Mack

Obviously there are the ideals of being only focused on the story and roleplay but you also cannot deny the very real incentive of ranking up. As Pilotfish had said before, its a matter of being able to be more of a player in the story if you rank up, to be relied on, to make decisions, and so on. Therefore, as he so aptly put it, it is inevitably a "race to the top" in order to be a person of influence with other players. It is rather easy to make a high-minded statement such as that, dismissing all those who seek promotions as being focused on the wrong thing or "wrong." It is good that you feel the way you do, it makes the server a better experience for everyone. However, it cannot be denied that promotions are sought after, for right or wrong reasons.

The rank-up issue was one endemic to previous SST communities and I have no doubt will plague this one in some fashion or another. Your explanation only deals with one half of it - that those who are worthy, that is willing to put in the time and effort get NCO positions, will rise up. What I am addressing, perhaps too implicitly, is that a primary motivator to get on and join the server is not only to shoot Bugs, but also to get promoted. Your explanation, while admirable, essentially tags the ceiling at Pfc for casual, yet interested players (and all others with less of an interest). If ranking up takes too long, is too arduous and too much of a job for something that should otherwise be considered fun then you have lost a prime motivator for people to get on and participate. Yes ranking up includes responsibility and having to manage things, but you seem to place too hard of a point on the barriers of promotion. As time wears on I think you will see this reflected in a diminishing playerbase. My proposal is simply the addition of one or two more ranks, maybe between Recruit and Private and between Private and Private First Class. Or even incorporating the Specialist ranks into the main rankings of the MI, if they aren't already. (At least they don't appear to be so to me.) What is ironic is your justification for your lack of PKs, particularly given the exposition by other administrators about justifying their ignoring of certain /rolls. They had made a pre-roleplay judgment about the viability of an action: that if it is foolhardy, the /roll should be ignored. You make a similar claim but in the other direction - that NCOs in the field rarely make stupid mistakes. I would expect on a battlefield that even people doing everything right might get taken out by a chance occurrence or overwhelming odds. PKs makes things more meaningful since something you worked hard for can be lost. It helps remove a sense of entitlement to a position. Right now people would be resistant to PKs because they, like you, are under the impression is that such PKs are only valid if they make sense from their perspective. You might argue that truly "arbitrary" PKs would anger people or make them quit. I argue that, if selective enough, it can be the opposite. If PKs were to be the general rule, it would require a paradigm shift in a lot of other aspects of the server. As it stands now if you simply made PKs more common with all other things being equal, it would be a self-fulling prophecy and the server would likely depopulate. A few, and I must emphasize only a few, high profile PKs where the person does not immediately get another character of equivalent rank and has to start from the bottom, would do a lot for giving more meaning to ranking up.

It sounds like good solution would be to have soft, but explicit guidelines on /rolls. Particularly when they are not applicable, how admins have discretion in certain situations and so on. What ought to be clear is that when a player can act independently and in those situations is encouraged to do so. You seem to have clear ideas on the proper circumstances for /rolls, it would be great if they were codified in a seperate thread. This also speaks to a wider issue of player involvement. Absent rolls, to a lesser extent I see this independent action problem in situations with low-ranking troopers in squads. There might be something meaningful or interesting going on during an event but as Pilotfish had mentioned earlier the only meaningful players are Corporals and above, hence the race to the top. While it is expected that line troopers are to follow orders, this is nonetheless a roleplay server and strict adherence to real-life counterparts would yield tedious results. A great example of this is last nights fantastic event - we were trying to find a keycode for a datapad but only about 3-4 players were significant in that part of the event. Seeing how there was 20+ players, responding to all those reports would be a nightmare. It's simply the nature of the problem as you so aptly described above and is essentially unavoidable in large scale events. There will also be people who are inevitably more involved and speak up more than others but I get the feeling there is an undercurrent of repressed action and things left unsaid due to how things are structured currently. The only 'easy' solution I see would be to have events at off hours when they player count is smaller. That way the server can have the big bug-shooting events everyone associates with starship troopers and also get more personally involved at other times. A separate question: How do the admins plan on keeping the roster bottom-heavy? That is, if PKs are scarce and people slowly but inexorably rank up, there may come to be at least a lack of Recruits, Privates and Pfcs.

Thanks for the response. I just want to make clear that I have no issues with individual administrators, its simply a matter of clarity on the /roll rules. That is, when it is applicable and when they are not; the boundaries and and areas of applicability of /rolls.

I detailed numerous caveats and concessions in the initial post towards the burdens on administrators when running an event. When I was prompted by Centrix to describe what happened, I prefaced it by saying that giving the details of the specific event would take away from the general suggestions I'm trying to articulate. Everything Grimm has said I have made room for, my tone was conciliatory and I omitted any mention of who did what. Rather than seeing this as a way to make things clearer for people who want to take risks in the future, you're seeing it as a personal attack on you. That is not the case. To briefly respond: You say that particular portion of the event was one where /rolls were irrelevant. This is clear to you. Maybe it is not so clear to others. You've detailed that in large scale or "main situation" events, that rolls are not allowed. This is not said anywhere else. From an administrator standpoint this probably makes a lot of sense, but it goes back to what I'm saying about what level of individuality and risk-taking you want on the server. There is no point during an event that a roll would not hold up other people in some way. Again not apparent, make a thread for rolls explaining the parameters of it. The PK thread is not enough. That rolls are made for "sparring" only isn't apparent. You're characterizing /rolls as selfish and unfair. Clearly we have two different perceptions which is why rolls would benefit from clearer guidelines. Lastly, you analogized my /me to something impossible and you said the better course would be essentially 'to go with the flow.' That is the very sentiment I am fighting against. First, the /me was not impossible and second, you're eliminating wholesale a category of actions that could make things more interesting. My issue is not that the actions were foolhardy or risky, but that it wasn't addressed at all. If it's stupid in character, PK me, but at least give me the chance however slim it might be.

This is less of a complaint about the situation and more of general suggestions for how it could be handled in the future. Posting specifics would distract from my suggestions as those involved would want to explain and justify their side, taking away from what I'm trying to get at here. It would be generally negative to bring it up, however, I'll abridge it so you get an idea. The first was when an administrator was an enemy with a bomb vest, he was shot by a Marauder but his corpse was beeping with the bombs. Everyone got out of the way, I rolled to try and move it out of the way and rolled in the nineties. I did my /me's, reported it, no response. I reported a couple more times and no response. I moved on. The second was when I rushed towards a barricade which was being watched by several administrators set up as enemies. I rolled an 83 and a 99. The administrators told me some of the quotes above - that its up the event runners discretion, etc and then shot me. I PMed each of them in turn asking for an explanation or justification and the quotes in my original post are what I received.

To your first point, the issue is that it in my situation, and I have noticed it elsewhere, was that there was not even the potential to do something out of the ordinary. It would be one thing if I tried, failed, and was PKed - here I didn't get the chance to do anything at all. To your second about the PK thread, that goes even more to the concept of notice and being clearer as it's not apparent that the purpose of that thread was for sparring - I took it as a catch all for any player-player interaction. Your take on that thread isn't immediately apparent when reading that thread. Hence the need for greater clarity.

My request is that there needs to be firm guidelines for independent actions taken by MIs in the field, particularly when faced with an administrator set in the guise of an enemy. I understand that an administrator's attention is divided; that an admin is burdened at every point trying to manage the event, deal with player requests, and roleplay. When I had protested what had occurred the justification I received was that the event manager has discretion to not deal with /rolls and in the alternative that not following orders "is not allowed" and that "you don't want your character to die, do you?" I do not blame the admins for this response or believe they meant to be dismissive, instead there were larger things going on at the time. However, this rationale does not promote MIs, line troopers especially, to take risks, distinguish themselves, or allow for anything but pre-determined outcomes. I also understand that in some situations authoritative action is necessary and that what might have been explained at the beginning of a mission will be tedious and obnoxious to explain to players who just connected. So what I suggest, alternatively, are: Default rule that /rolls are allowed when in any and all PvP situations unless otherwise stated at the beginning of a mission - in line with the rules on this thread: http://forums.starshiptroopersrp.net/index.php?/topic/63-how-permacharacter-kills-work-on-sstrp/. Maybe there could be some sort of indicator that /rolls are not allowed during a certain mission. Notice at the beginning of the mission is the main issue. If there are certain rolls that are accepted such as areas in which an admin has planned for troopers to have a choice, similarly indicate that /rolls will be accepted for that period. Rolls being incorporated into a /me so that it is easier to distinguish what the specific roll is for, this may be useful when there are a lot of things going on. Less passive aggressiveness from admins when someone does a /roll or tries to be different, its pretty negative to begin with and simply urges people to conform. It is certainly annoying for someone to use /report repeatedly when their issue isn't addressed but then again when there is no indication it is being considered or responded to - are we simply to let it go or try again, we have no idea without a response. There is no getting around how it might be irritating, particularly when there are things occurring all at once. This all factors into a wider sense of whether MIs are being managed or led, whether the mission is pre-set from the beginning or there are ways for a trooper to affect the outcome - if not it is simply shooting at NPCs which is OK too. The PK thread appears to indicate some autonomy is encouraged, the reality is that it appears to be the opposite. Where the admins stand on these suggestions will help indicate what is really expected of players.