Yesterday, witnessing on the forum that the Northern Council, a powerful alliance of nations, appears to be being reformed, that Keymon, one of the members of that alliance, has made a territorial claim to sovereignty over part of the territory of Likatonia (where I play), and that nations of the Northern Council are in various ways supporting Keymon (including militarily), I created an innocuous bill suggesting the Likatonian Senate formally request the Northern Council and its member governments to clarify their position in relation to Keymon's territorial claim on Pirland.
As the controller of a party in Likatonia, this was a reasonable and legitimate RP choice on my part.
As a courtesy and to be helpful, I posted a link to the bill on the Northern Council thread, to make the players involved there aware of what was going on. To my amazement, Auditorii followed this up by claiming the RP content of my bill "doesn't make sense" because "this is not a publicly known meeting". This is despite the fact there was nothing at all in the OP to indicate this. All that was stated there was that it was a " special, closed door session", not that the fact of the meeting occurring was a complete and utter secret from the entire outside world.
It goes without saying that even if efforts had been made to keep the meeting a secret, it is unlikely the news would have been stayed secret for long, since the involvement of so many senior leaders/negotiators from so many countries would surely have leaked out. Nevertheless, as I say, the fact remains there was nothing at all in the OP to establish that the holding of the meeting was being kept a secret, only that the meeting was being held in closed door session.
It is difficult not to form the impression that Auditorii's aim in this has been to retcon the original RP in the OP purely in order to OOCly torpedo my RP response to it. The reason for this, it is difficult not to surmise, is to prevent his organisation from facing a potentially controversial political issue which might undermine his OOC agenda of building the Northern Council in to a united and powerful alliance.
A reminder of what the Game Rules state on retconning:
4. Players are reminded that going back on established RP ("retcon", "retconning") is generally unaccepted and Moderation will be involved in the event of significant retcons/retconning, especially when there are OOC issues surrounding RP. Moderation reserve the right to approve or deny retcons/retconning as they see reasonable and realistic;
It is fairly clear Auditorii's actions meet this definition.
By the way, I have no objection to Auditorii and others wanting to role-play nations and alliances of nations with great military and general geo-political power. After all, in any realistic version of Terra, there would probably have to be at least some such nations and alliances. I do feel, though, that players who wish to do this should engage maturely and reasonably with RP that emerges, as opposed to picking and choosing which RP to acknowledge according to whether or not they feel it advances a narrow OOC powergaming agenda. If players are not willing to acknowledge and engage with the challenges their nations/alliances face as well as their strengths, then I really feel that sort of RP should not be rewarded by giving them privileged positions in the economic and military rankings which every single player in the game is then forced by the rules to acknowledge.
I also have a concern about the way Auditorii appears to use IC posts in order to take passive-aggressive OOC jibes at players whom he has personal issues with. The previous rules set explicitly discouraged this, and I quote the previous rule below:
1.1 Players have a responsibility to differentiate between OOC (out-of-character) and IC (in-character) behaviour, and to make clear when they are communicating in OOC or IC terms. Since Particracy is a role-playing game, IC excesses are generally fine, but OOC attacks are not. However, players must not presume this convention permits them to harass a player with IC remarks that have a clear OOC context.
This may not be explicitly stated in the current rules, but the principle should, fairly obviously, still apply.
Auditorii does, I regret to say, have a long history of doing this (including with passive-aggressive OOC comments as well), but I will try to list some reasonably recent examples. Yesterday, he posted this in the Security Council thread:
The Dorvish delegation would like to know from what cue-cards are the Jakanian's reading from? Is there perhaps a Vanukean helicopter outside? Perhaps a Vascanian one? Maybe a Malivian one? These proposals from Jakania are quite something I must say. So, the Security Council would DEMAND that countries reveal if they possess nuclear arms or not? What would the Jakanian delegation say if a country refused to comply with such order?
This stood out to me because there is no IC evidence I have seen of Malivia, Vanuku or Vascania supporting nuclear disarmament, nor of Jakania even being unusually close to any of those 3 countries. With the best will in the world, I genuinely find it really difficult not to interpret this as an IC remark with an OOC context, and with the OOC context being Auditorii's personal issues with the players associated with the countries mentioned in the remarks.
Another example I can give is Auditorii's post in the Kafuristan news thread a few days ago, where this reference was made:
Kafuristan had become increasingly involved in regional affairs as of late, after years of backwards thinking and fundamentally silly practices such as the "Sultan of Kafuristan" some paid Vanukuean courtesan.
Given the lack of RP explanation for why Kafuristan having a Sultan is "silly", with the best will in the world, I found that remark difficult to make sense of outside the context of Auditorii's OOC issues with the previous Kafuristan player, Pragma. The "Vanukean courtesan" remark was even more bizarre, given Vanuku had had no real involvement in Kafuristan RP immediately prior to Auditorii's arrival there. It is difficult to make sense of that remaark outsde of the OOC context of Auditorii's OOC issues with Kubrick, the Vanuku player.
As some will remember, only back in April, I think, Auditorii was doing this in the World Congress, where I remember several players (for example, XanderOne here), felt he was using IC statements to take OOC digs at players.
Another concern I have is the way Auditorii, who simultaneously controls Dorvik, Ostland and the OOC position of Third World Coordinator, has been using his control of Dorvik and Ostland in order to try to enhance the military standing of both nations. See this post, from only a few days ago:
Baldor, Greater Kordusia - Ministry of Defense officials confirmed that Dorvik has completed its largest ever multi-prong exercise to date. The Dorvish Armed Forces conducted several simultaneous exercises and operations. The first of the simultaneous exercises was a rapid response to piracy from Joint Base Kamphon in the Sea of Carina. The Dorvish forces stationed in Ostland alongside Ostlandic forces conducted a rapid response operation when a Minan-flagged tanker was boarded by pirates, the Dorvish and Ostlandic forces were able to recapture the tanker and placed several dozen suspected pirates into custody. The tanker was return to Mina underneath Dorvish and Ostlandic escort. Dorvish forces in Ostland have been on a near permanent training mission in Ostland for several decades, this has lead to the Ostlandic Navy having one of the world's leading navies in the Eastern part of Terra, helping to cement Ostlands place as a regional power in Dovani.
Aren't we meant to avoid combining the RP of ex-colonies and our in-game nations in this sort of way? Would it be okay for another player to do this? I feel I would be more comfortable with this if, at least, there was another game official actively supervising this RP, and a more general openness about discussing what is going on.
More generally, I know I am not the only one who finds that Auditorii's RP in the nations he controls - Dorvik, Kafuristan and Ostland - is all, with the greatest respect, rather sameish. It leaves me kind of wondering what the benefit to general RP is of having 3 nations in Terra all RPed by one person and in such a remarkably similar, militaristic/authoritarian style. If this was an ordinary player controlling 3 nations (ie. a primary account, a second account and an ex-colony) would there be more of an expectation that, in the interests of RP quality and diversity, there would be more tangible differences in style/content between their 3 different projects? That really is an honest, genuine question, BTW, and I hope offence will not be taken to it.