@Alaskan, appreciate the feedback, I'll get to some of your points just below.
@James, I'm just gonna move entirely past the contextual details, if I may, and jump straight to the point:
1
Moderation is not here to limit RP; we're here to make sure RP isn't unfair to the majority of players, that's it. Most of the times all that's needed is a little bit of guidance and a little bit of back and forth with a proper RP planning thread. Guidance, anyone can give.
2
The resources index needs to be considered by players wishing to RP on these resources, just like the oil and gas index. Simply put, just like Beiteynu can't claim it has an endless reservoir of oil under its desert, it can't claim is has an endless reservoir of uranium. So it's binding in the same manner that it's binding when we think of oil: Trigunia has a ton of it; does that mean Beiteynu needs to absolutely RP with Trigunia or bye bye economy? Nope.
As a player in Beiteynu, I can completely disregard the resources index if I wanted to for doing RP on the defence industry without having iron (which I've done) and the nuclear energy industry without having uranium (which I haven't done, because I thought I'd be fun to do RP with Kundrati being our main provider). Now on the other hand, Kundrati, with its endless reservoir of uranium, can RP being the Trigunia of uranium, if they wanted to, based on the resources index.
So what does binding/can/can't mean?
A common language for all players on where a lot of stuff is on the map. That's it. So it's binding for players in the sense that players need to consider it if they decide to do some extended RP on resources and seek to generate more RP with other players from doing so.
Will we abolish Beiteynu's RP if I decided to RP the country as king of all uranium? No, but wouldn't it be lame for everyone else?
3
In understanding that the language is not specific and it's not embedded into the game rules, we're gonna do 2 things moving forward:
- Embrace flexibility on the resources index, which again, should be used as the map we all look at to generate resources-focused RP with each other
- Take a look at the Game Rules and see how we can adapt them a bit to consider this "binding" essence of auxiliary material
4
We have most certainly missed past RP from players, old and recent alike. We simply can't go through thousands of posts. As such, the resources index will
forever remain open to petitions for amendments from any player, at any time.
Players can hit the
moderation queries/feedback topic with links to past posts and we'll make sure the list is updated for the missed RP.
@James, @Alaskan, I hope I managed to cover your points, at least on a significant level, if not entirely.