Next time someone is worried about setting a precedent, I'd ask that you try to contact the potential setter of this precedent. It may be, as in this case, that you're scaring the shit out of people about an illusion of some sort. Potentially, scrappy people who will hound others for a very long time.
I don't think anyone needs that.
For the record, Lillith and I are cool. We talked, there is to be no war, a concordance has been achieved interpersonally.
On the matter of permabans and permamutes and whatever else, we'd just finished a five-hour event, and some of us got very little sleep. Give us latitude.
Soter put those in, by the by, and was scolded by everyone for it. He's pretty short on rest too, what with being the leader of a massive group of players right now.
For the record, they were reversed by me as soon as I learned about them, so there's nothing that came anywhere near setting a solid precedent.
Some things about the Summit certain people, newer ones for example (looking at you, Casi) may not know:
-The (remarkably few) restrictions in the operation of the conference taking place now were designed to welcome, on an out of character level, players representing the enemy. This is why we keep telling people not to post intel or sensitive information in Summit just now. Fuck, I'm moving this point up to the top and reposting it down below later.
-It was created by Gaven Lok'ri, as I understand it, back in the mists of time. Responsibility for it was formally the purview of his alt who was stuck in a corp called the CRC auxiliary. There are some folks in that corp. They're all inactive. They used to be listed as channel mods.
-A while back, I said to Gaven, "Hey, can I do some things with this channel?" He said, "Okay, if I like your plans." I won't go into that too much here, but he handed over mod rights; I co-opted nothing. I currently have some rather unreasonable people talking shit to me about how I've stolen op rights for OOC, too, which is wrong and insulting enough, thank you.
-These plans are somewhat public. Contact me ingame if you want to discuss them, for now.
-The in-character rationale for the shift in control, which to Gaven's credit WAS all done in-character, was that the CRC auxiliary underwent a corporate takeover when the ISD CRC was disbanded by CCP. This was mostly my idea; I don't like players making ISD-themed corps because I find it campy and a possible source of alleged EULA violations.
-Further, the corporation that handled the takeover is one Ashar KorAzor owns all the stock for. As such, the summit IS owned by my main in-character. This generally doesn't affect OOC use of it, but she does talk some shit in there from time to time about it IC, mostly to say 'God, I hate spammers' and 'if you don't let that unpopular person I have not seen fit to ban speak their mind, I will mute you, because you are disrupting their use of the channel.'
-This reflects the actual rules of channel use. Spammers and users that disrupt roleplay are banned and/or muted, usually not permanently. And if you, say, make fun of a recently dead player or something I might ban you. It's happened before.
-Right now, Revan Neferis is on the ban list for a variety of reasons. If you ask nicely, I can tell you why, but basically, lolnazis.
-The channel's first incarnation as a setting, as far as I know, was a big room something like a lecture hall. People spoke there for formal diplomatic presentations and various capsuleer affairs. Some events were arranged there. Over time, it has somewhat drifted away from that, but not really very far in the eyes of its founder.
-I changed the channel description to reflect this drift quite a long time ago. That's probably why the shift to a conference room kinda setting is so new and startling to some - it is a nod to a very old tradition.
-In preparing for this event, I asked the leadership of the foremost groups from active factions as well as a hodgepodge of people their opinion on it and whether I should go forward with it; whether it was a good idea. The groups included the Heiian society, EM and affiliates, Graelyn and his Amarr Confido (however they're spelling it now), any Gallente I could find, Veto and certain other pirate interests, and some Angels supporters. The total number of individuals that knew about this, for DAYS, and had a lot of chances to protest out of character is well over fifty. They didn't.
-In reference to current events, I am not keeping Sansha players from speaking, interacting, or expressing political leanings - unless they get disruptive. Some have been; they're still using it today. Literally, today. This is because there ain't been no permanent muting or banning. Sheesh.
-Less Sansha have been muted (none were banned by me, under my authority, or at my asking, though I think a ban was reversed, thanks, Soter ><) than either non-roleplayers disrupting the event (had a few recruitment spammers, had some jackholes talking shit as expected) OR people without sansha affilation being disruptive loudmouths (many tempmutes were handed out to keep discussion on track).
-The (remarkably few) restrictions in the operation of the conference taking place now were designed to welcome, on an out of character level, players representing the enemy. This is why we keep telling people not to post intel or sensitive information in Summit just now.
-A further misconception is that, again, players of a certain faction are somehow being barred from interacting with others. That one's all you, Lillith. There's endless channels out there that would well serve your purpose, both more heavily populated and more active than the Summit. And being muted for ten minutes at a time really hasn't affected anything in terms of engaging individual players; you can still mail anyone you see talking in there in-character. You can still invite them to private conversations. You can do a number of things because you see people in the channel without speaking to them.
-But I guess that's not something the muted parties got to think about much, being that they were only muted, by me, for a few minutes if at all - if they were muted for roleplaying. I don't think the spammers and smacktalkers were doing anything relevant to roleplay, myself. We could ask them if you like, though :P
-After the conference is over, the Summit will go back to its previous functions and methods of operation.
Finally.
-Almost anyone can come to me and ask to hold an event in the Summit. Frankly, it's boring for the twenty hours out of the day I'm logged in, in my opinion. That doesn't mean I'm going to intentionally alter it to spice things up, but...if what I've done has essentially only added to the active population, I don't think that's adversely affected its capacity as a neutral ground in future.
Which, as my character has said in character, (which she can say after a long, sustained interest in the Nation), has all been the plan the whole time.
Frankly, I've almost never seen anything that compares to the sheer friendliness Ashar's showing these people-borg-things in-character, here.
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Topic: A trend and a discussion. (Read 19414 times)