Haflinger

This is an intriguing statement. Offline, I play and run roleplaying games of the traditional sort quite a lot. Sir Quote's claim here that the point of having an IC/OOC line is to prevent people from using knowledge gained out-of-character in-character runs into all sorts of difficulties in actual games. Several of the people I play with refuse to talk about games out-of-character for fear of learning things that their character doesn't know, because it's too hard to play knowing the context that your character doesn't. Given that this is a game with tens of thousands of players, it seems unreasonable to expect them all to live up to an IC/OOC standard that people who've been roleplaying since the '70s can't manage to pull off. Another problem comes in with the identification of what is IC and what is OOC information. It seems clear that posts about wars in the game are IC, while links to player's Facebook pages are OOC. But... a lot of people identify everything that happens on IRC as OOC. This strikes me as a problem, since IRC is basically where I play this game. If all of IRC is OOC, then all the queries, where I'm playing a character from a freaking science fiction novel, guys, are OOC, and I'm pretty much ... well not playing. Heh. So I don't know. We do need a better definition of the IC/OOC line. Personally, I think it should at least extend to stopping CN wars fought on the basis of "He insulted my ex-girlfriend, so now I'm going to impress her by blowing up his alliance!"

I actually think the UCN-Legion treaty will be the most important of these three events. In outlining the conditions required for continued mutual defense right in the treaty, they take a step forward into establishing a place a place for morals in international law on Planet Bob. The Vox Populi charter can best be seen as a small step towards attempting to establish VP as a normal alliance. It's only a small step though; much more dramatic it would be if they went all the way towards normal diplomatic relations, but that would probably mean giving up their essential identity.

XRCatD, Syzygy knows what the rule is - he's asking there what the purpose of the rule is.

This depends on what the purpose of having a sanction is. It's a reward setup by admin which comes with some additional penalties (most particularly, the tendency to attract flocks of ghosts.) I'm still not very clear. However, it seems to me that Admin wants to reward alliances who attract a large number of stable, long-term players to the game. That's the best explanation I can come up with for the sanction system, and how it works. While alliances such as TOP and Grämlins and OBR do attract long-term players, and help keep them in the game, they don't attract them in large quantities; and Admin obviously wants to have as many players as possible playing his game.

Syzygy, you misunderstood my comment. I'm referring to the majority of alliances, not the strongest sanctioned alliances. There are quite a number of alliances that do not possess a member with 61K NS. Heck, Invicta only has 7 nations past that line, and we're on the sanction race.

This is getting out of hand. For what it's worth, very few people in CN have much of an idea what I'm like offline. A geopolitical simulator/wargame/whatever this is is not a very good environment to get to know someone well. 'course, since I go by Haflinger in other contexts, it's possible if you feel like a stalker to figure out more about me. But I doubt anyone has. Anyway. When I criticize your character in Alliance Politics, it is by definition not an OOC attack. I am IN CHARACTER there. At least I try to be. If you think I - or someone else - is making OOC remarks, complimentary or otherwise, in AP, go ahead and report them. I'm getting tired of people complaining about OOC attacks in an in-character forum. It breaks the character. It makes roleplaying harder. And including all criticisms of actions people take in the game into the category of OOC attacks distracts us from genuine, serious attacks. Like DDOS, pornography, and death threats.

Actually, Syzygy, they would barely make a dent against the majority of alliances, most of which have few or no nations in range of them. You're too used to playing with the big boys, you've lost touch with the ordinary players. That said, I kinda like your three-way split idea. Except I would cut it as first the top 4 total members regardless of NS, then the top 4 score out of all other alliances, then the top 4 total NS regardless of members out of all other alliances. If you do the analysis, you'll see how doing it that way actually prevents zerg hordes from getting sanctioned.

You must like my friends. I abbreviate nearly everyone's name. Dawny and Dilber are the only two people I talk to often that I use more than four letters for.

Inquiring minds wanna know. I just saw it there. What's it for? It's not in the IPB help, I looked.

I also dislike the "attack on one" phrasing. Although Invicta does have treaties that use that phrasing, I vastly prefer the NPO-style phrasing. It's clearer. I also like the phrasing in our ODN treaty, which activates based on need. But oh boy, did that one ever confuse the OWF. People were speculating that it was anything from a PIAT to an MADP.

What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

Ghosting is kindof annoying, and like Trace, I think there should be a coded solution to it: an alliance gatekeeper to admit applicants. I've played other games which had that as a feature, and it greatly simplifies things. This is not because of Vox, mind; I've advocated such a measure for a long time now, far longer than Vox has existed. It's because of the amount of time that has to be spent by ordinary alliance leaders trying to find out if rogue attackers are actually members of alliances or not. If ghosting is impossible, then this massive timesuck disappears.

Rouge is a general term referring to red-tinted makeup.

We lost a 40K nation, this is going to hurt.

This ... is rouge. This ... is a rogue. Please do not get the two confused, or I will be forced to start producing images that combine the first image with pictures of nuclear explosions to go with the next time I hear someone discussing nuclear rouges.

It does, in fact, restrict you; because it puts everyone else on notice that you will not change these principles. While people may have come to expect a certain type of behaviour from the Grämlins, until this point you weren't bound to it. That said, I think the fact that you've taken this step is a noble one.

Indeed; it seems as though we have an argument in favour of the idea that the total alliance count grows as long as the total nation count declines. Gah, my poor, overworked diplomats. So many places...

Well, orange anyway. Now, black tea.... mmm, assam. That's tea.

I'm so glad for #29 being true. It's pretty much how I met most of the people I originally met when I was starting out as a diplomat.

I think I did mention blogger drama was greater than CN drama. If silly ant jokes are as high as it goes, well, I'll be greatly surprised.

Well, it was the Illuminati.

3BG is Fish+Beer/Construction/Fast Food.

If you click the word NEW by a blog which has new comments on it, normally you expect the browser to jump to the new unread comments. This is not what happens. Instead, the blog marks all comments in that blog as read and leaves you where you are. I find this disconcerting. So instead, in order to read new comments, I have to bring up the blog list for that user, and click on the little square with a slash between the two colours for that blog entry.

Now, that's more like the right direction.