Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Ashar Kor-Azor]

I'm going to think about this some, but I don't think it's really a very good idea at all before:

-We write a good primer for new Amarr players
-We engage people at an individual level rather than corporations
-We ensure that no-one tries to play figurehead. No one corporation can be seen as the center of the bloc for at LEAST a good six-month period. Especially nothing as closed-off as PIE, which traditionally has been hell for the fringe to work with. I'm done picking up the pieces to the tune of ten recruits a week when core-bloc members turn people away for not following a draconian set of standards they can't even express.

It's messy and really not necessarily worth doing without support for such things. Honestly, if it's just quid-pro-quo bloc reorganization, fuckin' forget about it. That old structure is shot through with shit. It has to go if any kind of innovation is to reinvigorate roleplay in the game.

[Laerise [PIE]]

Honestly, if it's just quid-pro-quo bloc reorganization, fuckin' forget about it. That old structure is shot through with shit. It has to go if any kind of innovation is to reinvigorate roleplay in the game.

So much for being nice and civil. 

[Havohej]

I saw that as 'conversational profanity' rather than combativeness, myself.  Like, "Think the Habs are gonna win the cup?  Fuckin' forget about it!"  Based on the RP community's penchant for negative dramas in general, I think there's probably some merit to the idea that the old way of going about things carries a lot of heavy baggage that would be better off left behind.

That said, maybe rein it in a little if we can so it doesn't get out of hand

[Ashar Kor-Azor]

Lae...Lae, look.

I didn't insult you, I expressed an opinion of what would best serve the community.

The old bloc structure may have accomplished a few things, but it does not strike me as something worth preserving. If you feel it is, carry on in your interests, but do so without me. I would rather seek to build institutions than cults of personality if I have the capacity to do so.

For the sake of real civility, I will treat you as someone I can confide in with whatever language I feel is appropriate, rather than rattle off a long list of adjectives about how fuckhorribly the bloc wrecked my game for years by being the self-balkanizing and recruit-shredding thing it was.

I expect nothing and hold you to no standards in return, except, you know, that you don't impose a singular perception of civility that gets upset when the kid gloves come off for things central to the experience of others.

And hav, u so biased. Shoulda modded meee : /

[Havohej]

And hav, u so biased. Shoulda modded meee : /

It's not so much bias, really.. it's just that I like to drop a nice F-bomb every now and then (often) too; I might very well be overruled on this idea, but while I very, very much want the friendly, open, welcoming atmosphere we're all after I'd rather that not mean 'no cussing', y'know?

At any rate, my post above was personal opinion only...

[admin]...not an official comment [/admin]

e: For my own information, could I ask you to possibly elaborate a little on what you mean when you talk about the old bloc structure, specifically in the recruit-shredding sense?  I wasn't around for that stuff (and would've been an outsider anyway), so I'm kinda curious about that stuff...

[Laerise [PIE]]

I think, and you may correct me here if I'm wrong, that Ashars main problem with the 'bloc' is that it does not conform to some corrupted hippie idealism :p
Meaning, we don't conform into one big apologetic group of people whose main goal is that 'everyone can express themselves the way they want, no matter the costs'.

What I do miss in your rant, if I may call it that, Ashar, is that you fail to see the ability of the bloc to work together if there is a real need to.
Very much like the empire itself the greater amarr community (GAA, or amarr bloc if you want), is split up into various sub groups - the most active ranging from fairly traditionalist (in the modern sense) corps like PIE or 1pg up to other entities of an even more liberal/lax attitude like, for example, Aldriths/Shalee's corp (the AM of the not so recent past might be another good example for the "shockingly" liberals).


And now specifically in regards to Ashars last post.

I don't care particularly much for what you call 'your game'. I am playing eve the way I think it's most enjoyable to me and my corp mates, and that's really it - you most likely do the same.
However, I see no reason to fall back into old modes of agression in ooc-discussions about ic matters, actually it's rather tiresome.

Oh, and re: 'gloves off', you know where to find me, bring it

Edit(h): Oh, and, before I forget about it...

It's the fracturedness of the bloc that makes it so much fun for me and many others.
Where would be the fun in a round table like the one proposed above (just to get us back on topic) if everyone was best friends and just after some tea and biscuits.

Edith(h II.): And, yes, yes, there will be tea and biscuits nonetheless 

[Ashar Kor-Azor]

Uh, no, and no, and no. Laerise, your interpretation of the content of my posts here deserves a response longer than I can give right this minute, but I'll be back in a bit.

Hav, I'm going to dinner, and then I will come back here and regale you with the grand tale of my perceptions.

[Ashar Kor-Azor]

Was hoping I'd get to use this.

[Laerise [PIE]]

->TANKRED STILL ENDURES ?

[Ashar Kor-Azor]

TANKRED'S GUNS HAVE BEEN FIRING FOR THE LAST TWENTY POSTS.

Havvo, the first poast goes to your question.

When I was actively recruiting for my corporation and those of others, I would regularly encounter players that were seeking to play Amarr-aligned characters, but were refused the in-character company or camaraderie of established characters on the basis of keeping their roleplay experience up to par. Some guy who'd committed no crime other than reading only five or six paragraphs worth of backstory on the official game website would have the temerity to start to roleplay his character, would meet some old-guard Amarr with a nice bio, happily greet them, and be brushed off and told to go back in the closet to lurk moar until he knew ALL his shit if he made an unfortivable mistake like thinking a citizen of the Evil Empire could be a nice guy. Sometimes he'd be referred to an OOC channel or given a shot, but half the time he'd get no information other than 'read what's on the fuckin' website' and be shown the back of someone's hand.

I'd recruit and educate these people; around mid-2007 I'd easily get a dozen a week on recruitment runs. A lot of them turned into superb roleplayers and mid-level Bloc and Fringe officer material once they left my corp. Their only flaw was that they'd refused to read fifty pages of badly organized shit on the Eve-o website and tried to be original about their character in front of some conservative Amarr.

Their Pavlovian response, without someone like me around to redirect them or give them a hand up (and there were a good number of people like me), would have been simply to get fed up with the Amarr roleplay scene and get the fuck away from it.

[Ashar Kor-Azor]

Lae-lae.

Let's play some quotefest!

I see no reason to fall back into old modes of agression in ooc-discussions about ic matters, actually it's rather tiresome.

Well, that's good. I wasn't falling back on them, which I hope is clear by now. The tone here is conversational; I conform to it. I just do it my way.

Oh, and re: 'gloves off', you know where to find me, bring it :P

I don't know if you got this, so.

I meant I used strong language (like the word 'fuck') around you because I thought you could hear such things in a discussion and not flip out.

Right now, it looks like I was mistaken. I hope you can bring that particular question to a close so I can get back to typing the word 'fuck' as often as I feel necessary to maintain the appropriate level of literary flair >.>

I think, and you may correct me here if I'm wrong, that Ashars main problem with the 'bloc' is that it does not conform to some corrupted hippie idealism :p
Meaning, we don't conform into one big apologetic group of people whose main goal is that 'everyone can express themselves the way they want, no matter the costs'.

Not so. Consequence is just fine, if it is reasonable and consistent at an organizational level; individual-to-individual consequences are fine too, and useful if they're varied. However, what I have experienced repeatedly is that individuals were told to conform to the decisions of their leaders both in and out of character; this robbed players of the ability to enrich their roleplay without significant penalties to their playstyle. It was allowing or disallowing people to be members of your club if they put a toe past the line.

What I do miss in your rant, if I may call it that, Ashar, is that you fail to see the ability of the bloc to work together if there is a real need to.

You may not call it that, because the rant starts a bit below the text you're currently reading (it's clearly marked, you'll see it when you get there). You may call it a summary of grievances, if you like :P

I don't fail to see the history of certain goals being completed, actually. I merely fail to see the merit of preserving a group that gets internet spaceship things done and utterly fails to bring in new kinds of storytelling. It's just a hodgepodge of paramilitary shit with a few backseat story-tellers sitting around, from where I'm standing - and I get the juicy bits related to me over the grapevine juuuust fine.

There has been no public discourse on the politics of the Empire in a venue not dominated by private interests. There has been no good engagement of the potential audience at a group level. There hasn't even been a Providence to point to lately as an excuse for the community resting on its collective laurels.

If you're satisfied with pure capacity for force-projection and a bunch of static modes of interaction, Lae, then there you go. I need more in my game, so I guess that's that.

Very much like the empire itself the greater amarr community (GAA, or amarr bloc if you want), is split up into various sub groups - the most active ranging from fairly traditionalist (in the modern sense) corps like PIE or 1pg up to other entities of an even more liberal/lax attitude like, for example, Aldriths/Shalee's corp (the AM of the not so recent past might be another good example for the "shockingly" liberals).

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.

It's institutions are cookie-cutter. There have been no successful Heir House corporations. There have definitely been no masterful constructions of new platforms from the wealthy foundation that has been gathered in terms of our sense of what Amarr capsuleers are like and the world they live in that are not pan-Imperial or Emperor-centric.

All the old Sarumites are dead or liberalized thoughtlessly; a lot of the old Liberals are now with the Sarumites. My favorite member of the old guard is Lallara for a reason.

This is some wicked bland factionalism.

The practical differences explored by the current range of corporations, when compared to the overall range of available paths to explore as offered in the fiction, is disappointingly small. If a list of tropes were made from the data-set these corps represent, it would be tiny. Their distinctions are well documented, but there is little difference of note between a racially liberal industrialist corp and a racially conservative one.

To put it another way, the procedurally generated content that resulted from an exercise of some five years and survived the crucible created by its own framers is of too little merit to preserve.

The last truly innovative liberal corp I can point to was Oberon Incorporated, and they did it because they had bleeding hearts.

I do it to enable a broader range of valid methods of in-character interaction.

I don't care particularly much for what you call 'your game'. I am playing eve the way I think it's most enjoyable to me and my corp mates, and that's really it - you most likely do the same.

Except that you don't know what I consider my game.

And except part of how I find the game enjoyable - a large part - is in finding ways to work with others and get them to share in as many elements of it as possible, and you just invited me to a summit to discuss loyalist interests or issues. How different are we in our goals, then? You can't have your cake and eat it too, I'm afraid. I'm either someone to brush aside, or I'm a like-minded player saying, 'Are there more ways to have fun here? Let's find them.'

It's the fracturedness of the bloc that makes it so much fun for me and many others.
Where would be the fun in a round table like the one proposed above (just to get us back on topic) if everyone was best friends and just after some tea and biscuits.

That's about the only place where there's a bit of hope, really. 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.

End /quotefest.

BEGIN RANT.

My core criticism of any and all Amarrian undertakings lately is summed up in a recent quote by Grae. It is as follows.


 [ 2010.04.15 06:11:36 ] Ashar KorAzor > D'you know the kid from the threat we linked you the other night
 [ 2010.04.15 06:11:46 ] Ashar KorAzor > about the politics and justification of slavery, the original poster
 [ 2010.04.15 06:11:53 ] Graelyn > Nope.
 [ 2010.04.15 06:11:55 ] Ashar KorAzor > is tryina do some clever, liberal things?
 [ 2010.04.15 06:12:04 ] Graelyn > Godspeed then.
 [ 2010.04.15 06:12:11 ] Graelyn > That's a dead-end.
 [ 2010.04.15 06:12:24 ] Graelyn > Nuances within the PF are not appreciated.
...
 [ 2010.04.15 06:12:43 ] Graelyn > It's LOLSLAVERS vs LOLDARKIES in space.
...
 [ 2010.04.15 06:12:59 ] Graelyn > I got that bashed through my skull eventually.
 [ 2010.04.15 06:13:26 ] Graelyn > I remember I sat Nubulai down once and outlined my liberal RP.
 [ 2010.04.15 06:13:38 ] Graelyn > "Does this have a point? Is it worth persuing?"
...
 [ 2010.04.15 06:14:04 ] Graelyn > "Um...well...hey, didi you know we're giving you the Sacred Cross of the Throne Order? Yay!"
 ...
 [ 2010.04.15 06:14:44 ] Graelyn > And since he was running the plot department, and he found any liberal Amarr anything to be confusing and silly, now so do I.

---

This is the attitude that the bloc has, in large part, embraced. I'm not gonna roll with that, Lae. I'd rather try to build something better from the ground up.

The buck stops with me on that one.

Anyway. Specifics.

My main complaints about the old bloc as a whole are the same as my main complaints about the CCP plot department. They are as follows:

-The Amarr bloc is a collection of personality cults loosely held together by common ground and friendship.
-The most influential leaders of the Amarr bloc favored balkanization.
-The bloc has failed to leverage its assets in terms of visibility and access to the public to educate incoming roleplayers effectively about game information. Which endlessly fucks up recruitment.

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.

First, on personality cults. I'll give you a couple of examples - PIE and CVA.

There has always been a lack of capacity in the bloc to establish a strong institutional culture for the thousand-odd players affiliated with it; nobody has worked to build something that runs itself, which is perhaps the one real accomplishment of Star Fraction. CVA didn't, and none of the other alliances came close.

This is why the culture of CVA shifted by degrees away from roleplay and directly towards 0.0 management, and why by the time I had an office in an outpost and was dragging corpmates out to 0.0 I couldn't hardly get the core characters of CVA to respond to new and interesting stimuli in an in-character sense. These people were too busy playing a game that consisted of a load of treadmills and running petty industries at a fraction of the efficiency they could achieve by more clever means, and called themselves a roleplay alliance.

A recruit in CVA who was looking to roleplay within his corporation was doomed almost from the start because of all this. I have dozens of friends in the group who, over the years, felt more and more marginalized because the personalities running the show responded first to the pressures of local politics and second to their declared interest. So the recruits didn't get to roleplay the way you and I did very much, Laerise, without leaving their corp almost completely out of the bargain.

That's bullshit. I don't want to be around it in EVE.

PIE suffered from this sort of thing another way - there was an Admiralty, but it was just a collection of figureheads who were good at certain things. As such, the organization responded to their whims. When personal conflicts occurred, they were settled by the whims of the people in charge; when things went well in terms of co-operation with newer corporations struggling to build themselves up, it was also on the whims of leading members - and no, not just in my case.

The real trouble came for me when Konstantin Mort and I spoke of the changes in PIE under Rodj as opposed to Gaven. I'd just gone to the Praetoria's public channel and spoken to a few newer members of the organization who treated me differently than members had under other CEOs; I had thought of communication standards under Lallara for a moment, but it was the shift in policy behind the behaviors that got to me. Konstantin felt the same way; he maintained that the lack of a structure of policies the CEO of the year had to abide by had altered the membership of the organization when the new CEO could come in and wield a free hand, but the goals of PIE had not changed in step with these alterations and as such, the corp was a different beast trying to fit itself to the same yoke.

That sure didn't help bloc politics become any saner, and it wasn't Rodj's fault. But it would not have occurred with strong institutionalization.

As it is, the whole thing feels like it works by virtue of being an old boy network. When you say it can work when it needs to, this is simply an old boy network in action. I think we can do better.

Onto the second point.

Gaven Lok'ri's player was a bright guy, but he said to me one day that because of prior disagreements with the community at large, the leadership of the various segments of the community he felt were like-minded were knowingly contributing to the balkanization of the community to preserve their play-styles. That was two years ago.

Today, there IS no core bloc presence outside of FW on the Amarr side that anyone really recognizes, nothing that even piddlingly compares to the Matari group in terms of its degree of outreach, accessibility, and capacity to achieve objectives. I lay that at the feet of a pro-balkanization posture among the leadership of the Amarr bloc and little else - they were following along with their predecessors instead of responding to circumstance and deciding that no, it was time to build up the camaraderie and co-operation in new ways. It was always people like Evanda on the outside, it seems, who rebuilt the bridges.

That can go.

Finally, the lack of available and well-formatted summarial documentation on the Amarr at large and the bloc in particular, accessible to anyone who feels like taking a look, and accessible without first joining a corporation, has monumentally fucked everything.

There have been half-hearted attempts on many occasions to fix this; here, I share in the blame to a significant degree. However, while people HAVE people posted chunks of internal PIE threads to Chatsubo (and done other things like that from time to time), they'd still left the onus on a newcomer to find that thread, analyze it, and make from it a sound basis for satisfying play.

This is hilariously unfair.

The Amarr are the most complex faction in the game.

They had to be. The villian must be the most interesting player in a given story to be effective, and Talisman got at least that right with the Amarr.

It's not about how inherently evil or good they are; it's not about the people that want to play some sort of weeping peacenik and try to make amends with the enemy. It's about positively everyone who ever wanted a deeper plot arc, or more PF.

The understanding was that all you needed was soldiers and adoring fans of your play-style, so you went and got them without building a public structure to allow for some evolution. The expectation was, among bloc members and everyone else, that smart interpretations were something that organically came together after some new kid had read sixty-odd chronicles, news articles, stories and novellas.

That's fucking insane.

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?

If the function of the group we refer to as the Amarr bloc is not to educate any interested party about an activity that only improves when more educated people and groups are involved in it, then that group is likely to wither on the vine. And the bitch of it is, I started talking about these things six weeks into my stay in the game. And I never stopped. And now the bloc's deader than a doornail, but I contend that it could have been twice the size it ever was with more able outreach.

We had this silver, and never did anything with it relating to casting a bullet. And this silver bullet could have destroyed allegiance drift in a group the size of CVA for a long time, or created a more robust political sphere, or generally been a drama-killer and a thing of value. We all collectively sat on our hands.

But the bloc had a lot more silver than the fringe.

Alright, dear reader, that's the end of it. You've beaten Backstage's first textwall. Be ye gratified.

[Myyona]

Might be a textwall, but I read through it all and found it very interesting. Applause is in order.

Never were a part of the Amarr block so I cannot provide any opinion on the topic my self.

[Ashar Kor-Azor]

Applause

Thank you.

I may or may not have read that as 'applesauce' the first time.

Don't think my brain likes the thought of me gettan applauded >.>

[lallara zhuul]

I was.

The analysis seems to be quite sound.

Especially on the old boys club front, lets take the Mito conflict for example.

CAIN was getting a beatdown from SF there, they had flown with the Amarr bloc a few times (against SF.)

As the current CEO I figured it would be fun to shoot SF.

I convoed Graelyn, expressed my intentions, he was going to do the same thing for the same reasons, I cooked up the Live fire exercises in the Mito constellation excuse and off we went.

I do agree with Ashar about the fact that PIE and its recruitment process turned away people, and as someone who took part and then later was head of the recruitment process I know exactly why.

It is because most of the people that show interest are blithering idiots.

I did hold hands with most of the ones interested in joining PIE and walked them through the PF, giving them enough information to make an educated choice on what they were going for. Basic information on the Houses, what they stood for, basic religious dogma that PIE was subscribing to, slavery issues and whatnot.

But a lot of them were disheartened by the fact that they would actually have to think about the choices that their character has made to get to the situation that they are in. And the fact that they liked pirating would not be kosher in a loyalist organization. Or that a basic level of literal expression was required to be able to actually convey what the hell was going on in their characters lives. The stories I could tell would probably take up a forum of their own.

I believe that there are possibilities for getting a roundtable together with Amarrian roleplayers first in an OOC setting, then in an IC setting (OOC first so that you could lay down ground rules so that nobody would get their panties in a bunch, for example the more hardcore Amarrians would not even interact with someone who is in a lesbian marriage or has non-Amarrian corp mates.) Just so that they know each other, and they can send those that are interested in certain aspects of the Amarrian RP towards those that are in organizations that reflect those.

So that nobody interested in the Amarrian RP would be turned away, they would be turned towards something, that would enrich their play and hopefully make them enjoy EVE more.

Personally I feel that FW pretty much killed the RP within the Empire and between the Freedom Fighters and the Loyalists.
But thats another story.

[Laerise [PIE]]

Lae-lae.

Let's play some quotefest!

Meh...

I see no reason to fall back into old modes of agression in ooc-discussions about ic matters, actually it's rather tiresome.

Well, that's good. I wasn't falling back on them, which I hope is clear by now. The tone here is conversational; I conform to it. I just do it my way.

Aw, c'mon, whose the one playing thin-skin now?   Meanie!

Oh, and re: 'gloves off', you know where to find me, bring it

I don't know if you got this, so.

Yep, I guess I did. *ahem* NO ONE HAS THE PROWESS TO FACE TANKRED IN BATTLE

I meant I used strong language (like the word 'fuck') around you because I thought you could hear such things in a discussion and not flip out.

Right now, it looks like I was mistaken. I hope you can bring that particular question to a close so I can get back to typing the word 'fuck' as often as I feel necessary to maintain the appropriate level of literary flair >.>[/quote]

I suggest that we split this argument into a new thread.

I think, and you may correct me here if I'm wrong, that Ashars main problem with the 'bloc' is that it does not conform to some corrupted hippie idealism :p
Meaning, we don't conform into one big apologetic group of people whose main goal is that 'everyone can express themselves the way they want, no matter the costs'.

Not so. Consequence is just fine, if it is reasonable and consistent at an organizational level; individual-to-individual consequences are fine too, and useful if they're varied. However, what I have experienced repeatedly is that individuals were told to conform to the decisions of their leaders both in and out of character; this robbed players of the ability to enrich their roleplay without significant penalties to their playstyle. It was allowing or disallowing people to be members of your club if they put a toe past the line.

There's just so much individuality that fits into a team Ashar.
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.

Respectively, if you don't like your employer, just look for another one that suits you better or go independant.

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.

´

What I do miss in your rant, if I may call it that, Ashar, is that you fail to see the ability of the bloc to work together if there is a real need to.

You may not call it that, because the rant starts a bit below the text you're currently reading (it's clearly marked, you'll see it when you get there). You may call it a summary of grievances, if you like

I don't fail to see the history of certain goals being completed, actually. I merely fail to see the merit of preserving a group that gets internet spaceship things done and utterly fails to bring in new kinds of storytelling. It's just a hodgepodge of paramilitary shit with a few backseat story-tellers sitting around, from where I'm standing - and I get the juicy bits related to me over the grapevine juuuust fine.

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

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

There has been no public discourse on the politics of the Empire in a venue not dominated by private interests. There has been no good engagement of the potential audience at a group level. There hasn't even been a Providence to point to lately as an excuse for the community resting on its collective laurels.

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...)

If you're satisfied with pure capacity for force-projection and a bunch of static modes of interaction, Lae, then there you go. I need more in my game, so I guess that's that.

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?
Yes, of course, you do, but please give me some examples on this, because quite frankly, you are wrong.

Very much like the empire itself the greater amarr community (GAA, or amarr bloc if you want), is split up into various sub groups - the most active ranging from fairly traditionalist (in the modern sense) corps like PIE or 1pg up to other entities of an even more liberal/lax attitude like, for example, Aldriths/Shalee's corp (the AM of the not so recent past might be another good example for the "shockingly" liberals).

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.

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.

It's institutions are cookie-cutter. There have been no successful Heir House corporations. There have definitely been no masterful constructions of new platforms from the wealthy foundation that has been gathered in terms of our sense of what Amarr capsuleers are like and the world they live in that are not pan-Imperial or Emperor-centric.

Khanid-Provincial-Vanguard anyone?

All the old Sarumites are dead or liberalized thoughtlessly; a lot of the old Liberals are now with the Sarumites. My favorite member of the old guard is Lallara for a reason.

This is some wicked bland factionalism.

Sorry, but we'll have to agree to disagree here.
Apart from a few IGS posts and outbursts in various chats I haven't seen lall's Path of Thorns do anything but being a silent reminder of the past.
Sadly she's still in a one man corp, I had high hopes from her to unite more people to her banner - still got unifnished business with her

The practical differences explored by the current range of corporations, when compared to the overall range of available paths to explore as offered in the fiction, is disappointingly small. If a list of tropes were made from the data-set these corps represent, it would be tiny. Their distinctions are well documented, but there is little difference of note between a racially liberal industrialist corp and a racially conservative one.

And this is the same for every other factional RP.

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

To put it another way, the procedurally generated content that resulted from an exercise of some five years and survived the crucible created by its own framers is of too little merit to preserve.

The last truly innovative liberal corp I can point to was Oberon Incorporated, and they did it because they had bleeding hearts.

Which I have never even heard of, qed

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?

I do it to enable a broader range of valid methods of in-character interaction.

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.[/quote]

I don't care particularly much for what you call 'your game'.

_{marked bold}

Except that you don't know what I consider my game.

And except part of how I find the game enjoyable - a large part - is in finding ways to work with others and get them to share in as many elements of it as possible, and you just invited me to a summit to discuss loyalist interests or issues. How different are we in our goals, then? You can't have your cake and eat it too, I'm afraid. I'm either someone to brush aside, or I'm a like-minded player saying, 'Are there more ways to have fun here? Let's find them.'

I should have thought my invitation to a discussion would point you to the later as my reason, maybe I didn't make myself clear enough.

It's the fracturedness of the bloc that makes it so much fun for me and many others.
Where would be the fun in a round table like the one proposed above (just to get us back on topic) if everyone was best friends and just after some tea and biscuits.

That's about the only place where there's a bit of hope, really. 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.

End /quotefest.

Aye

BEGIN RANT.

My core criticism of any and all Amarrian undertakings lately is summed up in a recent quote by Grae. It is as follows.


 [ 2010.04.15 06:11:36 ] Ashar KorAzor > D'you know the kid from the threat we linked you the other night
 [ 2010.04.15 06:11:46 ] Ashar KorAzor > about the politics and justification of slavery, the original poster
 [ 2010.04.15 06:11:53 ] Graelyn > Nope.
 [ 2010.04.15 06:11:55 ] Ashar KorAzor > is tryina do some clever, liberal things?
 [ 2010.04.15 06:12:04 ] Graelyn > Godspeed then.
 [ 2010.04.15 06:12:11 ] Graelyn > That's a dead-end.
 [ 2010.04.15 06:12:24 ] Graelyn > Nuances within the PF are not appreciated.
...
 [ 2010.04.15 06:12:43 ] Graelyn > It's LOLSLAVERS vs LOLDARKIES in space.
...
 [ 2010.04.15 06:12:59 ] Graelyn > I got that bashed through my skull eventually.
 [ 2010.04.15 06:13:26 ] Graelyn > I remember I sat Nubulai down once and outlined my liberal RP.
 [ 2010.04.15 06:13:38 ] Graelyn > "Does this have a point? Is it worth persuing?"
...
 [ 2010.04.15 06:14:04 ] Graelyn > "Um...well...hey, didi you know we're giving you the Sacred Cross of the Throne Order? Yay!"
 ...
 [ 2010.04.15 06:14:44 ] Graelyn > And since he was running the plot department, and he found any liberal Amarr anything to be confusing and silly, now so do I.

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!

---

This is the attitude that the bloc has, in large part, embraced. I'm not gonna roll with that, Lae. I'd rather try to build something better from the ground up.

The buck stops with me on that one.

Anyway. Specifics.

My main complaints about the old bloc as a whole are the same as my main complaints about the CCP plot department. They are as follows:

-The Amarr bloc is a collection of personality cults loosely held together by common ground and friendship.
-The most influential leaders of the Amarr bloc favored balkanization.
-The bloc has failed to leverage its assets in terms of visibility and access to the public to educate incoming roleplayers effectively about game information. Which endlessly fucks up recruitment.

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.

First, on personality cults. I'll give you a couple of examples - PIE and CVA.

There has always been a lack of capacity in the bloc to establish a strong institutional culture for the thousand-odd players affiliated with it; nobody has worked to build something that runs itself, which is perhaps the one real accomplishment of Star Fraction. CVA didn't, and none of the other alliances came close.

This is why the culture of CVA shifted by degrees away from roleplay and directly towards 0.0 management, and why by the time I had an office in an outpost and was dragging corpmates out to 0.0 I couldn't hardly get the core characters of CVA to respond to new and interesting stimuli in an in-character sense. These people were too busy playing a game that consisted of a load of treadmills and running petty industries at a fraction of the efficiency they could achieve by more clever means, and called themselves a roleplay alliance.

A recruit in CVA who was looking to roleplay within his corporation was doomed almost from the start because of all this. I have dozens of friends in the group who, over the years, felt more and more marginalized because the personalities running the show responded first to the pressures of local politics and second to their declared interest. So the recruits didn't get to roleplay the way you and I did very much, Laerise, without leaving their corp almost completely out of the bargain.

That's bullshit. I don't want to be around it in EVE.

The last paragraph is bullshit I don't want to have around in EVE either.

First off, 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.

PIE suffered from this sort of thing another way - there was an Admiralty, but it was just a collection of figureheads who were good at certain things. As such, the organization responded to their whims. When personal conflicts occurred, they were settled by the whims of the people in charge; when things went well in terms of co-operation with newer corporations struggling to build themselves up, it was also on the whims of leading members - and no, not just in my case.

The real trouble came for me when Konstantin Mort and I spoke of the changes in PIE under Rodj as opposed to Gaven. I'd just gone to the Praetoria's public channel and spoken to a few newer members of the organization who treated me differently than members had under other CEOs; I had thought of communication standards under Lallara for a moment, but it was the shift in policy behind the behaviors that got to me. Konstantin felt the same way; he maintained that the lack of a structure of policies the CEO of the year had to abide by had altered the membership of the organization when the new CEO could come in and wield a free hand, but the goals of PIE had not changed in step with these alterations and as such, the corp was a different beast trying to fit itself to the same yoke.

That sure didn't help bloc politics become any saner, and it wasn't Rodj's fault. But it would not have occurred with strong institutionalization.

As it is, the whole thing feels like it works by virtue of being an old boy network. When you say it can work when it needs to, this is simply an old boy network in action. I think we can do better.

Onto the second point.

Gaven Lok'ri's player was a bright guy, but he said to me one day that because of prior disagreements with the community at large, the leadership of the various segments of the community he felt were like-minded were knowingly contributing to the balkanization of the community to preserve their play-styles. That was two years ago.

Today, there IS no core bloc presence outside of FW on the Amarr side that anyone really recognizes, nothing that even piddlingly compares to the Matari group in terms of its degree of outreach, accessibility, and capacity to achieve objectives. I lay that at the feet of a pro-balkanization posture among the leadership of the Amarr bloc and little else - they were following along with their predecessors instead of responding to circumstance and deciding that no, it was time to build up the camaraderie and co-operation in new ways. It was always people like Evanda on the outside, it seems, who rebuilt the bridges.

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  
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.

That can go.

Finally, the lack of available and well-formatted summarial documentation on the Amarr at large and the bloc in particular, accessible to anyone who feels like taking a look, and accessible without first joining a corporation, has monumentally fucked everything.

There have been half-hearted attempts on many occasions to fix this; here, I share in the blame to a significant degree. However, while people HAVE people posted chunks of internal PIE threads to Chatsubo (and done other things like that from time to time), they'd still left the onus on a newcomer to find that thread, analyze it, and make from it a sound basis for satisfying play.

This is hilariously unfair.

I agree with you 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.
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.

Also, where do I find a concise and complete history of Ashar's exploits?_{smells a bit like double standards to me here}

The Amarr are the most complex faction in the game.

They had to be. The villian must be the most interesting player in a given story to be effective, and Talisman got at least that right with the Amarr.

It's not about how inherently evil or good they are; it's not about the people that want to play some sort of weeping peacenik and try to make amends with the enemy. It's about positively everyone who ever wanted a deeper plot arc, or more PF.

The understanding was that all you needed was soldiers and adoring fans of your play-style, so you went and got them without building a public structure to allow for some evolution. The expectation was, among bloc members and everyone else, that smart interpretations were something that organically came together after some new kid had read sixty-odd chronicles, news articles, stories and novellas.

That's fucking insane.

No, it's called hardening the ef up and putting some effort into something.
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"
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.

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.

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
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.

If the function of the group we refer to as the Amarr bloc is not to educate any interested party about an activity that only improves when more educated people and groups are involved in it, then that group is likely to wither on the vine. And the bitch of it is, I started talking about these things six weeks into my stay in the game. And I never stopped. And now the bloc's deader than a doornail, but I contend that it could have been twice the size it ever was with more able outreach.

Just because a few corps have gone inactive doesn't mean that the bloc is dead.
PIE has been on a recruitment surge for, well, actually ever since we joined FW, with sometimes more applications than we can handle immediately.

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.

We had this silver, and never did anything with it relating to casting a bullet. And this silver bullet could have destroyed allegiance drift in a group the size of CVA for a long time, or created a more robust political sphere, or generally been a drama-killer and a thing of value. We all collectively sat on our hands.

But the bloc had a lot more silver than the fringe.

Alright, dear reader, that's the end of it. You've beaten Backstage's first textwall. Be ye gratified.

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.

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).

We've been working our collective arses off and we've been doing, you may permitt me to say so, quite a satisfactory job.

Let me bring my own little quotewar/rant thread to an end though, I don't want to tire the audience.

1.) The simple fact is, the amarr bloc as you know it does no longer exist the way it did back in 06/07.

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.

Thats it from me for now, my coffeemug is empty and if I don't go to uni now I'll be stuck here the whole day.