My suggestions-
- No Faction Bashing. There is no need for faction bashing this is not a player faction vs. player faction environment.
- Do not promote a negative environment - New players are in the discord, and do not repeatedly fixate on negative emotions and situations in the chat. We're supposed to be welcoming and positive. Star Army is a great place.
In my opinion, these are all ideas that sound great on paper - but are terrible in practice. Why?
Several reasons (it's late and I'm too tired to think of a proper transition, sue me):
- They treat the symptom, not the cause. Suppressing "negativity" or "faction bashing" or "outbursts" in one place (the SARP Discord) doesn't eliminate the things that causes them to begin with - it merely drives them elsewhere to places like private Discord servers, which quickly become negativity-amplifying echo chambers that quickly spiral out of control and lead to more drama, more ugliness, and more exoduses. Trust me on this - I speak from personal experience when I say that the exodus in the summer of 2016 and the nightmare that was the Asterian Wars were respectively caused by and prolonged by the existence of private servers (#sarpfree for the former, one that myself, Ame, raz, and Legix were part of for the latter).
- They serve as an excellent means for bad actors to silence others. When I was one of the most (if not the most) toxic individual on the site back in the day, I would have given my right arm for rules like these - because they're perfect for silencing any form of dissent, no matter how valid it may be (and believe me, none of the factions on Star Army, including Yamatai, are perfect). Consider the following scenarios:
- Someone say something true about your faction that you don't like? Tell a mod that they're faction bashing, and that pesky voice of theirs is silenced.
- Someone saying something truthful about your plot/setting element/character/etc. that you don't like? Tell a mod that they're being negative, and poof, that troublesome little naysayer is no more.
Now, before it gets mentioned: I'm NOT saying that individuals should have a God-given right to act like jackasses or douchebags, because they shouldn't - this is Star Army, not 4chan, and we have an obligation to be respectful to each other both in public and in private - rather, I fear that bad actors would use the proposed rules to maliciously censor those with differing viewpoints and opinions.
- Strict Division between IC and OOC (Bring an end to Metagaming and Mixing) - Do not have outbursts OOC about IC actions. Don't treat someone's characters all the same if they are different characters. Stop applying real-life politics and laws to roleplay. Factions have their own laws they live on the wiki. Also, clarification that an OOC discussion about something on the discord does not influence roleplay.
The portion regarding outbursts I mentioned above; as for "applying real-life politics and laws to roleplay", however... why not?
I get it, I get it - "factions have their own laws [that]* live on the wiki" - but there's a few problems with this proposed rule:
- Roleplayers - in my opinion - are always going to draw upon real-life politics and laws when roleplaying, because it provides them with a framework that they can use to interpret and interact with the setting they're partaking it. To outright forbid a roleplayer from doing that would greatly detract from their understanding of the setting's vast lore and intricacies.
- An individual acting in bad faith could easily use the rule to forbid anyone they dislike from contributing to the setting by simply claiming that all of the person's contributions are based on real-life politics and laws, which seems massively unfair to me given that Star Army is a vast universe with a near-infinite amount of possibilities. If something can be justified by even the tiniest of amount of possibility, precedence, logic, etc. (i.e. Yamatai's political parties), why should it be denied?
- There is - to the best of my knowledge - no faction with a complete legal code on the Star Army wiki, thereby meaning that real-life laws should be used as a reference from time time, because let's face it: nobody wants to spend the time and energy necessary to port the entire United States Legal Code into the setting - and that's assuming that each faction would want to use the same code, which would make zero sense from an in-character perspective.
Also, I'm going to be honest: short of barring them from the Discord server, there's literally no way you can stop someone from being influenced by an OOC discussion on something unless they deliberately choose to not read said discussion, because nobody's going to admit to being influenced by something they want to be influenced by - even if you make them sign a waiver or something.
*Apologies if I misquoted you there, Andrew - I assumed the "they" was a typo.
- Rules about Player Wills - Limit the ability to transfer things to people to things like characters and corporations. Mainstream things like SAOY departments, SAOY fleets, etc should revert back to Wes's control for distribution.
If someone creates a fleet/department/etc., (i.e. the Star Army Rangers), why shouldn't they be allowed to retain control of it so long as they are not permanently banned from the site or using it in bad faith (proven beyond reasonable doubt)?
It should probably be explicitly said that players are expected to roleplay their characters in good faith. It's kind of connected Andrew's suggestion for IC/OOC separation and maybe has a place in the same clause or section.
A Star Army officer or soldier (or Nepleslian or whatever else), for example, should conduct themselves like one. There's a big difference between a character having an opinion and players constantly voicing the same opinion across multiple characters counter to how they should have been trained. A Star Army soldier might think something inwardly but should have been drilled to keep certain things to themselves. Characters have been filtered and edited at creation for being unfit to serve, but existing ones often exhibit similar traits. Not saying to bite a new player's head off for making an in-character misstep — all of us constantly have more to learn about the setting — but there are some very basic things that get learned at the beginning and shouldn't need reminding.
Sorry if it's not much of an idea. Everything seems pretty good from the perspective of someone who just doesn't use Discord.
This, in my opinion, is - similar to what I said above about some of Andrew's proposed rules - an idea that looks great on paper but performs poorly in practice, because it significantly stifles a player's creative freedom and roleplaying opportunities. If a player wants to have their character voice an opinion "counter to how they should have been trained," why not let them and then let said character suffer the IC (or OOC, if it's too disruptive) consequences of not "keep[ing] certain things to themselves"?
