On a starting note in line with Discovery policy of the Sandwich rule. I have actually gone and had an entire eighteenth for my brother and have had a pool party and a whole day off. So this is not written in the heat of the moment but in the cold hard light of the morning. Well, it started off then. It’s ending up being longer than I thought.
Comments on this to the chats or PMs please. I’ve posted this somewhere I’m not certain of people’s lack of being a dickness so it’s not open to anyone to edit. Sorry bros. I’ll prolly move it to a new Gdoc later and then make that one editable. Quoted every relevant post here.
Just to let you all know I’m sick as all hell and not overly happy with having to write a rebuttal to more than 9500 words. But because I love the Zoners and don’t want to see the official factions disbanded (And this is something that has been put forward as an option) I’m writing this.
My text is gonna be in purple for ease of differentiation
To quote Aerlem before we start.
aerelm Wrote:
As I already said, your frustration (you being the zoner players in general) is quite understandable, and I knew the extent of it full well before that thread was even posted and unlike a lot of pointless whining going around, this one actually holds some merit and is completely justified and not something we'd want to dismiss as "QQ", which is why I personally brought up the idea of a system to reimburse Zoner players for when the update is released. On top of that, it is also quite understandable if you want to vent out by going on a swearing-spree, but it's better kept to your own Skype chats where it belongs. Nothing good comes out of dragging it to the forums, which is the sole reason the ban was issued.
Moving on to the more important points...
1. The community has never agreed to "nerfs" of any kind, and every single poll posted prior every single nerf (no matter how much sense it made or how much positive effect it had on the server gameplay in a long run) has ended with the majority voting against it, so I'm afraid results of a forum poll is hardly a good enough argument.
2. As I already mentioned in my post, it's ok if you're against the idea, but how you express your disagreement is the important part. If you think this is a bad idea, look at the bright side: It's not implemented yet. So, take a while until you've calmed down, then write a proper post offering constructive points and a comprehensive list of the reasons behind your stance, and it will be taken into account. Long as you don't include the answer to "why" this is a bad idea, there'd be nothing to discuss dev-side, and hence, nothing to reconsider.
As a side note, from an outsider point of view the whole "Jinx bashing" deal is starting to look quite ridiculous, and mind you, this is coming from someone who's had countless arguments and disagreements with Jinx in dev chat, not only about his models, but about a lot of his other ideas as well, so would be nice if you can tone down on that one as well. If you want to voice your disagreement about something, do it about the original decision of revising zoner line, and not the mere model proposals Jinx came up with.
P.S: Only lead developers have gold name, which means in case of model-related matters only the model lead gets gold name, and not every modeler, but that doesn't make the lead devs any more important than regular developers.
So let’s start with addressing this.
You’ve stated that you wish to reimburse the Zoners. Okay, how can you reimburse people for literally hundreds of hours of time. In some cases thousands of ship hours. That not including all the time and effort spent on the forums writing RP backstories and posting inRP and all the time and effort involved in that.
These ships have been around on the server for YEARS! longer than I’ve ever played and I was playing back in like 2007 or something. (I took a long time to make a forum account, I was young enough that my parents didn’t let me have an E-mail address or go on the internet unsupervised, yay for overprotective parents.)
Two, I didn’t swear, Sabre did. I’ll have you know that I cursed like a sailor who has just been told that he has to have his balls removed without anesthetic when I first read the news. But most of that was screaming internally and then a spew of anti-jinx profanity-ridden rubbish that I deleted before posting because despite my rage I still delete things with incorrect spelling. And I lose the ability to spell when I’m blindingly angry.
Sabre also had a point and it’s just annoying as hell that his post got deleted for two swear words and he got a week tempban but I can’t do anything about that. Because you guys are all very strangely protective of Jinx.
Okay, so this is not a case of the community being mad about a nerf. This is not a nerf. A nerf would be changing the ships to be less effective. So like removing some gun hardpoints from the ships or a nerf to armour. This is removing the ship. You can say “But we are changing them to another model” all you desire. It doesn’t change the fact that you are removing LITERALLY tens of thousands of hours of combined RP. The change from a Battleship to a battletransport is not something that can be roleplayed. “By the way, this defence ship that I’ve ben threatening you with if you screw around in my No-Fire-Zone? It was actually just a transport all along. So I’m not sure why you moved on Mr. Battleship but there you have it.”
Two, here’s my response. And please don’t delete the PMs from this one. They are here for a reason.
And as to the Jinx bashing that’s something that a lot of Zoners are going to do because of how he handled the Omicroners in their last moments. Keep in mind that the disbanding of one of the most active and largest playerfactions on the server can be attributed solely to Jinx. He just said “I don’t want to search for a replacement. The faction is disbanded.” with that he broke down a hell of a lot of RP over the course of years and broke the balance of power in the Zoners and caused a lot of resentment towards him.
This has been counteracted by the Phoenix but it’s taken a while. They should not have to be a faction that rides off the demise of the Omicroners because the Omicroners should never ahve been disbanded. I know that and OSI and the Omicroners used to fight like cats in a very, VERY small sack and I was OSI HC at the time.
Onto Jinx’s PM
So thanks for deleting this when I quoted it in the thread. Because transparency is something that we all dislike. Please leave this one in here. I don’t want to have to write this whole thing again.
Jinx Wrote:when the ZA trouble happened early last year - the anti-zoner rants had started again. and many ppl questioned why zoners had evolved into that direction.
Indies. Not official Zoner RP. There was an FR5 request from official Zoners that was denied by the admins.
Jinx Wrote:at that point - the general mood of the forum was very much anti-zoner and "how can they DARE to have such big ships"
now let me tell you that - the only person who stood up for zoners vocally was Tel Aviv (and minions) - in a ... lets say... rather detrimental manner, cause he was and still is "the bad guy with the stupid ideas" .. and the other person was trogdor.
I was offline to prevent a mental breakdown. I’m sure that a lot of the officials tried their hand, filing for an FR5 and sanctions against them for breaking with Zoner RP. But the admins denied it so what can you do?
Jinx Wrote:at that point i got into contact with RedEclipse and tried to get hold on MadJohn to ask both of them as leaders or as ppl in leadership of their factions to stand up for their stuff and oppose the naysayers.
i did not try just once and gave up - i asked again and again and again for the entire freakin time ( which was around 2 months while the drama continued )
RedEclispe did post at least a shy post here and there trying to defend their assets - the only BIG vocal voice of a TAZ member was Sabre - and for all the wrong reasons. he continously asked to cut indie rights and favour factions - a policy we DO NOT SHARE as told again and again. - nither DocHoliday nor MadJohn as respected leaders replied to the skype call nor argued against the crowd.
Doc Holliday as much as I love the man (100% homo) is literally the most frustrating person to get into contact with via skype. Similar but less infuriating for Mad John. You just can’t get onto them. I can say “I asked the wall whether I could put a photo hook on it and it never responded.” That’s because it won’t respond. Doc has ALWAYS been this way and as someone who roleplayed a Zoner and was an official faction Hc member you should know this. Almost everyone else does.
You could also have contacted Fox. He’s been TAZ for about as long as I’ve been around the server. A very long time. And he’s almost always contactable and can send messages to the people that need to hear it.
Also there should not need to be arguing against people. This whole thing should have been nipped in the bud and the ZA ships all transferred to the BHG CORE. Or something. A faction that has RP reason to pew on the Order and get into fights with them. they could keep the ships for all I care, they can RP that they raided some dudes and stole them.
There is also the fact that what you are doing is not cutting indie rights here. You are in fact removing avenues of roleplay for indies and official factions alike. Unless the indies are taking an “If I cannot have this then everything must burn!” view I’m sure that having to file an SRP request for a ship and/or have approval from an official faction or have the ship removed that would be preferable to having the ships removed in their entirety.
If you do not allow factions to police their capital ships at all (Please note that LNS or RNC or KNF or BAF or Corsairs or Outcasts would remove a capital ship for offences much less than making an entire subfaction and then declaring war on an inRP ally and blockading a central faction system entirely) then do not punish them when the indies go out of control with them. You can either have the indies with maximum freedom (Something that you endorse) and have the official factions facing no consequences for their actions because they cannot influence them or you can have the indies rights reduced and the official factions being allowed to police them and thus facing consequences for the actions of indies.
You can’t punish me for the actions of my brother. I am not my brother’s keeper. He is his own person, I would not have my driver’s license revoked if my brother got his revoked. Why are you revoking my battleship license because someone who I have no control over was reckless with theirs?
Jinx Wrote:I also told the leaders "if they do not FIGHT for what they want, they WILL loose it, cause we, the devs.... WILL cater to the ppl asking for change IF the ppl affected do not fight against it." (and cause we simply cannot take silent ppl into account - cause we are no mind readers)
Here we are, fighting against change. I ask of you, where are your previous posts stating this? On the forum where everyone can see, the transparent process. If you indeed have any there. And you bumped them and PMd the people like you should do if you want a thread for sure to be replied to. Most people just check the top two pages and then call it a day, I’m guilty of this as well.
Jinx Wrote:now why is that relevant when it was a year ago? - cause change takes time. and consequences ... REAL consequences do not always just happen right away.
of course we know you wanne keep your toys - but we are also sure that those toys are detrimental for the general perception of zoners - and zoner players have NOT provided us with the FIERCE determination why they should keep them.
so - yea - don t give me the crap about not making an efford to get hold of the leaders of the factions. it was tried it either fell on deaf ears or was ignored. you simply cannot ask for more of a dev. - it is not our job to beg you to talk to us.
Fierce determination to keep their assets. Everyone assumed that that thread poll would come to nothing. Now here you are stating the change to the general community, and guess what? Fierce determination that such a thing is no. If you play a Zoner character at all you can see that this change is not going to help the server to change in the correct direction and that it will be detrimental to future and current RP alike.
The Zoners live in the edge worlds. We need guns. As much as I love my diplomacy, I’m a terrible PVPer and can’t beat a starflea in a battleship. I died to a stork while I was in a blarghest. That’s how bad I am. The fact remains that there are some people you simply cannot reason with and though we may love our allies we cannot have them always online at every station all the time. Our own Zoner defence ships make sense inRP. It’s been twenty years or so since we got the big wake-up kick. Someone who didn’t care about diplomacy came and pewpewpew’d Freeport 7. So we learned to defend ourselves. We built guns and ships to mount them on to prevent something like this from ever happening again. At least not whilst we drew breath.
This thing that you are trying to do. Please do not do this thing.