(09-11-2016, 04:48 PM)Petitioner Wrote: The point of a roleplaying environment is that it attempts to, at least in some way, simulate a realistic or at least believable scenario. As nothing unreal exists, naturally, we have to draw on real life to determine what is and isn't realistic -- maybe it seems like a tautology, but it's important to keep in mind. A great deal of hostile encounters in the game are between enemy soldiers; soldiers of Liberty or the Hellfire Legion or the Gallic Royal Navy coming up against one of the other two, for example.
In real life, these soldiers would give each other no warning before engaging each other unless there was some sort of extremely extenuating circumstance, such as, say, requesting safe passage because they were transporting wounded soldiers or even civilians. So, naturally, if we're trying to be realistic, it's a little silly to expect a GRN| and an [LN] player to shout at each other for, as you say, five minutes or so before right-clicking as hard as they can, especially when most of the time the players just want to get to the pews anyway. In fact, I'd go so far as to argue that engagement restrictions, in this case, are only there to encourage people to play by the "rule of cool" (being rad af takes precedence over anything else, including realism, and some healthy taunting and space-banter is a pretty cool part of the universe).
In situations like piracy, it's admittedly less clear-cut, but I'm part of the school of thought which holds that as long as it makes sense for the character to be doing, it shouldn't be against the rules, period (unless there's obvious ooRP harassment going on and grudges between players [not characters] being pursued). I understand the frustrations many players have been very vocally expressing lately, as someone who once voiced similar concerns myself in years past, but I think the solution for them is just to try and make themselves more appetizing to exchange text with rather than to try and enforce their vision of roleplay onto other players. Certainly, mandating an interaction last a minimum amount of time is an extremely ham-fisted way to go about it -- it would completely kill piracy (five minutes is way more than enough time to get away, call for help, or both) and bounty-hunting alike (same deal).
tl;dr You probably have good intentions with this thread, but it's truly an awful, terrible idea.
