Okinawa Event #2: Isehara Terraforming Platform I Sat 9 15:00 GMT

[RockCrystal]

Wow. I go in to a 4 hour shift at work and come home to find a 3 page flame war about the event I participated in this morning. That... that's just great.:(

From what I can tell, the core issue seems to be: How throughly do we want to play pretend here? We have some people here saying 'This is a game, games are supposed to have some semblence of fair play.' Then we have other people coming in and saying 'Nope, that's OORP, this is a WAR and we need to win no matter what'.
Quite frankly, neither of these positions really has the moral high ground. Let me explain what I mean.
To the '16vs4 OMG' people: This IS a game. Games need rules. This one had them. We stuck too them, perhaps a bit too much to the letter, and this is what resulted.
To the 'That's OORP, This is WAR' crowd: This is a GAME. We can play dress-up with our digital penis spaceships as much as we want, but at the end of the day, what matters is having fun, and more importantly, not having it at the expense of someone else's fun.
To everyone: This is a new thing that we're trying here. When new things are tried, mistakes are often made, and lessons are often learned from them.
Here is what I think needs to happen:
1. Everyone needs to take a step back from this. Spend at least 24 hours thinking about and doing something else.
2. With that fresh perspective, talk about the rules we used, and whether they need to be added to, taken away, or changed in any way. Two possible changes coming to my mind, just off the bat: Either institute new rules that permit some OORP side-shuffling, like calling those corsairs in from Theta or sending those dragons out to Chugoku, or changing the 16v4 gangbang into a gruling endurance contest, wherein a series of 1v1 battles take place, whichever side runs out of ships first loses.
3. ...we had a lot of 'sore winners' on our side. I myself made some injudicious comments over system chat, to the effect of 'Let's invite the Junkers up here to clean up the trash the Hogosha left' Those remarks were completely innapropriate, and I apologize for them. I would like to see similar apologies made for remarks made both after the battle and here on this thread. *bites tongue to keep from mentioning any specific remarks*

I hope my unsolicited remarks and suggestions are of some small help.

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Be kinder than necessary, because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.
J.M. Barrie