The issues of Antares

The server has been in quite the bit of strife recently; players leaving, everyone arguing, hornet nests stirred, lots of delicious and glorious drama. To the point, this thread is dedicated to the discussion on the opinions of what problem exist and what could be done to solve them.

While people have pointed fingers at many things: ERP, godmoders, cliques, etc, I believe these are only symptoms of these three core issues:


1). Lack of moderator action
As a recently departed player put it, "the moderators have no teeth". They are unable to commit to corrective action due to lack of tools provided to them by Kazyyk and because every action they do commit to has a strong likelihood of being chastised and nitpicked by Kazyyk. Moderators rarely commit to action except in the most dire of cases; and even then, they have to fight Kazyyk a lot to actually commit. I've seen enough from leaked staff logs and speaking with disgruntled staff and ex-staff to come to this observation.

This leads to stuff like blatant public sexual discussion and constant OOC spam in global to go unpunished, as we've all observed, as well as issues like godmoding going unchallenged.

What has to happen is Kazyyk needs to realize that he has terrible management skills and actually empower his staff, instead of second guessing for every slight they make. He's recently turned over a new leaf regarding this, and Kazyyk's not a bad person or deliberately negligent. I'm not trying to make a snipe at him, I'm just examining the issue clinically (and perhaps cynically).


2). Lack of ultimate authority
Starbound is soft sci-fi. Starbound is beta. There are lots of holes in lore, lots of strange quirks, blah blah blah nobody can agree on what is canon and what is not. This also extends to what is reasonable and what is not for NPC behavior, especially when it comes to canon factions. Furthermore, all IC events are run by players, causing players who disagree about what is and is not acceptable in the event to stick to their own cliques and bubble communities. Additionally this also extends to consequences; since nobody but players determine consequences, the only consequence that can be forced on a player is to exclude them from your faction or clique, accelerating the rate that divisions between cliques grow.

This issue magnifies the clique effect where major factions hate each other and refuse to include each other in roleplay in the belief that the other faction are wrong and all terrible roleplayers.

What is needed is an ultimate authority, a team of game masters (DMs for you NWN players) whose word on lore and NPC actions are final, and who get final control over NPC actions. If two factions cannot agree on a point of lore or an IC point, a game master steps in and gets the final word. Furthermore, GMs get power to control NPCs, forcing faction intermingling by running events and enforcing consequences for certain roleplay. This may lead to abuse by staff members, but a single corrupt staff member is far easier to resolve than a group of 20 and 20 players who hate each other.


3). Lack of conflict resolution for combat RP (PvP)
Precedence has shown us that every PvP fight turns into OOC whining. A planned event with predetermined outcomes turned to OOC whining just as I was writing up this post. Using moderators to resolve this has proven almost completely ineffective. Roll-based systems are too slow and clunky, and lead to OOC whining anyway because nobody can agree on what system to use, the rules of the system and what each roll actually means. In-game mechanical PvP currently is not viable, because everyone cheats and bring 1 billion DPS guns made in StarCheat to the fight.

This leads to combat RP being awful and unresolvable. This is a root for a whole lot of issues:
- why factions refuse to interact with each other; they don't want to deal with what they perceive as the other faction's bullshit
- why factions invent things up like anti-orbital guns and warships and magic scanners and planet killers; to try and stop combat RP arguing by making one side logically win by a landslide
- why players who randomly attack other players on populated worlds get away with it; nobody wants to deal with their bullshit

Originally, back in the simple days when it was Sen splash-killing idiots with a rocket launcher on Steel Valley, I was of the opinion that server-side characters was a bad thing, because it would prevent freedom of artistic expression (building tools and materials, fancy guns and colorful clothes). While I still believe that freedom of artistic expression is absolutely paramount and a core requirement of any RP server (unless you like everything made of wooden boxes), I am also now of the belief that server-side characters are required and that mechanical PvP must be the default form of PvP resolution.

Building materials, tools and non-combat orientated objects must be easily available so that creating beautiful structures is not hindered. Any sort of combat-orientated item should be restricted and require infrastructure, time, resources and labor to create. Players should not be able to cheat (GMs should be allowed to spawn resources in when it makes IC sense, though). Players should be able to import custom appearances for weapons, armor and clothes without importing custom mechanical attributes - I have a few ideas on how this could be automated by using a web submission form. Additionally, a staff of modders whose role is to keep the server up-to-date by verify mod submissions (including player-created mods) are balanced and not cheaty would be very important.

Mechanical PvP becomes the default form of PvP conflict resolution - players can still mutually agree to use a different form of conflict resolution like post-by-post or rolling, but mechanical PvP must always be accepted if parties cannot reach consensus.
This means PvP is:
- unbiased by human opinion
- more correctly reflects logical events (lets face it, most PvP on the server currently is in the realm of complete fiction to the tune of absorbing 500 bullets to the face without a scratch)
- in real-time, meaning half the server can't join in the 3 hour OOC fight that IC'ly takes 60 seconds
- fast-paced and action packed, like it should be
and hopefully fun!

And if combat RP is fun, the resolution unbiased, factions will be more eager to commit to combat RP and more willing to accept the outcome.

 

My proposed solution is a little more involved than that, but perhaps fully blown game master roles is not required if you fix the issue with combat RP.

Edit: to clarify, a "game master" would have the duty of a "loremaster", plus additional duties such as running in-game GM events. Players can still run events too, it's just that a GM has more authority and "power" to their event. For example, if say, the Billy Badasses goes to a major player city and kills a whole bunch of civilians for contrived reasons, the GM might run an event where an NPC USCM patrol attack Billy HQ to enforce consequence.

 

The issue isn't so much with non-combat RP or indirectly-related combat RP.
- Virtually nobody complains about cities popping out of nowhere with no clear resource base.
- While someone magicking up a fleet of warships is bad and does draw complaints, staff can take time to resolve them, it's not an issue that has to be done right here right now this very minute.

When it comes to combat RP, spending 20 minutes to discuss whether Billy's armor can deflect Badass's bullet turns what should be fast-paced conflict into a grueling OOC discussion that's fun for nobody. Conflicts that should last minutes get drawn out hours. This is not my opinion, this is an observation, and I think anyone who has been involved in PvP where two parties did not see eye to eye agree with me.

Isn't a lack of immersion the source of many complaints? Characters should not be able to change race at will, characters should not be immortal, characters should not dodge bullets, characters should not teleport through walls, characters should not have fleets of warships as a personal army, characters should not facetank walls of bullets.

Removing the ability to break immersion removes the desire to complain about immersion.

 

The problem is, how do you stop people from wanting to try so hard at winning?

I can't think of a good solution, and I doubt there is one. Peer pressure is probably the best answer, but it's not a very reliable one. Easier to fix the symptoms than the cause in this case, I believe.

 

There's also still the issue of characters that want to be the biggest badasses -in character-. They might be nice guys OOC and whatnot, but all it takes is 1 bad apple to abuse their trust and they'll find themselves wanting the "justify every attack you make" approach, leading us back to grueling combat RP.

I feel this was the case with the Holy Fleet; there were a number of players who played 'badasses' in the Fleet who were willing to die, but weren't willing to die to someone they felt was 'cheating'.

Edit: I'm just not sure if asking people not to want to be badass is actionable.

 

And that's the very problem we have! No faction wants to engage in conflict with the other faction currently, because they don't like each other, because they can't agree on the outcome of a fight beforehand. We have a stagnant server with everyone stuck in their own little clique, lots of toxic shittalking between factions and in internal faction chats, and no way to reestablish relations because the moment a conflict breaks out, all bets are off and the factions quickly don't see eye to eye, each believing that the way they're doing things is the more "correct" way to roleplay.