for "special" people. In the new system we are all equal.
Equality vs. Freedom. Equality isn't a virtue. Besides, we aren't all equal; you'd never say that if you knew anything about balance. And we won't all be equal, ever, until the day we're all flying Civilian-ID'd Starfliers with no guns and aren't allowed to talk or move, just sit still in space above Manhattan. We must all be sitting in the exact same spot, and we can't look at different things; we must always look at the same thing. That's equality. Sounds fun, right?
2) The new system allows for greater role play opportunities. It removes many of the limitations on tech that the old system enforced. It does this at a price, the efficiency of some weapons, but that is not an exhorbant price for role players.
Which manages to totally ignore the problems of both the old and new systems. See my response to Xoria's post below, and Tycho's response to yours above.
3) The new system allows Administrators and Developers to spend more time working on making new and exciting content because they will not have to spend so much time on sanctions for tech infractions. Each hour spent on sorting he said, she said, I can haz? posts, and They can't haz reports is another hour they can't spend on updates and bugs.
Uh, admins aren't developers. And they don't actually typically do tech chart sanctions. Tell you what, you find any one week when there are more than five separate, unrelated tech chart sanctions, or any one month with more than ten of the same, and I'll admit that there's actually a large workload under the current system. Which, of course, is irrelevant, because the current system is also broken.
For those still not listening. You are not special. The word is equality, and there is no reason that you should be beyond it's scope simply because you have played the game longer than others. Your role play will not be hurt in the least by this change. You do not have to get rid of any current tech mixes and more mixes will be opened up to you.
Oooh, yeah, how dare we try to be special? I forgot we're all playing NPCs here. How about we go ahead and dictate what the ship and loadout of every member of every faction must be, remove all non-faction IDs, and create a character creation system where all characters must be based on a set admin-designed template with some slight allowably modifications. I can see it now:
Bundshuh:
Options:
The Demoman: Nationalist Rheinlandic Freedom Fighter; heavy accent, always drinks lots of alcohol, born on Stuttgart.
The Pyro: Crazy terrorist/freedom fighter who loves to blow stuff up. Always talks hysterically. Born on Planet Hamburg.
The Scout: Orphaned as a child, blames the government. Joined in a prison in <insert local district here>, New Berlin, and started working in space when he got out.
The Spy: Agent for the Bundschuh who was caught. Now mostly spends his time shooting people over Planet New Berlin. Always wears a pinstriped suit, and chain smokes <insert tobacco product here>.
Oh...I see. You loose the edge in combat that your favorite tech mixes gave you before. Well, if that was the reason for all your vaunted roleplay.....then I couldn't care less. You are one of the people this is meant to slap down.
Yeah, how dare we actually expect not to get punished during our character's more violent reactions to things for roleplaying differently, huh? Us awful people. Really.
' Wrote:You're missing the point. The new system is being implemented in order to entirely replace the old system which required assessment and implementation by the Admin team. The purpose is to remove as many rules as possible and replace them with material disincentives that nobody needs to manually police.
Witness: old sanctions against continuous docking with a jump gate to evade destruction is replaced with a cool down timer; old sanctions for docking on enemy bases replaced with FL Hook disallowing docking if your rep is not good enough. Etc.
Can we get some telescreens now? Thanks!
Joking aside, automating things is good, but that's not the issue at hand. I've reiterated it time and again, and no one has responded yet. Problem isn't the new system. The old system was bad too. Problem is the whole philosophy behind the systems: the idea that people need to be controlled - not even stopped from using force! - for no other reason than "you think they might not roleplay well", whatever "roleplaying well" means. Our roleplay - our art - is forced to change, suddenly, repeated, drastically, against plan, not due to in-game events - which would make it dynamic art, which is good - but due to outside force. This force yanks it around at the end of a chain and changes it from a product of the mind into a product of force, and, thus, not art. Basically, you're taking our roleplay and making it not-roleplay by forcibly changing what should be the product of our minds into a product of your force. That's not okay.
Let's say for a moment you don't care. Let's say you honestly do not care whether what you're doing is right or wrong, or you don't believe me when I tell you it's harming roleplay.
' Wrote:Have you folks ever considered the fact that perhaps this will kill the desire in certain individuals to roleplay? At least, the desire of certain individuals to roleplay a certain type of character? A character that enriches the roleplay environment?
What about that? Where will your precious control be when Discovery is gone? I have no desire what-so-ever to play Discovery anymore. It's not 'cause I'm a Legionnaire; I hardly played that anymore. Let me tell you a little story of how control affects Disco, and why I'm sick of dealing with it. It's not about this policy specifically, because I'm only arguing against this policy as an extension of my larger argument against control.
My main character is Yoko Mori. She was supposed to be a technical pacifist who did intel work for people against Kusari, since she had a bit of a grudge against them. This worked well for a long while. I played her as she would be, in-roleplay; closed-economy, poor, can't just go out and buy a ship whenever she wants. She had an old Charon she picked up second-hand - again, entirely built closed-economy with money from her work and other random ways she picked up cash. In this case, someone gave it to her out of pity. However, have you ever flown a Charon? They're rather large. Yoko, of course, noticed this, and since her job primarily consisted of not getting hit for long periods of time while she scanned things, she asked one of her employers - the Blood Dragons - for another ship. She ended up getting a Tanto. Now, due to Tech Chart restrictions, you can only use a Tanto on a Merc ID, not a Freelancer one, which she did. While she's not a merc, people of course started treating her like one. Kusarians called her a "dirty merc" and refused to chatter with her like before, instead opting for more pewpew sooner. This changed her roleplay to a lot less talking - and me showing off her as a character, as I do really like her personality -and a lot more dodging.
As the character evolved, all this shooting did change her perceptions, and pushed her much more quickly to drop the whole pacifist thing. She was only ever going to be self- or friends-defense, bar a few exceptions for people she really hated, but there was a problem with that. See, no ID allows you to actually shoot what your character would shoot in-roleplay. You have to shoot what the ID says to shoot. For Freelancer and Merc IDs, that means no shooting except against bountied ships. Thus, if she ever wanted to shoot someone she really hated - say, she caught Evangaline McDowell molesting a close friend of hers and reacted murderously, which should would - she'd have to claim the bounty on that person, despite the fact that money was not at all her motivation. As a precaution, I registered for a number of bounty boards that covered likely targets. Whenever she shot a target down, I had to claim it.
Of course, that led to even more merc-calling, not unjustifiably of course. Slowly, because people reacted to her as if she was a bounty hunter, because the rules required her to be such in order to be true to her character, she slowly became more and more of one. Her personality has now changed dramatically; she's much less forgiving, much more money-focused, much more "kill the baddies and earn a living off it" rather than "help my friends and do odd jobs to try to scrape by". She'd've never changed like that if it hadn't been for this very same philosophy of control. If she'd changed based on in-game things, so be it. That's dynamism. This isn't. This is force.
This is only one example. This is the one I know, because it is the one I experienced. There are many, many others like it. I will not accept this any longer; I have stopped playing Discovery, and remain on the forums only to fight it on behalf of the sane people who are still left, and in hopes that I might eventually be able to return and roleplay again. There are some people like me left, but our numbers are dwindling rapidly. We're the roleplayers; we're the people who think, who come to create art and are driven away by the rules around how we must create our art.
I am not the little guy. I am not the big guy. Certainly, I'm a long-stander respected in a few circles, but only a few, mostly made up of disgusted roleplayers who are leaving at ever-increasing rates. I don't bother with politics, for the most part. This hurts Michael, this hurts the big guys, and this hurts me. The old system hurts him, the old system hurts the big guys, the old system hurts me. Stop trying to make this about equality, about being special, about long-stander versus the little guy. That's a false dichotemy. This is force versus thought, conformism versus art, ruleplay versus roleplay, and control versus freedom. Discovery will stand or fall on its principles, or lack thereof. Discovery must become principled or be destroyed. Really isn't much else to it. Freedom to roleplay, or control, ever-decreasing roleplay - true roleplay, not indulgent Mary Sue-ism and perverseness for its own sake, that'll only increase as control goes on - and eventual destruction. Doesn't make a whole lot of difference to me at this point, but it is a choice you have to make or you'll go with force by default.
