While it's not reasonable for either of us to expect the other to adopt the our opinions. Amicable discussion of those differences is useful for avoiding misunderstandings.
This is why i'm always very weary into entering that kind of discussions OOCly, with our RL eyes.
Firstly it often leads to drama as it is most of the time the case when players start talking politics - which will not happen with you fortunately, and maybe not with me either, but I recently surprised myself to tell gtfo to an internet friend that eventually pissed me off enough with his shitty bigoted and racist politics RL so... Yeah, I am still surprised how nice it feels now that i do not have to deal with that everyday. It was really unnerving over the time.
Secondly, it starts to thread on PF interpretation. We already have a lot of PF interpretations that conflict with each other in the 'community', and while I have always been a huge proponent of people working them out between themselves to find good ways to fix that... Well, I got jaded eventually (recently actually) because people do not give 2 fucks about it and prefer to continue bickering and ignoring each other in a game where you obviously can't ignore each other. So much for rationalism.
So yes, I think it should be good for players to get to a mutual OOC understanding on interpretations differing widely because of RL political leanings or other things. The issue is even bigger with the strong emotional subject of religion which is directly brought ingame by the Amarr lore. I have difficulties to deal with atheist crusaders as much as I have difficulties to deal with religious apologists for which the 'RP' reeks of OOC bleedovers all over the place.
Maybe i'm being a coward and fleeing it now. Maybe we should discuss it like we should, but i'm afraid of the result now.
While none of the empires are really good or bad guys, if you were to read all the lore and rate rate them 'bad to good' using a metric of who used violence and coersion to force themselves on others you'd have a strong case for rating the empires as follows: Gallente Federation -> Amarr Empire -> Minmatar Republic -> Caldari State.
Seeing as you mention none of the factions in New Eden being wholly good or bad, why bother with the metric? Why do we - as players - need to know we are fighting for the "good guys" surely all that is needed is for our characters to believe that they are fighting for the "good guys"?
To my mind attempts to even place any of the factions in New Eden on a scale of good to bad for a player is doomed to fail as CCP hasn't provided us with anywhere near enough information to accurately assess the merits of the societies in New Eden. This lack of information however isn't a hindrance to our characters as they exist in the world, so we can safely write them as saying this is evil or this is not, etc.
Yes, but you wouldn't believe the actual amount of RPers that really believe they are playing one of the good guys, or one of the bad guys (those ones often turn into outright mustache twirling villains). The guys that believe that Amarr orthodoxy = space Catholicism and will start quoting at you actual passages from the RL bible as part of amarrian scripture. No joke.
They just see it differently, and think that they are playing in some kind of Star Wars setting, with the good guys (and their bad sides) and the bad guys (and their good sides).
