[violet] wrote:I pose a genuine question: is the resistance here actually because you don't want to share the World Assembly with Gameplay? Because I don't want to run around trying to solve problems that aren't the real issue.
Much of the "resistance" -- which I think is more "confusion" -- is based on this:
Essentially, a MetaGaming violation is one that breaks "the fourth wall", or attempts to force events outside of the WA itself. Proposals dealing with Regions, with other nations, Moderators, and requiring activities on the Forums are examples. This also includes Proposals that try to affect non-WA nations.
That's not an arbitrary rule created last time Hack updated the thread, It's the distillation of almost six years of mods and players struggling to work out rules for dealing with proposals on a forum where some play IC and some are permanently OOC. The latter speak with their "own" voice, but they're also the leader, shaper, owner and creator of a nation.
Add to that the double vision created by some people playing as delegates for their nation, some playing as Delegates for their region (a Gameplay and in some cases a roleplay position), some as both and some as neither.
Put these together with metagaming, which is a damn difficult concept to explain to people who don't RP, and you've got a lot of room for argument. Those simple "no-nos" have reduced the arguments, by making it easier for the non-RPers to deal with. They've been reinforced by many a deleted proposal and heated debate.
Consequently, anyone who plays the WA for a while "knows" that you can't mention your nation or anybody else's in a proposal, in any form. If you're indignant about something your regionmate has done to his people, you have to write it into a generalised form that will apply internationally.
The side-effect of this distancing is that WA proposals are deliberately broad, intentionally international, and supposed to be, as far as possible, about establishing a principle and instructing national governments to put it into practice, but leaving the details up to them.
If, however, you're indignant about some Gameplay thing someone's done to your region, well, tough cheddar, as far as the WA is concerned. It's something that happened "back home"; it's part of the Delegate's (or delegate's, or president's, or Glorious Leader's) private life. If you've got the power to endorse proposals as a result of an impeccably democratic election, or as the result of dictatorially forcing all newcomers to endorse the Delegate on pain of expulsion from the region, or because you're the Founder and what you say, goes, the WA
just doesn't care. If you lose that power because your region has been invaded by a bunch of teenage graffitists or by a shrewd politico-military operation, the WA
still doesn't care.
You don't put that sort of stuff in proposals. A region is a geographical or political grouping of nations, like the EU or NATO or the Commonwealth, and its doings don't turn up in WA proposals just as the EU isn't the specific subject of general UN resolutions.
Equally, WA proposals haven't been legal if they deal with RPd events, because, for the OOC players, such events don't happen; they haven't been legal if they tell mods how to act, because the mods don't exist in many RP players' worlds (the Secretariat are, basically, just administrators); they can't require players to RP compliance or non-compliance on the forums, because RP (for some) doesn't exist and for others the other forums don't exist.
Now, after several years of refining these concepts, we're faced with proposals that accept WA interest in non-WA nations. They're not broad; they're very specific. They allow WA action on RPd events. They allow WA action on Gameplayed events. They even allow WA action on characters (and what I'm to do with a proposal about Neville, who is one of my characters but is not actually an Ardchoillean, I haven't a clue. Ardchoille the nation can't claim any credit for him.)
The impact of this is bothering some as much as the removal of Influence did raiders and defenders, with the difference that the WA hasn't exactly been a constant source of friction.
You've said it's supposed to be extending the moral WA's reach (and thank you for clarifying that; I thought it was just feelgood pics). That's easy to deal with ICly; a parliament or assembly can hold a Special Sitting and suspend standing orders. But OOCly, in a Gameplay sense, it means some proposals are allowed to break more than one rule. We can get around that by rewriting all the rules, or simply by fiat: by saying that the rules for these proposals are different. That's what I, for one, would prefer.
But , like many other WA players, I'm finding it hard to understand your view that proposals in these categories can fit within the same rules as the others when, for most of us, they manifestly
can't. The new categories deal with areas that were previously off limits. In the old categories, they're still off limits. That's confusing.