[Mzyxptlk]

In contests, there are certain rules everyone has to adhere to. In Planetarion there are three types of rules: hardcoded game rules, soft EULA rules and community guidelines.

No one can break game rules, it's impossible. Examples of game rules are "each planet has 3 fleets and a base", "tags can have at most 90 members, of which 60 count" and even "the Recluse is a Cathaar fighter that targets enemy frigates and destroyers".

The multihunters oversee the adherence to EULA rules. These include "you are not allowed to farm or let yourself be farmed", "do not share your account with other people" and "you can only have one planet". Breaking these rules, if caught, gets your planet closed and deleted. In the past "you are not allowed to have more planets in your alliance than your tag allows" was a rule that fell under this heading.

Community guidelines are things that are commonly taken to be morally right. Not adhering to them is generally seen as dishonorable but they are not enforced by the powers that be. "Do not relay information from an alliance channel to another alliance", "backstabbing is bad" and (when they were dropped from the soft rules) "don't have more planets in your alliance than your tag allows".

Unlike in the real world, there is a very clear line between these three types of rules. We can break all the community guidelines we want, neither the game nor the multihunters have jurisdiction there. We may be hated for it, true, but that doesn't mean it's illegal.



The skill that you are so fond of plays its part in forming and maintaining alliances too. Skill isn't just what we do ingame. Where we send our fleets, what research we do, what constructions we build; it's important, it's how we build our planets, but it's only a small piece of the picture. There's a whole world outside of the game, commonly known as the meta-game. Who we talk to, who we form alliances with, what channels, bcalcs and bots we use, the PMs you get from that asshole who just won't leave your planet alone; those things don't have an ingame representation. In that, Planetarion is very sophisticated; we don't play against virtual avatars, we play against real human beings. If I have a bad day, you'll be hard pressed to discover a sign of that ingame, but in the meta-game, on IRC, on these forums, it shouldn't be hard to see that at all.

Where I'm going with this is that there's ingame skill and meta-game skill. The skill set needed to do well in the meta-game entails your ability to form agreements with other alliances. A willingness to call people in the middle of the night because you really need that Phantom fleet to cover your incomings. And yes, were finally getting to the topic of this post, how good you are at recruiting people into your alliance.



In this post I've tried to explain what this game entails, what the various types of rules are and what "skill" is. Over the last few rounds I've gotten the feeling that many people have lost track of what it means to play Planetarion. The skill required to recruit people into your alliance is very different from the skill required in deciding what research to do next or whether to init another 50 roids before the end of protection, but both play a very real and important part in what PA has always been. If you choose to ignore part of that skill set because it goes against the community guidelines or your personal definition of honour, that's fine, but don't complain when others choose not to. Or rather, complain all you wish, because that's as much part of this game as everything else I just said.