Kes Wrote:I don't expect this will be like FFXI was. I understand where Castiel is coming from with past experiences, and I was there too and I remember how policy had to be set up in order to help keep order. There were fewer people and more tensions back then. I also don't think everyone is going to just hold hands and sing kumbaya around the proverbial campfire. To be plain, there will often (if not always) be someone around that wants to do nothing more than rain on someone else's parade. It's happened in the past and having some mechanism to deal with it, I think, is a very sound idea.
Kes I'm not saying have no guidelines I'm saying don't over-do it because of a fear that things will go wrong and the entire community will fall apart. There is a big difference between no guidelines, realistic balanced guidelines, and strict guidelines that stifle creativity. I'm just cautioning that making a lot of rules as to how someone has to RP will more than likely stifle anyone getting together across guilds. Dictating how people RP only will cause problems and discourage a large community forming. Let me try to explain with an example:
Say we have a rule that all confrontations between people in different guilds must use rolls to decide outcome.
Player A and Player B meet by chance and are RPing. They are in different guilds. A confrontation erupts and they decide they hate rolls and want to do something simple. Player C sees this and is a stickler for the rules. She /tells them "This is against the RPC Rules" they say "we don't care its just us and its not an event". Player C runs and posts a thread about the horrible and unruly people in those guilds and how they must be delt with. An arguement errupts on the forums based on difference in how the people think demanding rolls as a deciding facter ere unfair to begin with. A huge mess now has to be dealt with because the overly strict view of the rules is clashing with not strict ones. To avoid this you'd need page after page of how in this situation this applies but doesn't in the next. You are creating a lot of work for yourselves.
Let's contras the above with an actual thing that happened in Starsider over just this issue. I can't count the number of threads I've seen as to "rolls for fights suck" arguing with "PVP is the only sane way to decide on conflict" so I'm siting one I remember. There's this guy named Anishor who plays a wookie and he's a major PVP lover and been in game since its launch. He's spent tons of money on his PVP gear and feels its the only way to settle conflict. One day he ran into a player, who had been on just as long as him, but hated PVP and primarily just stayed in the game for RP so he sold his nice pieces and what he wore was more-or-less just a costume. Their characters ended up having words and Anishor demanded he fight the other player said he'd like to use rolls. Anishor told him that he should of spent more time on PVP gear if he'd planned on starting fights. They started into a major arguement.
Anishor made a post stating his views that went on for days with both sides of the issue and Tziana had to lock the thread and remeind people there is no right or wrong way and to stop arguing. Guess what they did.
The problem was handled by reminding people to respect other RP styles and no rules were needed.