Proposed RPC Rule

Hello all,

I suppose I should start off by introducing myself since I don’t frequent the forums; Zex the elite, loyal LOTJ patron since roughly 2000, returned to gameplay after a break some three to four months ago. I was recently brought on-board by staff to help do some coding on a few things, which has been on standby for some pending work projects, sad to say, but come tomorrow afternoon I’ll be past them and back into the LOTJ codebase.

Introductions aside, and on to the intention of my post:

I would propose that no two members of RPC can be in the same clan at the point of induction into the RPC.

Similarly, if any two members end up in the same clan after their induction, in the event of a war involving said clan, one of the two would be forced to either resign their position in either the clan or the RPC.

I believe that this would create a new level of balance in the RPC, and remove the potential for bias. This was just a passing thought, as I heard murmurings on OOC about RPC collaboration.

Please offer your feedback, and if you’re an imm, DO IT! DO IT NO! ( Schwarzeneger )

As much as I’d absolutely LOVE such a thing, its not fair to the RPC folks themselves.

You suck, and.. that would limit rpc candidates.. and yadayada (insert random fact proving point)

This is a non-issue, so no, I’m not down with this. It would be needlessly complicated to enforce and on some level bias is always going to exist but the way the process is set up is that it does go to reasonable lengths to avoid it. You heard Ocerion rumbling about something he only saw one side of, but I agree that it’s not fair.

I think this is a great idea because Ocerion and Zeromus think it’s a bad one.

But really, RPC are player picked and that inevitably leads to player bias, no matter what. I’m sure the imms would spot anything fishy if it was going on in the rulings. (No pun intended.)

Pick players to be RPC who won’t have player bias. The clans thing didn’t really matter much this time, I dunno how it was in the past.

I tend to agree with the others. I can not agree that this is a non-issue though, because I’ve seen it first hand when I was on RPC. Also, we can not just say “well vote for better people” because thats been said since I’ve started playing and it just doesn’t work like that. We all know that those who keep an OOC chatting presence are those who end up getting elected. Its not based on who players think would be a good fit for the position, its based on popularity. And unfortunately the more popular you are, the more friends you’ll have and the odds are that means you’ll be in the same clan with others and most likely in the same clan as fellow RPC. I applaud the OP for trying to think outside the box on this though, because I believe that sort of thought process is what will eventually lead us to a proper way of running the RPC.

There’s like over 80 active players and only about 20 active OOC personalities. If it was only about OOC popularity this current RPC would never have existed.

Oddly enough, I like the rule.  I’ve seen tons of shady shit go on every single timeline.

I think that this rule would bring an OOC aspect to the RPC that has been cut out in other areas. The RPC have pretty much no idea what person OOCly we are dealing with on either side of a case, and have no way of finding that out. If a message needs to be paged to an account, we have to wait for a PR imm or someone else willing to help to get that done. When I started on the RPC, I had no idea that another member on it was in my same clan.

I firmly believe it would be far from fair to just force one person or the other to resign their character if a war happened. Say two or three RPC were in the same engineering clan, and had war declared against it (or their leader declared war on a rival firm). What then? One or two people get shafted and their RP trampled on because their clan gets involved in a war, or because of a decision of their clanleader?

Well thank you all for the enlightening comments. I appreciate all of them… Archeon… and I definitely believe that the discussion here highlighted what I wanted it to: whether or not the idea was a good one. Thoughts were presented on both sides, and now it’s up for consideration. Mission accomplished, and thanks everyone.

The exact writing of the ‘proposed’ rule was more of a spur of the moment, ‘off the cuff’ thought. Not necessarilly a well thought out rule, and that’s why it’s on the forum not the imm board… or something.

As per any comments regarding people not knowing that their fellow RPC member is in the same clan as them, I would say that that is likely a rare case.

Altrez, you’re probably right for the mostpart, but the statement that players being elected encourages ‘player’ bias, only begs the other side of the coin, which is entire ‘clan’ bias.

Zero, stop being mad. Just add your comments, you don’t have to assume my position, or its reasoning. I’m sorry, but you’re just flaming people at every turn. The bias has always existed, and always will, you’re right, but what is being done to prevent it? Do you have any better ideas?

Neven… Either you got voted for because you’re popular, or you were the ONE RPC member that got elected ( maybe one each term? ) for their political views, unless things have changed drastically in my latest absence.

I want to make a signature with a disclaimer:

All comments should be viewed as simple observations and reactive statements or questions. Thank you all for not taking personal offense.

To be honest Zex I wasn’t the only unpopular/unknown player to get on RPC this term. And there were people running who were quite a lot more popular.

Also, in regards to what Bax said, I didn’t even know who other RPC members played til they had to abstain from voting on certain cases, and the clan limitation thing is just really not quite feasible because like, how would you count an RPC alt with a spyapp? Suddenly people on the RPC who are unclanned with their alts wouldn’t be allowed to join certain clans, and they might not even know it because they don’t know who the other RPCs play. I understand the concern for the idea in the first place and it would be great if everyone could just be positive that players on LotJ don’t cheat or metagame, but surely you can’t think that every player does? Maybe if you feel that way then since that would imply that you do, you could just stop doing so which might encourage more players to also stop doing so and then this whole thing wouldn’t be an issue?