The current server event, Purple Rain, brought up a lot of interesting dilemmas in how the Discovery works. Factions are very interesting in discovery. Like most clans in various videogames, they each have certain visions and slants, made different further by various IDs (the card you carry ingame), and IFFs (the text over an ID). For OFs (official factions) especially, but dedicated UFs (unofficial factions) are an equally influential example of this.
I, privately, as a player, detached from anything I've volunteered as mod content or done as an OFL (official faction leader), have had experiences with Auxesia, and Auxesia's HQ, which causes me to have certain opinions. Contentious differences of playstyle, direction, and understanding of the vision of the group which caused it to not work out for me. It's left disagreements hanging for a while. These are shared by the HC of the group. Does that bias my thinking? Certainly, it does. That's actually an acceptable response. But it's how we use that response - and how that response is percieved, that matters.
It is the nature of our alternate visions of an RP environment running into one another that we have differences of opinion. Faction leaders especially are faced with the very difficult, but rewarding, problem of both being administrative team leaders for their players, being held personally accountable for every decision their members take, and having to contrast that with being as permissive and encouraging to their members as possible - by creating oppertunities for them to butt heads with other groups in a constructive way - PVP (player verses player combat), server and unofficial events, ingame text-based roleplay, multi-person economy activities, and others. This leads us to both reflect, and encourage, certain attitudes in our communities, intentionally or not. All of our communities need one-another. We'd have nothing to do without the other groups.
It's okay to log Auxesia because you really want to kill Unioners. Unioners annoy you and that's okay. This generates activity and roleplay. It's okay to be happy, and it's okay to be frustrated.
It's okay to log Unioners because you really want to kill Auxesia. Auxesia annoys you and that's okay. This generates activity and roleplay. It's okay to be happy, and it's okay to be frustrated.
That doesn't mean there's a grand conspiracy afoot. That doesn't mean that members, new and old, should be told to distrust other people based upon one experience or another. Because that creates groupthink, which then creates tribalism. When that tribe gets big enough, another tribe will rise to counter it. Healthily controlled, that can be a great creator of activity. Unhealthily controlled, it ruins the fun of people playing the game.
It doesn't mean one faction wants to destroy the other. That rarely happens. People who genuinely to troll on the internet usually get caught in the act and either reported, or their immediate peer group does something about it, anyway.
We should make a difference between game mechanics and abuse of game mechanics. It's hard to draw that line. Is self-nuking to travel to a home base, thus skipping all possible interactions along the way, gameplay abuse? Is holding up a ship being scanned so people who can shoot them can arrive on another ID, abuse? Is not attacking a enemy transport outside of their ZOI, but disrupting them or shooting out lanes so backup can arrive whilst they don't have clear self-defence rights, abuse? Is bringing missile fighters to kill an enemy ace who could theoretically prevent ships from being able to dock without triggering the deathtimer depending on their location, even if the ace can't kill them himself, abuse? How do we prove people are logging to hunt people, or to avoid encounters, rather than flying their ships around and taking that dynamic risk? How can you tell if a faction is behaving one way or another because of Oorp bias, or a genuine InRp shift? It's not easy. Some of this is very difficult to prove. Yet it's what the community spends a lot of time talking about when it's frustrated.
We sometimes forget that, when another group acts in a way we disagree with, that because we ascribe our sense of fun into figuring out how things 'should' happen, how they 'do' happen we ascribe to negative forces.
Now I've done some of these things I've mentioned above, repeatedly. So have, certainly, the people who will see this post, and their first response be to write 'I know you are, but what am I', 'no u', etc, in whichever way they'd like to spin that.
Now there's also a counter-response to that. Reasonable players, who see what others are calling 'drama', and feel encouraged to stay away from it, because they don't want to be involved in negative emotion and unpleasantness in a game that people play in their free time after work, college, school, friends, and family. This causes very minor subjects to seem *huge*. This can be made worse by the nature of the outlets we use to communicate. Areas like discord servers, where if two people say X thing or Y entity is bad, everyone sees that in the server. They're either encouraged to turn off, or they start to agree, or they're disgusted and broadcast that message to someone else, who then sees it, and goes "Ugh, that person has horrible opinions about people, they must be terrible". This can ruin the fun of completely unrelated people to the original problem.
Competitiveness is a quite addictive emotion, and it's the basis of all games with some degree of risk-reward. It's important to note that the competetiveness itself is not what we enjoy and makes us come back to discovery - it's the gameplay and the roleplay. It's generally best to assume that applies to everyone.
Remember, we create the environment we want to see. We're not all perfect at it - I'm not - I bet, if you're honest with yourself, you're not either. But we're all very good at certain particular things - there's always something that we enjoy, and tune in for, or we wouldn't be here.
So even if you dislike how something is to the point where you're happy to rally your friends to shoot at and plot how best to counter it, either through elaborate roleplay or any of the other interpersonal interaction tools we have at our disposal, remember that you wouldn't have this fun opportunity for interaction without the other side doing exactly the same thing to you.
This has been a very fun week and a half of discovery. All groups, factions, and even individual characters have the potential to create situations like this. Go out there, compete, and don't follow the crowd, follow a team, instead. Or create one. Don't listen to anybody who says that what you're doing is silly if you're staying within the boundaries of the rules and the rough idea of the world. You are all excellent players, no matter what concept of the mod you bat for. It's important to realise that there isn't a set pool of fun that is sliced up and divided between players, and that we can all have fun, trying to find ways to rise above the situations created by each other.
TL-DR: Just enjoy the game, tell haters laterz.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
//we are not presents in the game master's head, they do what they want, us we are obliged to follow and accept! (keep in mind, we are in general discussion)
now it seems to have changed a bit, they seems to hear us more
Rheinland V Liberty, not Rheinland V "Kusari why did this happen everyone wants to know" When we gonna have another rheinland liberty war, that's what everyone wants to know. Auxesia V Unioner is great and all, personal bias and hatreds aside. But everyone would much rather see turtles and overlords slamming into eachother in hudson and bering. would generate genuinely fun activity and roleplay, Give harmony something to do, and give bering an actual reason to be a royal blood zone other than someone shot a nemp. As we saw with the "event" this morning, everyone loves to beat the crap out of eachother for no particular reason. Let's just accept that everyone sucks, and slam our indie caps into their very punchable faces. Then after we're done with that, we go back to being a community that doesn't want to tear itself apart because someone said something that someone else didn't like.
On the topic of Rheinland V Liberty, anyone remember getting torn a new one by the endless swarms of Fafnirs? Good times.