Now I have to wade through Lae's reciprocal textwall, as is expected.
Let this be a lesson to ye, who would textwall - the mason of textwalls will only find textwalls in life.
A quick foreword -
Insofar as I am concerned, the bloc is a structure before it is a group, Laerise, and I analyze it as a structure devoid of the qualities lent to it by whoever made up the group at the time unless I include a summary of germane behavioral patterns from the whole of its existence in my time in the game.
If you had thought I was criticizing the group, you thought wrong; if you had sought to defend the group, you did wrong by my argument.
With that in mind, let's just wade the fuck back in, hey?
Yep, I guess I did. *ahem* NO ONE HAS THE PROWESS TO FACE TANKRED IN BATTLE
TANKRED DEMANDS A DUEL. TANKRED IS IN THIS WAR FOR THE BITCHES.
I suggest that we split this argument into a new thread.
Fuck that. Been done.
There's just so much individuality that fits into a team Ashar.
And so little that fits into gridlock.
I obviously won't comment on my predecessors, but I consider myself fair, sometimes even exceedingly and stupidly fair.
Being asked to conform to descisions of your leaders is nothing I see as particularly back breaking.
Actually it's something I do in my every-day-real-life quite a lot, its called having a job.
The only people you're asked not to speak to in executing your job are parties you're precluded from sharing protected information with.
The people your predecessors - and likely yourself - have been pushed not to interact with, whether by rulesets and directives or by simple cultural accretion, are like potential new talent for your employer's company.
It's
a-may-zin what's goin' on, here in this analogy.
Respectively, if you don't like your employer, just look for another one that suits you better or go independant.
For example, if I think my employer has a monopoly on a public good, I might independantly work to break it? If my employer, or a potential employer, has demonstrated less-than-satisfactory stewardship of a central resource, I might try to put the rights of ownership to said resource back in the hands of a larger variety of parties?
You're defending the bloc as the rightful leader of the pack, here. I would suggest you cease to backpedal if that's your position.
There are two roads you can go in this regard, in my eve-experience.
One is that you conform to anyones wishes and, over time, become dilluted into something else, I'll cite AM as a prime example here.
The other is to keep a hold to a strong central ideology and stick with it, even if it rubs some people the wrong way once every so often.
You can, of course, prove me wrong :) and I'd actually appreciate it to see a new, working, solution to this problem - so far I didn't see anything coming from you or OBSA for that matter though, again, if I'm wrong just give me an example.
I suppose it's not enough of a testament to my involvement in seeking new play-styles that I have been embracing experimentation and innovation at every single level of the structure of roleplay, especially Amarr roleplay, for nigh on three and a half years, on every forum I've posted on, both in-character and out.
However, your statement that one must either give a lot of things or very few things over to the whims of the group at large does not strike me as germane, nor as terribly weighty, in the question of how one structures behavioral rules and reward systems. I have, however, already answered; I have suggested that
strong institutionalization is the untested option for creating truly useful codes of organizational conduct.Yeah, I can imagine internal stuff is hard to see from the wrong side of the walls of privacy, but I assure you, there are more story tellers in PIE than there are captains+admirals. ;)
And quite a lot of them are carving out their little, personal experience as we speak
Here is your fiddle, Nero.
Go unto the forum in the city and play your song; after all has burnt but the Gemonian stairs, I suggest you do the traditional thing.
(And they say
HE'S dramatic.)
No, most of our RP does not bring about world changing moments, oh my.
You sound more and more like Graelyn who wishes back the days when a single fart of a player woul make all five empires tremble :D
Well, that was disingenuous. Exploring new opportunities and concepts is something done by degrees; it is a studious methodology devoted to uncovering more of the topology of a place or an idea-structure, just like science is something used to achieve a greater degree of rightness by systematically eliminating faulty elements of a present model.
No need to take things that way.
Then please do explain why my unconditional invitation to such a discourse throws you into such a proto-rant. (not saying it's not enjoyable, but...)
You asked me what I thought of the idea; I laid down some things we needed to do and a structure we needed to get away from. You defended the structure, I defended my points. Here we are.
Before we go further down -this- particular road of "yeah it is / no isnt!!" calling, who says we only have a set bunch of static modes of interaction?
Aside from people in this thread, who will make their points themselves (HAI LILLITH), and aside from former members of the bloc that left in a huff that you old boys convienently tend to ignore (HAI LALL), and aside from old opponents you could never make peace with?
Well, the folks who roleplay in the other three core factions, for one. Should I name names? Will that be embarrassing enough?
Yes, of course, you do, but please give me some examples on this, because quite frankly, you are wrong.
Before we go further down -this- particular road of "yeah it is / no isnt!!" calling...
This is a closed loop. The circuit it runs on is made of irony. Oops, Laerise, I think you accidentally the point.
The trouble is that a cursory political analysis will reveal that EXTREMELY FEW new ideas have really arisen over the course of the bloc's lifespan and been disseminated to the community to any degree of prominence. There have been reactionary responses, shifts in opinion, and little else.
This is not the case, and I think you should do some more research, especially on FW, if you think that everything is and has been just the same since '06.
First, let's take out all the mechanics and so forth. Roleplay through in-space and mechanical action, by its very nature, is more up to the developers to innovate than anyone else. Those who do manage are usually not bloc members - go ask Azia Burgi what she thinks of the Empire.
Out of what's left, well. I'd remind you that factional chest-beating is nothing new. What exactly are you defending, the implications of more varieties of naval vessels being handed out as loyalty point rewards? You're just going to have to go out on that limb and be specific about this one.
Heck there even were people who actively opposed imperial decrees quite publically on the IGS!
The fact that it was solved peacefully and without a large news article does not mean that nothing happened at all.
Heh.
There was this Amarr corp called Oberon Incorporated? It opposed imperial decrees and rhetoric pretty vehemently on IGS, and did so around the time of the GNW era.
Oberon conquered 0.0. They set up the Syndicate-Placid commonwealth before they lost their taste for roleplay. They held Esoteria.
CVA pales in comparison to them on the novelty totem pole, brah. It's not that things being resolved peacefully invalidates their happening at all; it's that
it has all been done before, and no-one can even be bothered to learn the history, and from it, the difference.The fact that you haven't heard of a specific thing and independently developed it because you were working from a point of ignorance only makes it new to YOU. Like any insular community, the bloc has lost the benefit enjoyed by more communicative groups - the shared knowledge that comes with an increased number of peers. This unfortunate bloc-wide posture skews the perspective of its members.
Khanid-Provincial-Vanguard anyone?
And what is the virtue and the novelty in yet another Kingdom corporation in a long chain of like-minded Kingdom corporations? Silas is pretty okay, but he's also pretty samey when it comes to the broad strokes. He breaks out of no rut, I am sad to say. Tablaren stood a better chance with the Kingdom of Kador bunch, whom you failed to mention, but they're flat on their backs.
Three years ago, there were dozens of prominent fringe startup corps tinkering away at setting conventions. Now, there are almost none. I put that at the feet of the supposed vestiges of power - after all, they could have done something about it.
Stuff about Lall
I'll let him speak for himself when it comes to addressing your points. I referred to his leaving the bloc because of jarring changes and looking for another way. It was more interesting than rolling over and following yet another empress to yet another center. More valid. Better done.
And this is the same for every other factional RP.
Presenting the wealth of evidence to the contrary would be a staggering task fit for dozens of authors.
Regardless, a lack of competition or a perception that one's peers are also lazy is hardly an excuse to rest on one's laurels when it comes to something as inexpensive as
thinking.
For the minmatar you have the big players U'K (of whom most are too busy to do 0.0 games to post more on the IGS than "bloodyhand.gif" - no offense) and EM, who are just happily sitting in minmatar highsec doing... not much more than come out every highnoon to help the mini militia to outblob the amarrian even more, I see that hasn't changed either :P
Many of the supports for your counter-points are mechanical in nature; most of my position concerns itself with roleplay, whether free of mechanical elements or integrated with them.
I think I'm getting close to being justified in drawing a causation from that correlation, frankly.
Which I have never even heard of, qed :(
Ignorance is never a defense, and it should never be held up as a shield when someone is trying to point out some new phenomena to you.
You mean, content that is more world changing than getting commendations by heirs/the emperor/empress him/herself , or that PF was changed towards more liberal waters, especially in regards to slavery?
Why yes, I do mean content that's more world-changing than a line in a news-post or six, or a pat on the back from an AURORA NPC.
Your character lives in an everyday world, albeit a more volatile one than you do. Inside your char's head, news articles and thank-you notes from important people do not make up the majority of what your character knows, or decide the bulk of what your character does on a daily basis, nor do they alter the course of the world your character lives in - merely your character's lot in that world.
Yes, I know. I have had the pleasure to meet Ashar quite a few times already, and I think it'll stay at quite a few times, since the whole fed.-liberal schtik doesn't ring my bell (nor does it go well with laerise), so, sorry.
...Every time we interacted, I was doing my best to humor you and sate your tastes as related to me by others that knew you.
You want someone to blame for your negative experience with my character's attitudes and the way I chose to interact? Lay the blame squarely at your own feet. I'm a facilitator; when I'm on my game, I vary my play-style to create something I can enjoy with others.
...Except that where there used to be different mindsets on political or religious interests, right now there's just a focus on survival and the sound of the old iron curtain of 'What's Amarr is for Amarr only!' being drawn.
We can't have that anymore.
It is very fitting to the amarrian spirit, being xenophobic and all, but that comes down to personal preferrance, I'll give you that.
Absolutely not, it fucking doesn't.
The point of the above was that out of character interaction was not being sufficiently well separated from in-character interaction if the motivation in selecting one's out of character group was primarily an in-character one.
Sheesh.Oh for christs sake, leave Graelyn out of it, he's even more of an old grumpy man than Gaven... and that says quite a lot!
I should abandon the experiential evidence presented by someone who's actually had far-reaching responsibility and seen into how things work to a rather significant extent? I should abandon the input of someone that knows more than you because they're crusty and
rough around the edges?How convenient. You know, I don't think I will.
In short, it is not primarily a group that seeks to engender fun for as many as possible; it seeks to sustain set avenues of roleplay and favors them over novelty and experimentation for the sake of its own continued existence, and at a great deal of cost to its members.
I think especially Louella and Aldrith/Shalee will disagree with you here.
Hey, my character might not run up to them to give them an (in Shalee's case) unwanted hug and a kiss on the cheek out of happiness, but I sure appreciate what they're doing.
...Except that everything I've heard of them being involved in has been done to death before. Some of it, in my main's own corp.
I do agree on some of your statements regarding CVA, but we're seeing the same changes in UK as well, so I'll just put it down to problems with exponential corp/aliance growth and 0.0 Realpolitik.
I suppose it's easier to put a problem down to an answer featuring the least common denominator than actually examine the suggested solution.
I don't think sitting in your highsec while the other side is down in the dirt and unable to reach you due to standings mechanics is reaching out, but then I guess you just don't have any idea of FW realities :s
Ignored this statement for this round, because you need time to catch up regarding my points on faction warfare's place in roleplay-centric considerations.
In regards to PIE I'd like to ask you to stop thinking in the past and to learn to live in the present.
I'm not going to say much else because I'm already getting sick of the distinct possibility of seeing this conversation c/p'd to the IGS by a certain kind of people who do not inhabit this forum quite yet.
Well, that was quite meaningless, then.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, to a degree.
I really didn't think anyone could ever agree with anything wholeheartedly, to a degree.
There have been some attempts to write up accords of one kind or another, but not all information should ever be revealed - it simply takes out the novelty of RP to ooc'ly know everything in advance.
Half the function of roleplay is to create new content. As such, one can never run out of novel content; a lack of such things is a problem with the roleplayer, not the setting.
I guess you'll get a big headache when I tell you that I expect our members to dig around our forums if they want to get some juicy ooc-tidbits, but to me thats another experience to enjoy - heck I did a lot of reading during my time as (back then) an ensign as well and it didn't hurt me in the slightest.
Yes, it is more effort, but not everything should be avaiable at handsreach.
First off, not everyone enjoys the experience of doing a chore for the sake of doing a chore.
Second, people benefit from comparative analysis moreso than from searching for primary sources. This is hard to facilitate when one makes them search for primary sources.
Third,
it wouldn't matter if you had the best-organized private forum in the world. It is still private; I am speaking of community benefits.
Also, where do I find a concise and complete history of Ashar's exploits?smells a bit like double standards to me here
Her bio. It has every public event she's involved in IC or OOC that made a real impact on anything ingame.
Funny thing is, everything relevant to affecting the game-world that my character was involved in is out in the open, and here I am listening to you essentially justifying keeping public information secret on the grounds of preserving character secrets - like you have no conception of what's useful to the community at large and what's just part of a given player's latest arc. There's a few good heads in the Amarr bloc; I'm sure they can figure out how to disentangle private details from public information.
No, it's called hardening the ef up and putting some effort into something.
Don't give me that stupid bandwagon shit, ever again, as justification for a reason to make roleplay harder to get into in this game.
It's bad enough with a shrinking community, a third-rate writing staff, a shit system for organizing PF, and no primers.
What a waste.
In my time as a recruitment officer I have never sent someone away for lack of PF knowledge, apart, of course, from cases that went along the lines of "Long live the God emperor, lets slaughter the xenos, I FIGHT FOR THE BITCHES" :D
And if people got sent back to the drawing board the sole effort we required was for them to do maybe 15 minutes of reading. If you can't abide that you don't really belong into my corp, I have to deal with people who have ADS on a weekly basis and my patience doesn't extend far enough for me to care for ADS in internet spaceship games.
An impatient recruiter and disseminator of information hurts the community.
There was also all this stuff locked away on a private forum (PIE's internal boards, in several cases) that nobody ever dragged into the light because they couldn't be arsed to stop doing other things in the game. That's weak. It's a disservice to the community, and I simply won't associate with it. I can get critical OOC faction-related information out of a given member of Electus Matari and RE-AW easier and faster than I can out of one of the members of my own factional RP group, and I've asked repeatedly. What the fuck is that?
It's sensible.
And it's also a slow development that happened over the years, mostly due to metagaming of emeies which made IC interaction, especially on the IGS, a very bland and annoying experience.
It is not sensible to hoard. Bloc corps have a communal sharing track record so bad, and so intricately linked to your getting-along-with-others record, that were they young children, they'd be thrown out of kindergarten.
Ex-SF members have shared more than you guys lately. Do you know how badly I'm stymied by that?
Unlike EM we have/had to deal with people like SF (especially Jade/Jasmine) and various lolrp merc groups hired by Revan over the years.
We don't have the allencompassing fluffarmour of "oh, I was kidnapped and raped by an evil slaver" on our side, so we'll have to make up for that somehow :)
Somehow, I don't think curling into a ball and telling everyone to go away unless you were trying to beat on them was the right solution.
And, yet again, if you want to know something, why not just ask?
You surely haven't asked me about anything like this in the last... year or two.
Laerise, when I've talked to Amarr roleplayers in the last year or two, they've been...different than you, and different than a lot of bloc rank and file. Because I value going to the source, for one thing; because I value novelty, for another. And because I've already asked for the insight of a lot of bloc rank and file on a wide variety of topics and the answers have generally been less novel, varied, or well thought-out than asking more diverse groups, thanks to all the indoctrination.
Just because a few corps have gone inactive doesn't mean that the bloc is dead.
Again, your group's internal logic and your group's opinion of itself count for less than communal perception and opinion.
PIE has been on a recruitment surge for, well, actually ever since we joined FW, with sometimes more applications than we can handle immediately.
Sadly, numbers do not equal clout. Telling me that you're turning into some new version of CVA after admitting CVA's inability to maintain itself as a roleplay organization is...troubling, if you fail to see the connection.
Again you fall down the tarpits of your uneducated POV, making assumptions and pointing fingers at things that either have no factual evidence or that you misunderstood.
...
Yes, we did, and mostly because noone I know of (except Kost and a few others) did think of it as a major problem.
In conclusion, why did you not just change things your own if you dislike them so much?
You had your own corp, OBSA, running for quite a while and the only thing OBSA ever did was create an ofspring corp that introduced me to half a dozen new characters.. and that's all, really.
Sure, its very simple and comfortable to just sit on your white horse, eat some BLT and point down the hill towards your imaginary fairy castle, but it doesn't change anything.
As much as I enjoy your discourse, only action can make changes to t he ingame reality, and the amarr bloc has brought quite a lot of changes about.
Your opinion on PIE is completely uneducated and more of an account of fraction of our past than anything else. Quite frankly, I find it a bit insulting when you point towards a past leadership that has been at odds with your ideals and then project this at the present situation.
I'll tell you whats the most mindboggling about your wall of text.
It's all I've ever seen from you except some random blurbs on chat screens and maybe the odd occurance in local back in 07.
All this shit up there above this line? It weighs in at about second level on the ol' disagreement heirarchy.
If I were to go into my personal list of projects, it would be longer than my arm. The degrees of diplomatic outreach, the extent of initially private writings (once again, INITIALLY private) that have fueled the work of others, the attempts to create alliances...they've been significant. I could take credit for all sorts of shit, including the formation of a good few active and interesting corporations that you'd likely callously dismiss. But I'm simply not one to toot my own horn in quite that way unless you REALLY want me to partake in such an idiotic and self-aggrandizing exercise...Except wait, no, I won't - because you're asking me to weigh my personal accomplishments, and not those of myself and my affiliates, against the whole of a bloc - not against, say, your's, or those of a seminal figure within the bloc, but of the bloc as a whole.
Strikes me as rather presumptuous of my capacities, and hardly germane to the discussion. I don't have to be accomplished to have valid criticisms of something; I don't have to be anything but sufficiently observant to see something's flaws.
This is like when I told Jade that his character's constant mackin' on Revan wasn't terribly clever and he turned around and questioned my sexual preferences, Laerise.
Meanwhile the loyalist bloc has been uniting the bag of cats that is the amarr militia for two years now, been instrumental in the continuation of the timeline and in bringing about significant changes (Brother Joshua and the Kourmonen campaign being two prime examples here).
Brother Joshua affected a figurehead and little more, Laerise. Unless you have access to the G-unit's files, you really cannot comment on storylines. And, for the last time: greater involvement in factional war does not equal clout in the roleplay community; accomplishments in faction war are no more accomplishments in roleplay than are accomplishments in holding 0.0, and many of the points you have presented suggest that every gain regarding the capacity to wage factional conflict is a loss in the capacity to innovate in roleplay.
1.) The simple fact is, the amarr bloc as you know it does no longer exist the way it did back in 06/07.
Frankly, I would prefer it. The bloc I'm criticizing is less able by extremes than the bloc you evidently think I'm criticizing.
2.) There are significant changes on the horizon that may well bring about a massive change in our own little habitat and in extension in the whole of EVE.
The future's the future, and mechanics are still mechanics. The ability to build something on a planet simply isn't going to affect my capacity to innovate in any real degree. Feature changes that allow walking in stations affects my character's appearance, not its substance.
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Topic: Amarr Bloc Discussion (Read 19820 times)