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The Great ST Debate
- Thread starter Tom
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Zakalwe
Inactive Member
Indeed. And back to the debate itself, and (if I may), I would like to bring back in the psychological/philosophical view:
Human beings are geared to avoiding death, to be terrified by death. We are so scared by the idea that when we die we shall simply cease to exist, and all we have learnt will simply disapear, that we construct religions whose sole purpose is to convince us that as long as we live a certain way we shall live forever!
(Don't get me wrong, I'm religious, I just understand the psychology behind it.)
And, much of science is geared to preventing death. Our medicine, hospital systems, geared to preventing it.
The most important thing is a life support machine. These can keep you alive indefinatley, and people often argue to keep a loved one on, even after they are brain-dead. And yet people can not bear to think of a loved one leaving them, of being deprived of them, that they are willing to keep what effectively is a living corpse alive, in the hope that there will be a miraculous recovery (I'm reffering to the brain-dead cases, not those of other, simmilar conditions). Ironicly it is the religious, those that have least to fear by there relative or loved one dying, that fight most feverently to keep them alive. Those that are firm in the belief that there is an after-life, still refuse to put there faith up to that!
Death horrifies us, and yet fascinates us. The psychology behind that is far more complicated, and I'm not going into it.
The important thing is, that once we discover a way for us to live longer, to acquire immortality, we will take it. We have no other choice really, we're that scared of death. The people in the SA, and Elysia (who originaly developed the technology), would of course put ENORMOUS amounts of research into discovering a way to prevent you from dying. Or at least, once you die being able to come back to life. It's the holy grail of technology!
IC, we can not loose it. Getting rid of all telekinesis was reasonably large, since there are still many cases in the archives of it being used, but think if we took out one of the corner stones of the universe! How would we explain that? How would explain all of the many many times it's been used, all the characters that have back ups? Even making it less reliable ... what explanation are you going to give that?
SA representative "Due to our feeling that mortality is fun and we should give it a go, we're going to make it more likely you die in the line of fire."
Also try and understand that this will mean HUGE gameplay issues. With ST changed or gone, conscription to the SA will plummit. People in Yamatai aren't really used to the idea of dying permenantly, where you can have ST backups. The idea that you could die, for many of them at least, would be alien. They're not going to risk there lives in such an obvious manner, in a universe where space battles cost litteraly millions of deaths in only a matter of minutes, with weapons that can anihilate entire planets and capitol ships with a simple pressing of a button. Then you'd only have Neko's, and even they, designed for combat as they are, may be slightly less enthusaistic about going into battle knowing that they could die for good!
OCC:
It is our natural will to prevent our characters from being killed. Sure we can know that they'll come back, but unless we're really unempathic, we still care whether they live or die. If you read RP's a lot, you'll notice irrational hanging onto characters lives, rather than casualy throwing them away. ST does not make this fight for character survival any less significant, or prominent. Only one person has thrown there lives away recently, and that was one of Luke's characters - who didn't even have a backup!
Players that don't like this could try quite a simple factor - don't take ST backups for your character. Try and get a law passed that means a ranking official does not have the right to force you to have a backup, and then claim you object on a philosphical or religous basis.
"I do not believe in ST backups, since I think it takes away from life. We only live once, and having backups cheapens it."
That is a possible responce, however it is going to be reasonably rare in the SA, since it is part of there culture.
Now as for the efficiency of the technology:
Due to this pathalogical fear of death, people are going to be constantly improving on the technology. It has been around for a long time, and with the resources of the SA, I'm fairly certain they would have perfected it. That is if we're going to be realistic. In addition, recent technology developments in WARMS and PARADOX, mean that ships can violate Heisenburgs uncertaintly principle, and thus get an even more accurate depition of the brain.
With the state of technological perfection that the SA aspires to, I really doubt they'd allow one of there most vital components have more than a negligable (meaning obscenely rare, but could theoreticly happen as a plot device), risk of failure.
I'm burnt out now. Respond and I shall continue.
Human beings are geared to avoiding death, to be terrified by death. We are so scared by the idea that when we die we shall simply cease to exist, and all we have learnt will simply disapear, that we construct religions whose sole purpose is to convince us that as long as we live a certain way we shall live forever!
(Don't get me wrong, I'm religious, I just understand the psychology behind it.)
And, much of science is geared to preventing death. Our medicine, hospital systems, geared to preventing it.
The most important thing is a life support machine. These can keep you alive indefinatley, and people often argue to keep a loved one on, even after they are brain-dead. And yet people can not bear to think of a loved one leaving them, of being deprived of them, that they are willing to keep what effectively is a living corpse alive, in the hope that there will be a miraculous recovery (I'm reffering to the brain-dead cases, not those of other, simmilar conditions). Ironicly it is the religious, those that have least to fear by there relative or loved one dying, that fight most feverently to keep them alive. Those that are firm in the belief that there is an after-life, still refuse to put there faith up to that!
Death horrifies us, and yet fascinates us. The psychology behind that is far more complicated, and I'm not going into it.
The important thing is, that once we discover a way for us to live longer, to acquire immortality, we will take it. We have no other choice really, we're that scared of death. The people in the SA, and Elysia (who originaly developed the technology), would of course put ENORMOUS amounts of research into discovering a way to prevent you from dying. Or at least, once you die being able to come back to life. It's the holy grail of technology!
IC, we can not loose it. Getting rid of all telekinesis was reasonably large, since there are still many cases in the archives of it being used, but think if we took out one of the corner stones of the universe! How would we explain that? How would explain all of the many many times it's been used, all the characters that have back ups? Even making it less reliable ... what explanation are you going to give that?
SA representative "Due to our feeling that mortality is fun and we should give it a go, we're going to make it more likely you die in the line of fire."
Also try and understand that this will mean HUGE gameplay issues. With ST changed or gone, conscription to the SA will plummit. People in Yamatai aren't really used to the idea of dying permenantly, where you can have ST backups. The idea that you could die, for many of them at least, would be alien. They're not going to risk there lives in such an obvious manner, in a universe where space battles cost litteraly millions of deaths in only a matter of minutes, with weapons that can anihilate entire planets and capitol ships with a simple pressing of a button. Then you'd only have Neko's, and even they, designed for combat as they are, may be slightly less enthusaistic about going into battle knowing that they could die for good!
OCC:
It is our natural will to prevent our characters from being killed. Sure we can know that they'll come back, but unless we're really unempathic, we still care whether they live or die. If you read RP's a lot, you'll notice irrational hanging onto characters lives, rather than casualy throwing them away. ST does not make this fight for character survival any less significant, or prominent. Only one person has thrown there lives away recently, and that was one of Luke's characters - who didn't even have a backup!
Players that don't like this could try quite a simple factor - don't take ST backups for your character. Try and get a law passed that means a ranking official does not have the right to force you to have a backup, and then claim you object on a philosphical or religous basis.
"I do not believe in ST backups, since I think it takes away from life. We only live once, and having backups cheapens it."
That is a possible responce, however it is going to be reasonably rare in the SA, since it is part of there culture.
Now as for the efficiency of the technology:
Due to this pathalogical fear of death, people are going to be constantly improving on the technology. It has been around for a long time, and with the resources of the SA, I'm fairly certain they would have perfected it. That is if we're going to be realistic. In addition, recent technology developments in WARMS and PARADOX, mean that ships can violate Heisenburgs uncertaintly principle, and thus get an even more accurate depition of the brain.
With the state of technological perfection that the SA aspires to, I really doubt they'd allow one of there most vital components have more than a negligable (meaning obscenely rare, but could theoreticly happen as a plot device), risk of failure.
I'm burnt out now. Respond and I shall continue.
Hey, i resent that, i didn't throw away my character!
I felt that i was not getting anything out of my character, and i had no more use for him, i believed that to create a new one would be much more fun than my old one, and i saw no point in just leaving my character there doing nothing, i felt it was better to have him killed of instead of dissapearing into nothingness.
I felt that i was not getting anything out of my character, and i had no more use for him, i believed that to create a new one would be much more fun than my old one, and i saw no point in just leaving my character there doing nothing, i felt it was better to have him killed of instead of dissapearing into nothingness.
Zakalwe
Inactive Member
Really not the point here ....
I was simply commenting that the presence of ST tech didn't make it any more likely you where going to do that. And while on the subject:
Luke, it was a reasonable thing to do, although have a character that you think would be more conveniantly dead suddenly come down with psychosis and shoot at someone shows a lack of compassion towards your own characters. That's not a problem I suppose.
In addition you could have continued playing him, and you can have more than one character at a time.
Now let's not continue this area of conversation, and get back to the topic at hand.
I was simply commenting that the presence of ST tech didn't make it any more likely you where going to do that. And while on the subject:
Luke, it was a reasonable thing to do, although have a character that you think would be more conveniantly dead suddenly come down with psychosis and shoot at someone shows a lack of compassion towards your own characters. That's not a problem I suppose.
In addition you could have continued playing him, and you can have more than one character at a time.
Now let's not continue this area of conversation, and get back to the topic at hand.
Tom
Inactive Member
This sounds like a great IC way of pushing the toning down of the military from 10000000 ships to the smaller fleets of 125 or so. That really helps the anti-ST argument, actually.
This isn't a bad sociological impact either. Might be fun to pursue.
RPers will RP the way they do, that's for sure. They won't go getting themselves killed for no reason, as with any other RP. But players need to learn the good sides of character death, the stuff that makes them mature past the "irrational hanging" onto their characters. The stuff that makes them sit back, nod reflectively and say "Tough way to go, but that's war for ya. He/She had a good run." What we DON'T need is the cowboy's and indians rationality where it gets to be "haha! I shot you! Nuh uh, no you didn't because he can come back to life!"
One of the big reasons that I don't like the ST tech is because the fight for survival becomes less significant. Without consequence, how can you say that fight is just as significant? It's like in those cartoons where a dude falls into water, starts drowning, and then realizes the water is only knee deep.
The technology in SA is so advanced that we can just basically assume stuff works on completely unprovable grounds. Disproving the uncertainty principle? No amount of research I could do online would give me enough credit to disprove that theory so that our WARMS and PARADOX tech works the way it does. It is, again, just an OOC assumption we make for better game flow, as with ANY other advanced tech that we use.
By this logic, we CANNOT use the current IC tech level of SA to support or shoot down ST tech.
This is mainly an OOC issue with players taking positional stands.
We shot down magic/psionics for no good reason IC and we're planning to reduce the military size somehow (it'll be hard to find IC reasons that don't look odd), but we appreciate the benefits and growth that come out of these decisions. (For magic/psionics: no crazy abusive voodoo. For size: Getting it down so things are more managable)
Why can't we treat ST tech the same way? It's not untouchable.
Zakalwe
Inactive Member
With magic there had been a small sub-culture in SA of magic-hating, and single bit of RPing brought the subject to surface. There had been, what some people thought of as 'abusal' of the system. And therefore it had to be changed.
This is different. Show us a case to back it up? Show us a place of ST being used for your cowboy and indians scene?
Without that, there is no impact.
And the size of the fleets ... that was Wes' decision. There was no poll I can remember, he just decided that it wasn't a good idea to have huge fleets, and would rather have smaller fleets which where better orientated for their tasks.
OCC: Show us an occasion, go on! I'm not trying to be aggresive, but if you're saying:
But without proof that this has happaned, then you have no precident to base your judgment on!
Actually, a very simple explaination of the reduction of fleet sizes is that while there are still many, many enemies of the star army out there, recent weapons technology has invalidated the need for massive fleets to carry the destructive power necessary to fight those enemies. We have weapons that can destroy areas of space-time itself, pull energy from the transuniversal aether and move our targets into the hearts of stars.
We don't NEED big fleets any more, because any one ship currently in production and general use by the star army (the sakura class, for example) can take on small fleets of enemies and pull through unscathed.
And that's just the ships. I will not TALK about the power armor and upgraded neko crewing them.
It's not like it's been abused a lot. The problem is that through its normal use, the military RP is trivialized.
By the way Yangfan, if Wes is so worried about people dying in the RP, why would he put out a hit on Kai and Elena? Stuff like that happens a lot. Are you trying to suggest he can't tell the difference between real life and RP?
By the way Yangfan, if Wes is so worried about people dying in the RP, why would he put out a hit on Kai and Elena? Stuff like that happens a lot. Are you trying to suggest he can't tell the difference between real life and RP?
Tom
Inactive Member
Let me clarify. After reading my statement I didn't get the intention across as I wanted.
The "cowboys and indians" statement was meant to be interpreted as the result of the "irrational" attachment some players have to their characters.
ST tech can only help this along, as everyone expects their characters to be savable. The nearest example I can think of is what happened to one of Tyler's characters.
Zakalwe
Inactive Member
Uhm ...
I wouldn't say that Tyler has an irrational attachment to his characters. He's one of the more respected RPers on the site.
I think you're making assumptions really, or believing in the worst of other in these cases, and then making these assumptions ... I've never found the presence of ST technology to change my RPing whatsoever.
I wouldn't say that Tyler has an irrational attachment to his characters. He's one of the more respected RPers on the site.
I think you're making assumptions really, or believing in the worst of other in these cases, and then making these assumptions ... I've never found the presence of ST technology to change my RPing whatsoever.
It appears that everyone who wanted a vote has voted already and that the anti-ST dudes weren't able to support their arguments either (although some good points were raised); thus, ST tech will not be "nerfed" as some have proposed.
I'd like to thank everyone for the great discussion. It's good to have a feel of what the community wants as a whole. ^_^
I'll lock the topic now, since the debate's been settled.
I'd like to thank everyone for the great discussion. It's good to have a feel of what the community wants as a whole. ^_^
I'll lock the topic now, since the debate's been settled.
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