this is to respond to the last remarks from mr. Zelot, starting in reverse order for sakes of a more clear reasoning.
' Wrote:It's funny, I must be like a psychic or something. Here I was not 2 days ago talking about how your whole neutral to all guards is going to be a problem and what to do I find when I log on tonight? A (]C[) (God that is a really really annoying tag to have to type) in the Corsair guard systems. What was he doing there? Well as he put it to me, "Wreck Hunting." Now, would be fairly upsetting to me if what your men were really using that rep you make get for is to "Wreck Hunt" in peoples guard systems. When I demanded he leave, I was told "You don't trust Zoners" and "We bring you food to feed your children" the implication being that you folks can do what you want and go where you want because you bring food to Crete. Well this is unacceptable. I have Screens, but wont put them up here, but if the leadership of (]C[) (annoying) wishes to see them, pm me. I would hope to get some response from you people.
[font=Palatino Linotype]Well sir, what can I say - indeed such behaviour is most unacceptable and of course you don't have to send any screens to us - such notifications we will always treat very seriously. The "wreck hunting" activity was not approved by any of the chief officers, and the arguments he put are absolutelly not in accordance with the policy of our company. Humanitarian missions serve only purposes of building positive relations with the poor Sirius citizens and we don't expect anything in exchange.
So, we have already performed an internal investigation, and determined the responsible person. The pilot has been strictly instructed: (a) not to undertake any unapproved actions (b) never justify any of his activity in a non-RP way. As he said to understand and to agree with all your arguments, I hope such situation will not occur in the future.
As a try of excuse I can only say that the abovementioned pilot is a relatively young member of our organization, maybe this particular aspect of proper behaviour in the Guard Systems was not 100% clear to him. But based on my knowledge of how he has been doing sofar, and how hard he tried to fulfill all the requirements put for him by our company (maybe not precise enough as to the guard systems aspect) - I expect that once learned lesson will not wander into oblivion.
Furthermore, in a few hours we will ammend the internal instruction which we give to our recruits. We will instruct them especially to behave properly while on the stage of neutralizing the guard reputation. The concept of the guard reputation neutralization I have covered a bit more in the next part of my letter.
' Wrote:A couple of more points from me. First, the whole have to be neutral to all guard factions I think will really be a problem for some people. I would not want your people in the AFA or Corsair guard system, I would shoot them on sight if they were found there, the fact that you want all of your recruits to set up their ship so they can go into any guard system means to me that you intend for your ships to go into those guard systems, if even to check their neutrality. That is unacceptable to me personally as I am sure it would be to other faction leaders. Guard systems are highly restricted areas, not to be entered by neutral factions, the fact that you require your recruits to go into these systems is a major problem for me.
[font=Palatino Linotype]I hope you won't eat me alive for what I say now, but... the full guard reputation neutralization has been done by our members already for about 8 times now. During this I have heard of two incidents, where one of our members was shot by some military guard (self guilty - could have asked for permission or for a contact), and once I have been asked to leave the system (which I did, having apologized for losing my way).
During the most intensive period (where we all did this paralelly), it didn't seem to me that we spoiles someone's play, mainly because the systems we were visiting (for purposes of adjusting the IFF frequency to the signal of the emitters used by visited factions), were in 95% empty. We hardly met anyone around there not to mention the systems interiors.
So what I am trying to say is: maybe we could find some way in which we could do the guard faction neturalization, if we only assured that this would be done in a fully RP-justified and non-invasive way? I think it is feasible, based on the fact how many of us succeeded to do it without spoiling the game to the others (at least I don't know of any such cases).
Furthermore, if you would be afraid of dozens of the (]c[) pilots wandering around the guard systems, I immediatelly assure: the number of recruits who come to this stage is small, not to say very small. For example, for now I don't recall any recruits being at the guard reputation neutralization phase.
This is intentional, since thanks to this mechanism we may filter out all the impatient and non persevering pilots, and end up with a small couple of mature and reliable people, who are aware that Discovery is not a shooting game. This is why it is so important for us to be able to rather make this process of a good quality rather than resigning from it.
' Wrote:The second point I want to bring up may seem petty, but I assure you, it is an important one. Your faction tag really pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable to people on this server. You will notice most of the faction tags are [Factiontag] or no bracketing such as the BPA who's tag is BPA. The admins have stated that people should limit the number of symbols contained in their names. The factions on the server have tried to abide by this policy. Not only is (]C[) fairly annoying to type, it is outside the accepted naming conventions on this server due to the fact that in 5 characters you have 4 symbols...something to think about, something like or [C] would be more in fitting with the servers naming conventions.
[font=Palatino Linotype][poor joke]
Well sir, actually this is a small c, so it's (]c[) - much less annoying, isn't it? Heh...heh... *noone else laughing*
[/poor joke]
I thought that we already fulfilled the requirements put on all factions. Before posting our proposal here on forums, we asked one of the administrators wether it is ok. The answer was that it is, under condition that we remove the ranks symbols (yes, we had ranks in it too!), which we naturally did. So, however this was only a loose consultation, I assume we whould have been informed if it was outisde of the acceptable naming convention (besides, having 4 symbols / 5 characters doesn't seem to make us exceptional as I observe the pilots list).
We have put some effort in adjusting our logo to the tag, we have designed our corporate paper based on this, and I must say we are bound to it. Of course, we don't intend to irritate anyone (especially you), but on the other hand it would be very hard for us to change all the tagging/graphical system based on every such signal. I hope you understand us here.
' Wrote:Lastly I still think this would be a better proposal coming from a faction like Universal than another Zoner trading company, just more like the house corporations.
[font=Palatino Linotype]Sad to hear that. As I said before, we are strongly bound to both neutrality & corporate aspects of our identity. Resigning from one of them would mean cutting into half all of our entire roleplay vision.
So at this point I can only say, that (provided that we become approved) we will do our best to stay credible both as Zoners and as people acting in an organized company. And since we don't see a real conflict between these values, I very hope that some day we become credible also for you.
Kind regards,
dr Werner Mazurksy
CEO, board member
Zoners Trading Consortium Ltd.