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[Jakiin]

We in the RP community have, as a necessity, rarely shirked from using headcanon. There are many examples of this, such as Caldari honorific -Haani: Entirely unsupported by PF, it is still accepted as part of the State's culture by most and used by a sizable portion of Caldari RPers. Ideas such as these, if accepted by the community at large, do an excellent job of increasing the depth and thus immersion of New Eden's 'backstory'. But not all such ideas, such claims, are used for benign purposes.

It isn't at all uncommon on the IGS, or indeed any In Character forum for any MMO, for someone to start a thread claiming X, Y, or Z about some faction's alleged misconduct without any evidence. Similar threads in this vein include topics that attribute certain attributes to certain in-game races or cultures based on 'empirical evidence' that is never presented because it of course does not exist, and furthermore has no canon backing.

The difference between these two sorts of claims is more than just politeness, it's effect. If you as a Caldari want to say that popped collars are all the rage in State fashion, then the only kind of people who will care are other Caldari RPers. They will consider your claim, and make the decision based on whether they think the Caldari liking popped collars would be interesting. However, if you as a Caldari want to claim that the Gallente like to sodomize chipmunks, then it becomes political.

Politics is a huge part of EVE, it is in fact the game's primary draw: Sure other games might have more involved combat or more varied environments, but in EVE more than perhaps any other MMORPG you can build an empire. Or, if you so choose, support one. And an unfortunate inevitability of politics is a very Us vs. Them mindset. This mindset means that when you say the Gallente like to sodomize chipmunks, it won't just be the Gallente RPers with an interest in it: It will be the Caldari and Amarr who have a vested interest in tarnishing the Gallente reputation, it will be the Minmatar who have a vested interest in defending their allies (And making the Amarr look stupid). What results is not a suggestion on how to expand the Gallente background, but an attack from one side to another.

But is this necessarily a bad thing? As I said, politics and factionalism in general is one of the game's core attractions. You could certainly argue that mudslinging for the sake of mudslinging is a part of the community's culture, and that there is no practical difference between using fiction made by CCP and fiction made by the players.

Personally, I'm against making things up to serve a purpose, particularly when there's already so many 'true' things to rant on about. I am also as a general rule against mudslinging, seeing as two sides repeating their incompatible dogma over and over again loses its appeal quickly. But I'm curious if there's anyone who would agree with the above argument, or who would have other arguments in favour of these politically motivated claims.

[Lyn Farel]

If some players want their characters bigoted in a way it just ends up in basic mudslinging, I make sure that my character takes them as they are : stupid bigots (vs clever bigots, who are not the same at all). I just consider them part of the universe as much as anyone else.

Which annoys me is not IC stupidity or bigotry, its OOC shit sugarcoated with IC stuff.

[Mizhara]

There's very little in Eve RP that necessitates any kind of Fiction Invention that affects anyone but your own character. PF deals with the big stuff, setting up the generalized ideas and impressions of the various nations, factions and so on. We get to invent shit on a personal or at least local level where others of the same faction (or enemies of the faction) gets to invent their own shit on their own local level. "My town were fifty percent slaves." said by a Gallente is actually plausible since there's bound to be backwater planets where they've abandoned all 'standard' Federation politics and laws, but no one can sit down and make a sweeping statement about an entire faction unless it's already laid out in PF.

I do like that popped collars and sodomized chipmunks get a fairly equal place in the argument though. I've often felt that popped collars get too much of a bad rap, y'see.

[BloodBird]

Headcanon is not the only areas where a 'thing' about a race or faction or anything becomes popular, regardless of how 'true' or 'accurate' it is; this happen in established fiction as well, especially established fiction that is not quite as established, or clear.

I will leave you all with a great example; The so-called Caldari Prime "genocide". Pretty much my number one biggest pet-peeve next after IC-piracy, so I'm sure I've beaten the topic to death elsewhere then ripped of a limb and beaten the corpse a bit more for the hell of it. You all likely know what I'm talking about so I'll leave this here for now.

[Jakiin]

There's very little in Eve RP that necessitates any kind of Fiction Invention that affects anyone but your own character. PF deals with the big stuff, setting up the generalized ideas and impressions of the various nations, factions and so on. We get to invent shit on a personal or at least local level where others of the same faction (or enemies of the faction) gets to invent their own shit on their own local level. "My town were fifty percent slaves." said by a Gallente is actually plausible since there's bound to be backwater planets where they've abandoned all 'standard' Federation politics and laws, but no one can sit down and make a sweeping statement about an entire faction unless it's already laid out in PF.

I do like that popped collars and sodomized chipmunks get a fairly equal place in the argument though. I've often felt that popped collars get too much of a bad rap, y'see.

While there is some limited plausibility in unverified claims at a local level, I think that extreme claims tend to be a bit less valid. A perfect example would be the hypothetical you provided: Lowsec or not, slaves are still illegal Federation-wide, which means that abandoning that 'standard value' would be going against federal law. It is, in fact, about as plausible as Puerto Rico getting away with legalizing slavery or denying women the right to vote because it is a 'backwater' part of the United States.

[Mizhara]

Highly unlikely and not something I'd acknowledge IC, yes... but still a possibility. Since it's just a 'local' thing, I can just wave it away as irrelevant, non-existent or otherwise not part of my Eve experience. People do these things all the time, with Rogue Drones as one example. It's much easier to just go "yeah, whatever... you are a) crazy b) some insane statistical outlier c) no matter what, you're NOT representative of your faction" than trying to argue the stuff IC.

My main point is that you just can't invent something affecting an entire faction, because inevitably that means you're trampling roughshod over someone else's RP without anything to back it up.

[Jakiin]

Highly unlikely and not something I'd acknowledge IC, yes... but still a possibility. Since it's just a 'local' thing, I can just wave it away as irrelevant, non-existent or otherwise not part of my Eve experience. People do these things all the time, with Rogue Drones as one example. It's much easier to just go "yeah, whatever... you are a) crazy b) some insane statistical outlier c) no matter what, you're NOT representative of your faction" than trying to argue the stuff IC.

My main point is that you just can't invent something affecting an entire faction, because inevitably that means you're trampling roughshod over someone else's RP without anything to back it up.

Fair and true, respectively.

[Kybernetes Moros]

Making events / characters / ideas up to serve a purpose is something I hate to see; it's been incredibly rare, in my experience, that it amounts to anything beyond "oh, I dislike the faction, let's generate the most suitable strawman". It interferes with the RP of others, often without the input of anyone else, without drawing from existing PF -- if there is good PF evidence for the events being constructed, however, it changes the situation a bit. I dislike people making characters who are incapable of seeing good sides to their IC enemies (it's boring to watch the "no u" that ensues all too often) but at the very least it has some substance in canon.

Fortunately, EVE offers an excellent opportunity to ignore the worst of these inventions as the ravings of a madman.

[Vikarion]

I will leave you all with a great example; The so-called Caldari Prime "genocide". Pretty much my number one biggest pet-peeve next after IC-piracy, so I'm sure I've beaten the topic to death elsewhere then ripped of a limb and beaten the corpse a bit more for the hell of it. You all likely know what I'm talking about so I'll leave this here for now.

That actually is fairly well-supported by canon. It's probably not at Final Solution levels, but it's frequently referenced and a Chronicle (The Science of Never Again) is actually devoted in part to it. In that Chronicle, it references the orbital bombardment of civilian cities. In The Early Days, it reveals that the Caldari who survived did so by hiding in cities and forests. Now - and I hate to use a real-world analogy here, but one has to at some point - let us take the example of the Khmer Rouge. What they did - destroying urban populations and driving the survivors out into the countryside - is commonly considered a genocide. However, their program of agrarian communism was less destructive to native populations (they did desire that some would survive, after all) than orbital bombardment of civilian populations would be.

Again, this isn't to say that a fictional universe is in any way comparable to the suffering of real persons. But if you want to portray, in art, certain events, one must compare the created to the known at some point.

As for the original point, I'm very political IC, and I don't think its possible to be truly unbiased OOC. Nonetheless, I think that what we RP should be either obtained directly from canon, or inferred from it. I'm not fond of the concept of a character flying without a capsule, for example, or being a telepath (at least until TEA - darn you to heck, TonyG  ). Within those bounds, however, anything goes. Heck, I've often said that I wouldn't be unhappy if the Federation was removed as an RP entity from the game.

Eve, in my opinion, would lose its zest, its flavor, if it were to lose that edge of nastiness and cruel competition that has characterized it for so long.

[Rodj Blake]

The thing is, these claims invariably make the person doing the claiming look good.

Now, in some games that might not be a problem, but Eve is a game where reputation matters and I for one happen to think that reputation should only count when its been earned and not made up.

So if you go around telling people that you're the head of the Federal Navy, or on the board of one of the PF Caldari megacorps, or the leader of one of the PF Amarrian families, you should have something to back that claim up with.

[Bastian Valoron]

Is someone here saying that our characters shouldn't be lying or making up false claims? Does PF indicate somewhere that this perfectly normal mode of human behaviour is missing from New Eden?

I mean, there exists people in RL who do this a lot, we have to deal with it and it adds a certain edge to the character of the person making the claims. It's not like we have to believe everything someone says, but we can, if we think that for some particular reason our characters would be inclined to believe in the claim.

[BloodBird]

My problem with the Caldari Prime bombardment is not it's documentation, but somewhat lack of it. This is likely intentional to create argument, but no-one seem interested in arguing anything. Instead, pro-Caldari sources claim the Fed wanted to exterminate the Caldari entirely (it fits with their anti-fed agenda) while the counter-arguments, if they can be called that, devolve into excuses for the deed. The PF info given to us give no clear answer anywhere to what exactly the over-arching goal of the Fed was at the time - at least two scenarios can be argued with equally little evidence to back them up, but only one is ever argued and defended against by any opposition.

This has created the PLAYER CREATED fiction of Caldari Prime as an intentional genocide attempt, and that is not accurate. PF states the Fed set invasion forces down on the planet, that the orbital bombardment was systematic (They aimed at specific areas, this could be anything), that Caldari resistance was waning rapidly and that it would only be a matter of time before the Fed had complete CONTROL of the planet. The chronicle you mention even gave a number of fatalities to the bombings - I did not recall that there ever were a number mentioned - "hundreds of thousands". I was under the impression they lost millions out of who knows how many billions in the bombings. It also claims that the blockade/bombings went on for "far to long" - while this statement don't offer an accurate or specific period, they apparently had the time to bomb the world for a long time. Either their aim was sloppy or they never tried to hit as many people as possible to begin with, or they may even have tried to avoid hitting their own troops on the ground.

In short, there is plenty of "evidence" to support the argument that the only thing the fed wanted was control of the planet, bombing away any resistance, but this practically never happen; by now the repeated argument that a mass-extermination of the Caldari was the only goal has been repeated so many times whenever it is bough up, that people seem to take it as fact, even if the "evidence" can point either way.

Another interesting, minor point, is the casualties mentioned in the relevant chronicles; if the State lost hundreds of thousands of civilians, then they lost anything between 200 k to 900 k in the bombardment. That's pretty bad, but in the terrorist hit on Nouvelle Rouvenor it's said they lost over half a million. That's 500 001 to anything under a million people dead, already rivaling the Caldari Prime bombings. Add to that the carrier insertion by Tovil Toba and the "roughly 2 million" he killed and the civilian losses is anything from 200 k to 900 k for the State vs roughly 2.5 million for the Fed. If players were to bitch IC abut who killed the most civilians or who were the nastiest mass-murderers, Federals would have a grimmer number to fall back to.

Anyhow, in short; My point is, while it's not an entirely "unbacked claim" that the Fed tried to commit genocide on the Caldari, it's only one of at least 2 different explanations, but due to popular repeat it's argued as solid fact and treated as such by allot of players. This shoe-horning of PF to fit one group's agenda has by now been treated as canonized fact and become acceptable player fiction.

And that makes me somewhat unhappy because the chance for debate or argument on the topic is nearly removed in favor of either bitching about the past evils of the fed, or trying to play it down as a form of damage control or out-right agreement that it happened.

As for Bastian's "why can't people lie about it?" - Well they can, and they do. My problem is the lack of counter arguments in this case. One side lies or makes a claim - the other buys it, agrees with it, or just treats the opposing opinion as indisputable fact.

[Jakiin]

Is someone here saying that our characters shouldn't be lying or making up false claims? Does PF indicate somewhere that this perfectly normal mode of human behaviour is missing from New Eden?

I mean, there exists people in RL who do this a lot, we have to deal with it and it adds a certain edge to the character of the person making the claims. It's not like we have to believe everything someone says, but we can, if we think that for some particular reason our characters would be inclined to believe in the claim.

Oh no, characters can lie and spread delusions: I don't think (And I certainly hope against)  any Amarrian RPers see their characters' view on slavery as anything more sympathetic than 'well intentioned but misguided' at best. And of course as anyone who has been the public face of a corporation will tell you, bare-faced lies come with the job.

But I doubt that when Hilato Talkori's player was writing about provist crimes he was thinking "Oh Hilato, you devious little liar you!" And why should I give him that benefit of the doubt? He never presented it other than a straight accusation, without any OOC wink-and-nudge that he is IC lying. The reality is that without any indication otherwise, without any OOC declarations we know of, and without any precedence of this being a known but repeated lie/delusion amongst certain factions, there is no reason to think that his thread is anything but yet another attempt to make the 'other side' worse. And to the surprise of no one, we have several characters (Some of whom are, and are played by, intelligent, respectable people) stepping in and throwing their support behind this man and his campaign against the provists, not because his campaign is based on anything so irrelevant as evidence, but because they are also enemies with the provists. So more mud is thrown, the lines in the sand that have long since been dug to the depth of ditches get a little closer to their dream of being full-fledged canyons, and I can't help but wonder what vote I missed where we all decided this was fun.

Stuff

Also, this. As someone who's only ever RP's on the Caldari/Amarr side of the line, I never read the Caldari Prime bombing as anything more than a heavy-handed attempt at regaining control by systematically destroying the Caldari infrastructure. If some others read it as being an attempt at genocide, then that's also fine, but universal acceptance of this theory seems a bit off...

Except of course for the fact that it, like the "We're doing it for their souls!" excuse of the Amarr, is one of the few things they have to make CCP's claim of this being a 'no good guys, no bad guys' universe slightly less laughable. But that's for another thread.

[Matariki Rain]

[....] I can't help but wonder what vote I missed where we all decided this was fun.

In general, I avoid IGS because I find it neither fun nor useful. People play EVE differently, though, and for some IGS seems to be worthwhile or even "the place where you do RP".

[Lyn Farel]

Is someone here saying that our characters shouldn't be lying or making up false claims? Does PF indicate somewhere that this perfectly normal mode of human behaviour is missing from New Eden?

I mean, there exists people in RL who do this a lot, we have to deal with it and it adds a certain edge to the character of the person making the claims. It's not like we have to believe everything someone says, but we can, if we think that for some particular reason our characters would be inclined to believe in the claim.

This.

People confuse too much IC with OOC sometimes.

Which brings me to :

Making events / characters / ideas up to serve a purpose is something I hate to see; it's been incredibly rare, in my experience, that it amounts to anything beyond "oh, I dislike the faction, let's generate the most suitable strawman". It interferes with the RP of others, often without the input of anyone else, without drawing from existing PF -- if there is good PF evidence for the events being constructed, however, it changes the situation a bit. I dislike people making characters who are incapable of seeing good sides to their IC enemies (it's boring to watch the "no u" that ensues all too often) but at the very least it has some substance in canon.

Fortunately, EVE offers an excellent opportunity to ignore the worst of these inventions as the ravings of a madman.

I think it would be more accurate to say that "I dislike players who are incapable of seeing good sides to their IC enemies and then creating characters". Or at least, that is what I do think myself. Take Rodj for example, tell me if I am wrong but I highly doubt that he believes the exact same thing than his character, and still, his character is kindof a bigoted Amarrian. It is pleasant to play with him because of this. If the player is conscious of that difference, it gives depth to the character himself. When I read some other people it just sounds like that is just the player that is talking. The character is paperthin and almost non existing (and looking like a ludicrous cliché). Of course I am not going to point fingers at anyone (be them there or not) as I do not want to tell a few people that they are doing it wrong imo, but I can tell Rodj that he is doing it right, right.. ? 

It becomes even more annoying when these people start to really care about their personal political views on the eve world so much that it is damn easy to tell when it is the player that is speaking, and more, that it gets quite obvious that the player himself is implying to you, the other player, and not even your character, that you are doing it wrong and that your understanding of the PF is just shit.


OOC bigotry sugarcoated with IC, as I said above.


Edit : this also goes pair with so called RPers RPing not for the sake of RPing, but to win the argument. A lot of people are just there (especially on the IGS) in the same kind of testosterone contest that is so ingrained in Eve everywhere where people think they are proving something - or I don't know what exactly - by winning the argument by whatever mean necessary. Who cares after all ? That is the character that may be losing the argument, not the player, so who the hell cares ? It might actually bring interesting cases where a character might change his/her mind or suddenly have a lot of doubts, or whatever.