This is true, but I think you're addressing a complaint I haven't really made. The inescapable game mechanic aspects have usually been ok in roleplay terms. How can Gruenberg move from Malibu Islands to Antarctic Oasis or Quintessence of Dust from the IDU to Wysteria? Well, they didn't: they just switched their "political affiliation". (For example, this could be like when Tunisia applied for EU membership, despite not being in Europe - or maybe it was Morocco? I know Morocco was in the Eurovision Song Contest, with a song including the lyrics "we are all different colours but on the inside we are all red"!)[violet] wrote:I feel like I still don't understand this. The WA is, of course, rooted in gameplay in its implementation. As a participant in the legislative process, you know that, for example, the people most influential on whether a resolution passes or fails are the Delegates of large regions. In a close vote, at least in theory, a person could cause a resolution to fail by unseating a Delegate and swinging the region's votes.Quintessence of Dust wrote:as the esteemed Kumquat says, the disrespect for IC/OOC conventions makes it nigh on impossible for RP-oriented nations to retain WA status.
Now I get that the now-GA has more or less separated itself from this: that when you're IC here, you're not your nation but a representative of your nation, and you ignore the gameplay world. What confuses me is a statement like the above, that RP nations can no longer function because there's a new part of the WA that acknowledges the existence of regions. Hasn't that always been the case? Not in your legislative face, to be sure, but there? I thought that GA play has always required mental partitioning, the decision to draw a world inside a particular scope, and ignore what's outside of it.
Ahem. Similarly, in AO we tend to assume the "delegate" is a title bestowed on a nation for services to the region, andRP contests to "elect" them. The Compliance Commission? The dreaded UN/WA Gnomes. It's even possible to RP the mechanical effects: for example, the recession RPs that followed both The 40 Hour Workweek and Promotion of Solar Panels.
Any "mental partitioning" required for these features is par for the course in a game of this nature - not, after all, designed with roleplaying in mind at first, from what I've read. What is beyond the pale, is voting on "the player behind Kandarin". (I feel it's worth pointing out, given this example is used so frequently, that no one bears any ill will to the player behind Kandarin - they're just a convenient example, like invisible pink unicorns or carrots.)
These are the people we "post as" in WA activity. How can they possibly have an opinion on a player? I'm not talking about the MetaGaming rule as applied to proposals, obviously that's out of the window. But forum posting in general is governed by the same conventions. The One Stop Rules Shop even says so! (It still does, by the way.) Shoehorning the conceit of a region, a delegate, a proposal category, automatic compliance, whatever, into a roleplay is possible. I fail to see, though, how our ambassadors, delegates, representatives, foreign secretaries, etc., can be expected to have opinions on "the player".
So then the answer is, presumably, that the SC business be conducted out-of-character. But then, I was elected delegate of my region based on my in-character activity. I'm not qualified to vote on whether Kandarin is nice and Macedon nasty, and I'm certainly not more qualified than others in my region. But we can't split up delegate duties. What I've been doing is hard ignoring SC activity. But the consequence of this, however gratifying for the preservation of my RP universe, is the complete withdrawal of Wysteria, one of the more populous UCRs, from a whole part of the game system. Not an ideal solution!
This not to mention that some players actually are trying to post in-character in the SC forum - meaning my out-of-character comments about an out-of-character resolution are met with an in-character reply that assumes my comments were in-character, but in which the character makes reference to out-of-character and in-character actions. Typing this reminded me of a teatowel we had in our kitchen that my English grandfather gave to my Austrian grandmother to explain his greatest passion in life, cricket, to an outsider. It went something like:
Look, I know all this must come across as very obsessive. It's only a game, my characters don't really exist, it doesn't really matter. But given the amount of effort we've put into developing the game, it seems a shame to see it all end just at the time when the new forum had prompted quite an upsurge in WA activity.You have two sides, one out in the field and one in.
Each man that's in the side that's in, goes out, and when he's out, he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out.
When they are all out the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out.
Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
When both sides have been in and out including the not-outs, that's the end of the game.
Howzat?
It did!? Uh, that was the one April Fool's joke that had us rolling in the aisles - until we realized it was real. I don't see any of us could possibly have suggested it, given the first we saw of it was the resolution we had before us to vote on. You don't have a link or some details by chance, do you? Academic though it now is, it'd be interesting, because I honestly had no idea any WA players had suggested that.[violet] wrote:Boy, not to dig up history, but the way I heard it, the push for that came out of this community. The idea didn't come from above.
Ok, I apologise. I hadn't realized you'd apologised. (Hmm, would an Australian use a 'z'? The mystery deepens...)[violet] wrote:QoD, you're being mischievous. You're taking a post I made before I understood the nature of this community, and which I've subsequently recanted and apologized for, and spinning it into a conspiracy.Quintessence of Dust wrote:I do have other issues: the statements by the gamestaff that WA play is now redundant, for example, are more than a little troubling,
Nonetheless, it was a comment you made, and it wasn't in isolation. On separate occasions, you said we had "discussed pretty much every issue there is", that our game had "stagnated", and that it needed "new life" breathed into it. So I guess my question is: based on what? I'm really interested, because I do accept that some of us have been a little dissatisfied with WA play lately: the UN/WA break didn't really cause an upsurge in activity, in truth. But when we suggested some changes in Unibot's sticky, you said that all these would do is improve the game as it's currently being played, and that you were looking for something more fundamental.
...why? I'm not taking you to task for it, I'm just interested. If this is about Influence and France/Belgium, then six and a half years into the game is a little late to change horses and decide the UN/WA should deal with OOC gameplay factors. If this is about the political tenor of the WA, or some particular resolutions, then maybe that can be corrected without Commendations. If it's about something else, then could you explain what? While I know the mods occasionally get irritated by the somewhat rules-intensive style of WA play, which takes up far more mod time than any other group in terms of modcentre activity per size of player group, I'd never realized until now that there was this negative attitude to WA play, and given it's a game I enjoy I'd be anxious to do what we could to overcome it.
But not, I assume, separating the SC and WA entirely? So long as they share the same voting and queue mechanics, there will always be this overlap.As stated, I want to ensure that GA legislation is affected as little as possible by the SC. I've outlined my commitment to that several times, including in this thread. If we need different quorum figures, different voting times, whatever, we can do that.