Exodus Integration : A Poll

[Regalis]

Certain members of the community obviously have little to no confidence that people will not take any conceivable opportunity to abuse any loopholes in the system for their own benefit.

This is interesting considering that basically all the proposed scenarios for abuse can already exist now in some transmuted form. At a minimum, after someone dies and makes a new character. I don't hear anyone calling for making ALFA truly a one PC only experience and not allowing new PCs despite the fact that nearly all of these loop holes exist under the new PC scenario. I am, therefore, unconvinced by the "we could never allow the possibility of such" rhetoric. You've already compromised. The question is where the line should be drawn, but the arguments are about how there should be no line because this is ALFA. It's already not as black and white as you guys are pretending in your strawman arguments.

It's also kind of insulting because implicit in the statements of some of you is that others in this relatively small community would be out to actively defraud you and undermine your experience if the iron fist were loosened a little. The fact that the very people who are trumpeting the caliber of ALFA's player base seem to be the ones who trust it the least is ironic. Do you really think that a draconian rule of law is the wellspring from which the caliber of ALFA's RP flows?

I pity you if that is actually the case. I'd also observe that I've seen relatively few overzealous paladins of Tyr running around in character. For that I'm quite glad, for if there were half as many of those IC as there are on these forums, I would have much less fun. I would guess they reason they aren't in a surplus is that they aren't always the life of the party, to put it mildly.

If people want to meta-game, it's going to happen. For some reason, this one issue has become the place where the flag has been planted, ideology has emerged, and demagoguery flourishes. Why here of all places? I have no idea, honestly, but it's clear some would be willing to bite off their nose to spite their face on this issue. So nothing will change.

That's fine enough for the time being. I'm less certain what it portends for the future.

There is, of course, the alternative doctrine of "trust; but verify." Where you demonstrate that you actually believe this is the finest RPing community there is and trust them to behave responsibly. You give them the freedom to help the community flourish. You don't punish all of the ones who wouldn't abuse the system and everyone else who would benefit from that added depth and breadth to the community. You reserve the iron fist for those who are found to abuse the system, and you encourage and trust the community to help police itself. This is not an open world, after all. Trying to preempt any problems would make sense if anyone could log in and go straight to causing havoc. Everyone here is screened, presumably wants to either be a good roleplayer or become a better roleplayer, and should have a vested interest in maintaining the integrity of the community. It's patently obvious most people here would have little compunction about reporting those suspected of taking advantage.

Have you guys studied management? Economics? Political theory? I'm baffled by the preference for the police state and the overwhelming presumption that a preponderance of guilt would invariably follow the application of limited freedom. It is antithetical to the prevailing teachings in the liberal democracies that I imagine are home to most of our player base. Perhaps global financial institutions and BP have done much to tarnish liberalism, but the empowerment of and implicit trust in the individual was the sine qua non for the affluence in the first place. Authoritarian societies that do not trust and empower individuals rarely create such levels of prosperity, giving them rather less to lose.

I do not understand the fear that has created this peculiar cultural moor. It's a small community. It'd be policed by DMs and by fellow players. There are compromise potions that obviate most of the risks above and beyond the levels that currently exist in one form or another. Moreover, it's far less hardcore RP to have people teleporting their happy arses nearly instantly all over Faerun than it is to have different characters that never leave their home region. Stick people who portal between servers in a small room unable to do anything for 2 weeks real life time, and maybe I'll relent. (Maybe that's how it works now?) Otherwise, even the hardcore RP argument would seem farcical.

PS: See some of you at the next Politburo meeting. *fleez*

[Drankathar]

Regalis welcome to alfa.

Nuff said.

[Rotku]

Is that a Dran I see?!

And Regalis - nice post. It seems to have grown a fair amount from the copy I read before

[Drankathar]

pfft no, its not! That Dran guy is a chump.

Exodus merging with alfa is a practical joke tho right...? Didnt exodus get formed because people didnt like alfa...? Or am I missing something here.

Anyway needless to say a lot of what has been said its true and shows what alfa really is. Sucks but meh. If your going to implement a merge with another "gaming group" then there's going to be teething issues as each group will divide on what they "want"

Easiest way of doing it is sticking to the ALFA core rules of one pc per person, no exceptions. If you play in both then choose, sucks but meh thems the breaks.

[Veilan]

The analysis that our reservations stem from "lack of trust" is just half of the issue. The other half, which instantly nullifies the suggested issue of "use the iron fist for abusers", is that policing, especially of individual instances of abuse, is next to impossible in ALFA. That has good and bad aspects, but renders making examples of the few bad apples a suggestion in thought only.

As I pointed out earlier, and as I'm sure many of you have also experienced, people will do bad things, no matter how good the community, and the larger a community is, the more anonymous, the less people feel like part of a close-knit society that entails all of their community.

I also don't agree that the policy of rules "supply side" is somehow detrimental. There's no yoke of unbearable rules - in fact, ALFA tries, and I dare say by now with some expertise, to be governed by rules that are fair and sensical, yet try to utilise as little enforcement and policing as possible. DMs don't want to police, and our community is, still, too big to work on a trust basis only, so it's not a bad thing if rules supply a frame that actually empowers everyone within it to just enjoy the game, without worrying about policing or their behaviour.

[Mick]

Good to see you, Dran.

Welcome aboard, Regalis.

[witch]

Very good post Regalis. Couldnt have said it better.
Also know that the discussion and choices made as you describe in your post have been very old in alfa (atleast since i was around..damm im getting old)

I also agree with Veilan (if my memory serves right formerly known as Alara?) that the bigger the community the harder it is to reign on trust only.. very true.
Think the question is.. have we gone to far in it is what is basically asked?

Easiest way of doing it is sticking to the ALFA core rules of one pc per person, no exceptions. If you play in both then choose, sucks but meh thems the breaks.

that would be an option yes.

[peterdin]

I do not understand the fear that has created this peculiar cultural moor. It's a small community. It'd be policed by DMs and by fellow players.

Agree with that.
I have always stayed away from these discussion and just enjoyed the game.
But now I just feel a silly urge (probably because of the heat overhere) to react.

I've never understood the 1 PC rule, but as it's the rule I obeyed it. (in fact if more PC's where allowed, I would just stick with 1 because of my limited time for this).
It seems all rules are based on fear, fear that someone misuses whatever is created.
But why shoudl they do that? There's (as stated before) a screening process, DM's and other players around.
So why not base on trust (call me naive)? Trust that people will do good.
But, as one of the pre-assumptions of NLP tells us, "Every behaviour starts with a positive intention" we can argue what this positive intention is.
An intention to "get my PC to level 435 as quick as possible"is a very good intention because it does make me feel good (example).
Seen through the eyes of another person, this would not be seen as a good intention.

So it all starts with what we define as good.
As this is hard rp community, I can define the following as a good intention:
Have fun while RP-ing in the faerun settings with others online. Focus will be on role play, slow XP increase and limited wealth.

The crux here is "with others". Together we define what is good/bad behaviour.
We can, while playing or after the play, give feedback on what we've seen and one can adjust (or not) behaviour correspondingly. This is what was happening on the late OAS a lot and was really appreciated by players and (speak for myself) DM.

I could envision that whenever peeps show inappropriated IC behaviour our interaction with them IG can show them how RP should be done. They could learn from it, appreciate it and copy the behaviour.

If they dont, well then at any time a DM could come around and press the F5 button on them.

Oh, I just remember its a poll, so I vote none of them. I would say abandon the 1 PC rule, but that's another discussion..

my 25 cts.

[Veilan]

But you can't singularly police in ALFA. Many good DMs and Admins have burnt out over that fact.

ALFA is not near as rules-nazi in practice as it is made out to be. As Regalis observed, people pay a lot of lip service to the hardcore RP on the boards. But in the game you will find your fair share of people sleeping, swimming and shitting in full plate and a minor armoury, and getting all upset if a DM has a guard NPC treat their rotten adventurer sorry scumbucket commoner bastard arse for the armed, dangerous vigilante he is... cry foul and demand tech raises when they choose to pick a fight with an elder earth elemental or wrestle a balor... have their buddies log on for CvC... and lie about what exactly they were doing naked together in that room . This, of course, is partly hyperbolic, funny exaggeration... but only partly .

We tend to make our own little spaces, and that we aren't simply one single campaign group makes trusting everyone an impossible way of governing this project. You don't even have the automated benign control that the familiarity with everyone entails if the same bunch meets every week in one guy's basement.

In ALFA, however, if you have DMs learn our wealth standards, it's a witch hunt. If someone blatantly cheats, flaunts our rules and then laughs about it, it still takes months and some Admin ruining their political fortunes to act on it and kick him out. It's also okay to not have a bad conscious in ALFA when your char suddenly has + a gazillion illicit stat points, in fact, your brazen ways of sticking it to the establishment may earn you admiration! Go you!

ALFA has very strong protections for players against "the power", which is the other side which balances out our "hardcore RP" claim. Now, don't misunderstand me - I'm all a big fan of due process and player empowerment within reasonable limits - I always point to my entry into ALFA politics, when I rather vocally demanded from Sareena that our Standards be released to every player. In a larger and mostly anonymous society, it's important to have checks and balances both ways.

So, I'm not trying to complain or rant "omg we have too many abusive players!" or "omg we have nazi rules!", what I'm trying to do is give an outsider a perspective why a lot of beautiful, great ideas - all that were presented here were quite solid - simply won't (currently!) work for the beast that ALFA is. To not further derail this thread, I'll not share my thoughts on how to get to a "more trusting" ALFA here .

That this discussion about Exodus integration triggered some navel-gazing in my mind does not risk a potential merger at all. I rather think it's a good sign of the health of our particular brand of unruly, vibrant "UN-like" project.

0.02€,

[Hialmar]

I had voted 2 but this discussion shows that we are not ready for that so I go back to option 1.

Now please someone lock this thread and let's forget those ideas.

[I-KP]

Now please someone lock this thread and let's forget those ideas.

Alternative: Stop reading the thread if you're bored of it and allow others to continue to discuss in peace.

...or is that just too liberal?

[Regalis]

Veilan, the crux of my argument was that all the problems that people have insinuated might emerge can already exist. If we take your jaded view, then they do exist. If they are impossible to casually police, then they are impossible to casually detect. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound? Does it matter?

Those who twink end up in the clink.

If people super sekretly transfer an item between servers to different PCs, is it lame? Yes. Does it ruin the internetz? No. Two people could play on both ALFA and Sundren and work out a cross-server quid pro quo. Or someone could decide to "retire," befriend a newb, get them to loot their corpse and then die themselves, and then loot all their gear back with their new PC, rewarding the newb over time. Or a dozen other scenarios that can be dreamed up just as easily as the ALFA/Exodus scenarios. None of them involve +10 stat items or 100,000gp materializing out of thin air. (If such materializes, it has NOTHING to do with 1/2 PC.)

People are asking for a border fence, but no comprehensive immigration reform. This is a red herring. If the supposed issues were really issues, then people would be pursuing them beyond this 1/2 character hypothetical. No one has remotely come close to persuasively demonstrating that people are secretly Jonesing to engage in a metagamed interserver money laundering operation. You treat it like inevitability and ruination. I say, if they can do it cleverly enough to not get detected by either DM or fellow player, then they aren't having enough of an impact on any of the honest folk for it to be worth the price you're prepared to impose.

I think the main use of the allowance would be completely innocuous. People would log onto the server with the active DM or where their friends were on so they could RP with them. It would allow people to get the maximum enjoyment from their time.

But maybe there can be too much of a good thing. Suppose people were allowed to have any many PCs as servers if they wanted, which is not what's proposed but could be seen as an extension of the argument. Suppose further that each server runs regular campaigns 3 nights a week, and each server has a night unique to itself. In the days where only 1 server has an event, maybe everyone knows their friends involved in that will be on that server, so they log in there. Everyone else does the same. So, hypothetically, most everyone's playing their TSM PCs on Friday, even if they won't be participating in the event. Having all those people wandering around all over the server could make life rough on the old DM trying to run an event for a specific group. Moreover, the groups on unique nights might swell to unwieldy numbers.

I suppose it all comes down to bulls and bears. Bulls, like you, are worried about enough of an explosion in the player base to bring about functional anonymity and the abuse it might bring about. I can see the logic behind that reasoning. My counterpoint would be that the ALFA servers will not compare favorably vis-a-vis the other NWN2 servers out there, without DM interaction. (This is rather by design.) Thus, I think the player population will be somewhat self-regulating and hyperinflation in the player base that might allow overt abuses to slip through the cracks without the DMs or other players noticing is likely an unjustified concern. (I, further, think you have overlooked that ALFA and Exodus are competing against all the other NWN2 servers, many of which are much better suited to the type of nonsense that you're deathly afraid will take hold here. Why would they work 10 times as hard to accomplish the nonsense here, when they could do it much easier and risk free somewhere else? I believe that's where you argument falls apart.)

Bears, like me, are concerned that the community won't be able to support 5 potential servers without a painful dilution in the player base for each server. The counterpoint for my position is the one I listed 2 paragraphs ago. A server could end up flooded on particular nights, though I would certainly hope people would respect DM requests to show deference to their events. (If not, the DM can just spawn a beholder on them. )

You favor austerity. I favor quantitative easing.

I just hope most of the people who favor austerity don't do so chiefly out of suspicion of their fellow members.

[fluffmonster]

I find this whole debate somewhat amusing from my perspective of mild disinterest.

The fact is that these communities are not that different and certainly much less different than some believe. The basic presumptions of what makes a good RP game are essentially the same. The attitudes toward FR are essentially the same. The notions of game balance are essentially the same. In that light, it is the claims of ALFA's elite uniqueness that amuse me most. There are lots of excellent roleplayers out there and only a small fraction play here.

I would urge people to keep perspective. This discussion seems to have headed in the face-value direction of asking whether Exodus is good enough to join ALFA. This highlights for me not Exodus' flaws, but ALFA's. It may be that there are too many irreconcilable yet reasonable differences to deepen the merger, but my impression is more that the real issue may be whether ALFA has the maturity and capacity for self-criticism to join with anyone. That will be exactly the case if it turns out ALFA's strongest impulse is to refuse to compromise on anything.

[zicada]

I think, to make an informed decision here, it would be good to know how many active players Exodus has to offer. If we're talking, say, a handful of people from Exodus vs hundreds in ALFA, one would logically presume to know where compromise, if any, should lay.

Also, please everyone, try not to make this into game B where you argue just for the sake (and enjoyment) of it. If you don't have anything valuable to contribute to the discussion, don't post. I'll just remove posts i find to be nothing but game B or devoid of value.

I don't see anything too negative in this thread, 10 posts in a row about it being negative though, makes it so.

[Veilan]

This discussion seems to have headed in the face-value direction of asking whether Exodus is good enough to join ALFA.

Oddly, I didn't get that vibe at all. Most discussion there has been on philosophy, not on tangible obstacles, indicating that "on the ground" almost everything is actually good. There's always argument about something in an online community, it's the nature of the medium. I've not seen a single serious post suggesting one project is "better" or the other needs to be "good enough". And I even could understand if people from a smaller, and thus more closely-knit and trustful community, would think twice before risk losing that. The hunch I'm getting, with some admiration, is that Exodus in my mind stands to lose more than ALFA. I consider a community based on trust and viable enforcement the better one... however, it's impractical for ALFA, both due to issues of size as well as philosophy. But would I prefer my 1 DM 4 player PnP-group over ALFA? Of course. Does it have near as many worries as ALFA? Of course not. But that lies in the nature of the thing.

And then there are some differences, that I personally don't find insurmountable or even big (judging only from the posters here). It's better to talk up front though then have some disappointment later.