Shattered Kingdoms

"ITT" means "in this thread" FYI. OA is the only one who has misrepresented an IMM in this thread.


It's about incentives. It's about what is fun and why players make the choices they do. If you just prohibit certain alignment/faction leader options then there isn't any policing required. It will be quite obvious when an inappropriately aligned character becomes a leader. In fact, since IMMs are the ones who handle all setting of leader flags, it will require about 2 seconds extra to police this.

I didn't misrepresent anyone. I made a direct quote of a clear statement. Nice try, though.

Again, you're suggesting a bandaid when what's needed is open heart surgery.

I don't disagree with your points about leadership, but I feel (and newer players who have contacted staff members with their impressions of the game feel) that an alignment flag is pretty worthless if a player doesn't keep to it. The problem of crappy adherence may well multiply when players are forced to choose alternate combinations to coninue thier OOC quest to win SK, which is what I forsee happening.

However, since you want to argue with me, I guess you can continue.

This just in: people are whiny idiots. Meissa to lead investigation into why people whine.

If people are going to whine, they should whine about things that matter.

For example, why do people like Star Wars so much? Those movies are terrible.

Yesterday I was walking to lunch with some co-workers when we walked past some jacked up jeep liberty that had the imperial logo painted all over it and some ridiculous exhaust pipe sticking out of the driver side quarter panel. Easily the dumbest thing I've seen this week, Styles' cryfest aside.

No, I'm definitely suggesting open heart surgery. Restrictions on faction leadership alignments would be a major change and a lot of people would be resistant to it. Telling individual players to do this or that to change their behavior on a case by case basis is a bandaid solution. The point that I'm making in all of this is that failure in alignment adherence is a systemic problem with systemic causes. It is a byproduct of the roles of factions being usurped by players with no consideration for the rest of the player base who lead with characters of inappropriate alignements, because this forces good RP through alignment adherence to face strong disincentives. It just should never be that way on a game where good RP is supposed to be rewarded. In fact, bad RP is rewarded when players do what they need to do to get along with faction leadership to avoid the real consequences of being an oathbreaker, being hunted, banished, losing allies, and so on. Even characters not in factions can fall victim to this.

This has nothing to do with winning SK or whining. It has everything to do with SK being maximally fun for the largest number of players who are playing in totally appropriate ways. You and others have identified a problem and I have been trying to give you a good solution. There is really nothing to be gained from letting a scant few players rain on everyone else's parade by shirking the system and hijacking factions. They could just as easily play appropriate characters and we'd have a lot fewer problems. There is nothing to be lost by forcing the issue and putting a moratorium on this practice, and alignment confusion will be dealt a major blow.

Because no matter how you slice it, lightsabers are [REDACTED] awesome.

I'm pretty sure that popularity != quality.

I am behind Meissa at this point. I was only speaking alongside you to make sure there was an understanding of what it was you were saying, and that it had valid points.

Now, as for why you should let the IMMs handle this the way they want, let me ask you a question. Once your suggestion is implemented with the restrictions on faction leadership, what will you be saying when the people who aren't even in a faction are still continuing to break alignment?

This problem is bigger than factions, Styles. It is not just an intra-faction problem, as pointed out by Meissa. Fix factions, go ahead. I foresee less people joining a wider variety of factions because they know they won't get leadership. I wouldn't be surprised if less people joined factions altogether, which would lead to more characters not in a faction. Meissa is trying to explain to you that being in a faction isn't the actual problem, which she has tried to explain by stating that there are a good deal of characters not in a faction that are also breaking alignment.

Alignments aren't determined once you join a faction. Alignments can be broken completely aside from being in a faction. Alignments are being broken not because people are following a leader they shouldn't, but for another reason. This reason could be a misunderstanding of their alignment, a complete disregard for the boundaries of their alignment, or a complete disregard for rules altogether.

To reiterate, getting faction leadership alignment restrictions will not, in any way, stop characters from breaking alignment.

Threads like this are what make me stop playing SK. All of you should be ashamed and try to have more fun instead.