jamescfm wrote:I'm referring to players who will totally disregard any outside opinion on their role-play, especially that of the RP Team. Oftentimes, this means behaving as though their nation is significantly more economically or militarily powerful than it is and ignoring it's rankings status. What happens then is that because they can say "look at all this RP where nation X is behaving like a superpower", the RP team are forced to improve its ranking.
Okay thanks, that does give a little more insight.
The issue though is how're you going to force the country in your hypothetical to comply? Let's say the Mods make the Accords mandatory game-wide. Now let's use Hawu as an example because it's a fairly well-known RP Team Rankings controversy and because it largely involves me and I'm here to defend myself, no one else will feel called out. So let's say the Accords are made mandatory today, then tomorrow Hawu continues as it always has -- engaging in military and econ RPs as it pleases, using volume and quality of posts to demonstrate its military and econ status. Now let's say after I've posted a news report about a large naval deployment from Hawu including Amphibious Attack Vessels and the like, the RP Team makes some public statement that says: because Hawu is listed as a small military power, no RP about it deploying Amphibious Attack Vessels can be done. And let's say I refuse to go along with the RP Team statement and continue RPing as I had been doing. What will the RP Team do at that point? Will it announce on the forum that me and Hawu aren't complying with the Accords and so every other country is require to ignore Hawu RPs? Well what if I find one or two players willing to continue RPing with me despite that? Will the RP team delete my forum RP posts, the ones they disagree with? What if I post new ones? Would my Wiki articles be reverted and edit-warred? Would I be banned from the Wiki? Would the Mods ban me from the game for RPing actively but in a way that the RP Team disagrees with?
Perhaps the answer is yes. After all, don't players get deactivated or blocked from re-activating if they don't comply with Cultural Protocols RP? But military and econ RP aren't as simple as changing the names of your characters and the title of your party. Back to the Hawu example, it took many hours and days to draft a single military RP post for Hawu. That's because I've always obsessed over quality when RPing. Let's say others also view my RP as high-quality and maybe high-volume, but they still believe I should be banned from the game for RPing contrary to RP Team statements. What that means is that a punitive comply-or-we'll-ban-you response could result in the most active or quality RPers being banned from RPing ostensibly for the purposes of improving RP.
The enforcement problem is the reason that Reddy's and Maxington's solutions seem the most effective to me right now. Maxington and Reddy say we don't have a big problem with rogue RPers. Maxington says a quick conversation with the worst offenders is usually enough to resolve any concerns. Reddy says the RP Team needs to get more players involved in RP possibly through some kind of marketing effort. In short, engagement rather than enforcement.
A good example of Engagement Rather Than Enforcement for me would be if the RP Team responds to objectionable RPers by RPing with or against them. For instance, if the RP Team thinks I'm RPing Hawu's military as too strong, the RP Team could test the Hawu military in RP. If I say Hawu has an Aircraft Carrier, the RP Team could bomb it to see if I can really sustain the force capacity I asserted. Or they could add a large debt to Hawu's government expenditures to represent the procurement of the Carrier. For the many players who only RP inside their countries and never visit the forums, the RP Team could post on their nation pages detailing the foreign policy impacts of those players' domestic RP. Or we could bring back a limited version of the Multiple Accounts Experiment and allow RP Team Members-Only to create multi accounts to RP against parties/players inside their countries/on their nation pages. Or the RP Team could use your (Jamescfm's) National Oceanagraphic Society (Indrala) example where you addressed the problems of non-standardization and local disagreements by asserting a standardization solution in the territory of the map you controlled. I don't know if you've started a party org for it, but you could obviously draw up a treaty asking governments to recognize, legitimize, and abide by the NOSI's body of water naming decisions. Because your NOSI RP has been high-quality, I think most players will sooner just accept than object to it, because objecting to it would mean having to do at least as much work undoing the solution as you've done fixing the problem.