[Tietäjä]

Originally Posted by Jester

Ascendancy currently have 66 members, so they would have room for Rob inside the tag. Even under the old restraints, his value/score are low enough that he could have joined.

This is a valid argument. Yet, it is being made invalid by:

While the whole *scendancy thing is an attempt to get around the alliance limit, it is not an attempt to break the rules.

While we can argue about the reasonability and necessity of such alliance limits (an argument where I totally agree with you a lot: they're stupid, and a lot of other rules enforcement pieces are a bit haywired, which I have been arguing for for a while now), isn't an attempt to get around the alliance limit an attempt to break the rules, de facto, giving that the alliance limit is a set rule? To me, Fiery said that the tag scheme is accepted as with the promise that there will be no cooperation between the tags. Like it or not, sitting on a private channel handing out scans to members of an alliance while your own alliance pretty much consumes no scans at all (?) can probably be interpreted as support. As strange as it sounds, but then again there's a lot of room for interpretation in the rules.

What comes to more and less discrete cheating, Mzyxptlk has a few valid points. This can be elaborated by instances such as the Arc-Bintara -case last round. This can be elaborated by the fact that in the past too, certain influential and upwards looked community members are more able to get themselves special permissions to go around a given rule (Round 17, where a certain alliance had more than the allowed 65 - was it then? - members, while other alliances were told that this is not plausible behavior). It all comes down to what we define "acceptable bias".

While I think the whole mess is ridiculous, there also remains the point Mzyxptlk mentioned that a discrete "cheat" should be punishable if getting nailed as well as a less discrete one. We could also present evidence of past "discrete" avoidings of the alliance limits, where the multihunters have just said there's not enough evidence, otherwise action would be taken, but the thing is, now there seems to be more plausible evidence.

We have over 70 members, we don't know what to do with them.

The intuitive choice would be not to recruit more than 70 members (as the tag limit is in place to prevent alliances from recruiting more than 70; hereby I'm not arguing that the rule is good and should be in place, I am arguing that while one is in place it's probably there to be played by).

I think Rob made a mistake by joining the Descendancy tag rather than the Ascendancy tag, but as I reasoned above, I don't think he ended up providing anyone with unfair benefit by doing so.

Yes, I agree on both - a mistake, more on the Descendancy tag part, taking into account that Rob's prominent as being the owner of the Ascendancy group. I'm a little confused and I have really no clue whether the *scendancies share channels or not, and what they share or don't, so I guess it's best if I do not comment on it.

I'd also like to point out that the Multihunters agreed to warn us if the interactions between Descendancy and Ascendancy tags were getting close to violating the rules, but failed to do so. It's hard to play by the rules when no one tells you what they are.

Indeed. And the harder it gets when it depends a lot on the multihunter at hands (say: in my case, one agreed that my Planet/Rulername The Gay Adventures of Hot Boylover George, aimed as a joke between myself and voodoo, isn't a very offensive one, and allowed me to maintain it, and the following day another multihunter was threatening to close me over it). I'll revert back to my five point plan when dealing with the multihunters. The actual "breach" is sometimes less significant: what's more significant is how you deal with the multihunters, and whether they're having a bad hair day or not.

The whole section 18 is in a need of a serious revamp. The lists of rules given make things unnecessarily complicated: as mentioned, scanners inserted to other alliances to leech fund and spy - are considered as members of which alliance in respect to the memberlimit? What about "less competitively playing" alliance members in the sole function of defending the given alliance's members for example incluster? Impossible to prove, pretty much known to have been done. It's all a little bit of a mess.