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As much as some people would like to derail this discussion off into the issue of trust, my objections have nothing whatsoever to do with trust. But let's go down the trust road just a little further first to see where it leads.
Should faction leaders have control over battleship purchases because they can harm smaller ships?
Should faction leaders have control over cruiser purchases because they can harm smaller ships?
Should faction leaders have control over gunboat purchases because they can harm smaller ships?
Should faction leaders have control over bomber purchases because they can harm smaller ships?
Should faction leaders have control over who logs onto the server with a password?
Once you say that answering no to the first question makes that person distrustful, then the same holds true for answering no to the rest also. Would we all have to be labeled as distrustful if we didn't want faction leaders having control over who logs onto the server with a password? After all, that is the ULTIMATE preventive measure against abusers, isn't it? Of course not. This isn't about who can or cannot be trusted at all.
But if it was about trust, then why do so many people automatically distrust anyone who wants to buy a battleship? Why are those people the immediate target of so much distrust that they have to be examined, tested, evaluated, and regulated before they spend the credits that they just spent dozens or hundreds of hours earning? The accusation of distrust is a knife that cuts both ways, and the fact is that this proposal is founded on a premise of distrust at its core : a distrust of anyone who wants to buy a battleship who isn't in a player faction.
But throwing the issue of trust and distrust around is really just a slightly modified version of the classic ad hominem argument. In this case it is implicit rather than explicit. If you disagree with giving faction leaders control over battleship purchases, then your motives are labeled as distrustful, and the necessary implication is that you are a suspicious, paranoid driven nut whose opinion should therefore be ignored. Voila! If you can't defeat somebody's arguments, then you make them look either evil or foolish, because nobody wants to agree with evil fools.
But fortunately for me, I've been around the debate block more than a few times and I don't fall for such cheap tactics.
I trust myself implicitly. I trust my second in command in the Lane Hackers implicitly. I still do not want either myself as a faction leader or my faction involved in regulating other people's ship purchases. Doing so is fundamentally unjust to them, and unjust to our faction.
What this has come down to from the beginning, for me, is the connection between two competing needs : effectiveness and freedom. We need a server that has effective safeguards in place to create a fun and safe gaming experience. We also need to protect player freedoms as much as possible. The test of any policy regarding control or power is whether or not it produces substantially better results than the absence of the policy and an assessment of the degree to which it needfully or needlessly restricts player freedoms.
Both before and after this proposal there is only one thing that removes a problematic battleship : Admin intervention. Restricting the freedoms of people who have done nothing wrong does not assist in that intervention.
If there are problematic battleships that ought to be removed, then Admins can remove the ship or the player, and they don't need to sit around waiting for permission or a nudge from any faction leader in order to do so. They also do not require a new bureaucracy in order to accomplish that. A new bureaucracy that imposes restrictions on the front end adds nothing that makes identifying problem behavior easier ( a rule violation report is a rule violation report is a rule violation report ), it needlessly restricts people who have done and are doing nothing wrong, and it criminalizes a simple ship purchase. Turning ship buyers into sanctionable criminals is an absurd way to punish whatever behavior is regarded as bad enough to take a ship away.
We should punish bad behavior, but there is no legitimate justification for imposing further controls on people who have done nothing wrong. The Admins only need two things to intervene : a name and evidence. Restricting everyone's freedoms does not provide either one of them. With or without this policy, the person with a name and evidence has to do exactly the same thing in exactly the same way : report it to the Admins. So the policy contributes nothing of value, and takes away freedoms.
But let's step back from this specific issue, now. A few months ago I started a thread about the rules and asked for specific, positive measures that could improve Discovery. I received precisely zero answers from any of you.
For the past year every Administrative response to problems has been to micromanage with more rules, restrict more freedoms, exercise more control, and wield more power. What's the result?
Is this community more harmonious than it was a year ago?
Is it more cooperative?
Are there fewer problems?
Is it more fun?
Just take a look around the forums and it's easy to see that the answer to those questions are no, no, no, and no.
It's time for all of us to wake up, myself included.
We need to stop with the micromanagement. We need to stop with the control scheming. We need to stop with concocting some new rule for every occasion that miffs us. We need to stop fooling ourselves with this illusion that just one more rule, just one more restriction, just one more line in an ID, just one more phony "power" which amounts to nothing but an excuse to punish normal behavior is going to solve any problem. They haven't yet, and they won't. The more rules, restrictions, and controls that we add, the worse things get. The effects have been detrimental, and proposals like this have been a large part of the cause.
What we need to do is not control each other more, we need to actually Lead, with a capital L.
That means Admins.
That means faction leaders.
That means faction members.
And that means YOU.
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