(]c[) Zoners Trading Consortium V3.0

[lousal]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

all ZTC members would like to express their gratitude for your comments. We have received your main concerns regarding our self-imposed entitlement and thus feel well advised to explain the very essence of our organization by some informal thoughts and considerations below.

Sincerely,
Louisa Salome


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//***** OOC

completely neutral attitude towards all human factions including their guards.

Because it is very very difficult to acheive, and also, how do you know if you're neutral to a guard without seeing a guard vessel? This almost requires you to go to guard systems to check. Furthermore, if you aren't visiting guard systems, why would this rep matter, be known or have any effect?
...
Drop the guard system noise. 95% of factions will give you a high five on the streets and a bullet in your head in their guard system.
...
I'm going to nth this. It'll save you plenty of headaches in the long run.

Yes, we know that most guards do not like unpermitted visits in their systems, and we are not planning a faction whose very essence is provoking conflicts with guards. We would also like to point out that the purpose of our initial repfix should not serve some weird and artifically established harassment of recruits. It is simply a necessity if we want to take the "Zoner Neutrality" seriously.

There are currently discussions about the abuse of the ZG ID, and we think that they are well justified, but we also think that the main reason leading to a kind of unreflected and flat Zoner impersonation accopanied by hollow role play is the easy access to the ZG ID together with all its benefits. Bluntly spoken: If a player has not to work for his character's reputation he will not value it, and he will perform poorly after obtaining the ID.

From our point of vew the main benefits of the full guard fix are:
- it takes enough time for the player to decide whether he would really like to play a ZG and not only use the character for power trading
- the development of ZG characters should take enough time to reflect at least a little of its duration imagined to be happening in a real universe; timelines in role play are never linear of course, but a shrinkaqe to approximately no duration does not serve role playing purposes at all
- the immanent contradiction of general Zoner Neutrality and guards always being hostile towards everybody can be resolved this way

... while the main faction commitment remains: We would like to simulate a real universe as good as possible.

Well, how can we monitor our guard neutrality without meeting other guards?
There is no way around, but to meet them, while we are advising our rectruits to talk to other guards in order to arrange a short rendez-vous. Some may even hop into the guard systems just to encounter one NPC and leave it immedeately thereafter, but we do not appreciate this method. Once the initial repfix is completed there is no need to visit guard systems anymore ...

... as long as there is no good reason for doing it within role play. During one meeting in-game we have experienced the value of a realistic repfix: The reputation of some visitors in 74, guests we have invited to visit us there, were not fixed properly, so the whole atmosphere has been spoiled by guard NPCs permanently attacking our guests. Pretty annoying, since role play usually lives on atmosphere (not on technical rules) If you imagine other in-game events, preferably having been negotiated and being of a diplomatic nature, the true neutrality becomes very important for realistic Zoner role play.

We have planned the lesser repfix to be used for our transports, because we do not want to abuse this complete repfix by trades in and routes through guard systems. We have thought this to be a convincing sign for our purposes not to abuse the scope of our neutrality at all.

On a more positive note, every encounter that I've had with you guys on my secret Zoner has been a delight. you people are almost insanely helpful and polite.
I am charmed, thus far, and considering infiltrating your ranks in secret to find the source of your dark powers.

Some of our internal faction rules are called 'insane' by our members, but that is the way we would like to keep it because of our role play experience with classical RPG systems. RP fun is clearly correlated with the efforts a player has to invest. The ZTC should be no easy fun.

Dusty, on behalf of our founder Muad'Dib (aka Johann Boll) I would like to invite you to infiltrate our ranks, but I have to issue a warning first: Protect your soul well ;-)


Greetings, Lou