Crackpunch: "This is different though. Karlotta keeps coming back to crusade against the injustices here, even though he's not really wanted. It's not how people should treat gaming. He's probably been doing it for longer than I've played on the server."
Crusading against injustice is a pretty cool thing to do. I support amnesty international in almost all situations. I am, and have always been fond of Karlotta. From the vigilante who shot the nomad-lover propagandists from the Shrine to Johanna Hardcastle.
Yes, Karlotta broke server rules. Got banned. Happens to tons of people. Most probably don't come back.
Karlotta comes back out of a desire to change the server for the better. Considering all the moaning I've heard since my latest return about the state of the mod and politics, perhaps the mod needs a cold-eyed "outsider" to make constructive criticism.
I read this entire thread in one sitting and it got me to thinking. Every time I get into a group with the upper echelons of discovery players, the group chat gives up all pretence at RP. It is as the LPI chat log in the Black Scorpion incident revealed to many who would not previously have been exposed, just how shallow the immersion in character is in many Official Factions.
This is in part a flaw in the way Official Factions function, I think. There was a post a few days ago in which someone said that the official factions were just clans from any other game, their only real defining feature being the tag. It struck me as true.
In part this may stem from the change in rules about official faction minimum play time, in which players are obliged to play longer hours than they may want to, sit around in space with no one to talk to, or organise desperate group activities which, due to boredom lead to the out of character group chat mentalities. Which lead to lulz.
Apart from this is diplomacy, in which Official Factions are meant to represent their npc faction whenever they speak. If the [101st] want to ally with the Corsairs to crush the other Houses, they can say it, and (so long as they don't actually fight alongside each other due to ID restrictions) drag the indies and non-official factions along with them. Case in point; Kishiro influenced government of Kusari despite original lore stating Samura influence Kusari government. Some will say "oh, that's the server's story changing over time," but it is in fact changing this way only because of petitions by Official Factions and the various developers.
One of my major bugbears is the way that Outcasts and Corsairs seem to drift further and further apart with each version. First it was just distance between them, was it three or four jumps? Lots of neutral bases on the way. Then it was just Eta in the way, but suddenly a minefield, and npcs on steroids to the point where any engagement was part-decided by which side's npcs decided to turn up. And now Outcasts and Corsairs are not even able to fight in one another's home systems. Whoever thought that was a fine idea has forgotten just how amazing the old Alpha/Gamma fleet battles could be. And generally these were spawned randomly, by a few ships heading to Alpha, provoking a counter-attack, whereupon a counter-counter-attack would be launched, or vice versa. This freedom of encounter allowed the events to unfold dynamically, where people could just be a Corsair fighting Outcasts, and play out the wild dogfights only hinted at in the spacestation rumours.
Another example are the Omega wars, that brief period of krieg in 4.85. I was there at the beginning, and we could never have expected it to spiral into such brilliant bloodshed. It was a thing of beauty. A lot of people will likely focus on the "drama", but that's all metagame. RP is antithetical to metagame, in many respects. RP invites immersion, where metagame provides disconnection. Metagame identifies the player behind the character, where RP subsumes the player into the character.
From my experience it has become harder to find genuine RP in space. From 4.85 onwards I essentially had to cruise disrupt people to get them to talk, or shoot at them, and talk while I dodged. There are exceptions to this, but I would judge that number at 5% of all interactions.