[STAFF]: WARNING

[IahimD]

Trying to explain how something breaks the rules to players, and to try to get people to understand why something shouldn't be done - or at least, know enough to not do the bad thing, is the best we've got. If you or anyone else would like to write up more guides on what is and isn't acceptable for players to use, that is always welcome - but I doubt that there will ever be a realistic case where this game will get an official list of all possible bad things to not do.

What genuinely moved the needle for how I was perceiving this whole situation is this:

If you play in a way where you have gone out of your way to have a certain undercover identity, and you have done EVERYTHING right (all the right equipment, all of the correct ways of interacting with other players) except that you're limited by the game engine to dock in a certain secret base that nobody else should know about and you do so when you don't think anybody is around - it is absolutely unfair and powergaming for that to be used against them to ruin their roleplay. Having consequences forced on you because someone else acted on information that they shouldn't have had (the location of the base) while cloaked - and due to a limitation of game mechanics that don't let them dock anywhere else (we frown upon F1ing in space) is unfair, unfun, and if done deliberately, toxic. It erodes the trust that the game will respect everyone's ability to roleplay and to face consequences that they have earned - and be free from being forced into consequences that they have no way of avoiding.

My issue was that this whole time I could not understand how this was powergaming, but then I thought about a situation when the undercover character would have been Intelligence (LSF, BIS, KOI, BDM, whatever). In this case, the human undercover can protect "their cover" by docking with a Freeport or with a Freelancer owned solar. The Wild undercover does not have this option because of game mechanics. I did not think of that until Kai pointed out the obvious. Speaking for myself, I can now understand how this can be categorized as powergaming, while an Intelligence undercover docking with his own solar and having their cover broken by this might not be categorized as powergaming (or are these cases also powergaming?).
Because there are instances when factions gathered info about other factions while being cloaked and that was not an issue (correctly so).
Is it worth making a rule out of this specific Wild related exception? I can also see that some time will pass and new people with no context might start feeling that Wild is favored in some sense because they benefit from this one exception. Thank you, Kai and Eternal.Journey (in another thread) for taking the time and explaining the other point of view.