Ascendancy Recruitment Policy (ARP!)

[Knight Theamion]

Seeing as there is a shitload of confusement over these boards. (I call it confusement, it could also be that a lot of people are ill-informed) I hereby chose to elaborate a bit one it. There is a lot of overkill in explanation below, if you want to read the conlusion, scroll down and go to conclusion.

In 'regular' alliances (or BG's) there is a power of control on who gets in or not. This power usually lies with people called recruiters or with the HC or leaders of that group. It is constrainted and people know who to talk to to get people in (or out). This also ensures that these people can easily set up some recruitment policy and or constant standards recruits have to adhere to. (We all know from the old days the forms you have to fill in with 'how many hours a day can you be on irc, what is your time zone' and so forth. This is 'standard'. This is not Ascendancy.

From round 25 until round 30 (this is my knowledge but as far as I know it also happened before that this way). We used the old system. If you ever read the munin code or documentation from those rounds you could check. People would have invites and these invites they could use to their own discretion to invite new players. This meant that, for instance, the number of players I could invite to the game was limited. The fact this was limited is one of the sharp contrasts to the new system which I will explain further into this post. An invite would be put up and people could tell the inviter (daddy) that they'd have problem with the invitee (gimp). Whenever a gimp misbehaved or his daddy had enough of him his daddy could kick him. (Note that also Jester and JBG had the !getanewdaddy power. Noone I know ever complaind about JBG having it, but if you want to point the obvious out: No this is not entirely in line with the 'all equal' Ascendancy thought, but it completely is coherent with the 'don't be shit'-reasoning.

Now the new system (there are two versions with different carebear/cookie systems, these however do not influence the effects of the new system, so I treat them as one). Everyone can invite anyone. And everyone can vote on this 'proposition to invite'. The weight of these votes is dependant on the ammount of carebears one has. You can get carebears if someone else gives you a cookie. You can hand out 4 cookies a day. Cookies can be given for the most arbitrary reasons, but they can only be given in public. For instance:
<Theam> !cookie jester munin update <3
or
<Hosie> !cookie theam giving up own planet to save gal!
The public part is important because it prevents/exposes blatant circle jerks.
Now lets say I want someone in. Lets give an example.
<Theam> !prop invite Tesla Good player. Has been Ascendancy before, apparently split up with his missus and his office put him on office duty. Which makes him sad, miserable and 24/7 online. I say <3 and get him in.
(fictional prop btw!)
Now people will react to this and will go start doing !prop vote 365 yes or !prop vote 365 no (if Tesla's proposition is proposition number 365)

After a while I would expire the proposition and he would be in or not.
Kicking people is the same process. I am fed up with someone or thinks someone is shit (or a crasher or whatever) and I would do !prop kick elviz pnapping planet whore. shouldnt be in this alliance. hasn't attacked omen in like 23423 ticks and barely defends.

Also in Ascendancy we like to invite new players. It is the philosophy of most of us that if you find a new player in your galaxy (we usually degeneratively call them pet projects) we try to get them into Ascendancy immediately, if we think they are up for it, because it actually increases their playing satisfaction and we might retain a new sign up. Also, people from the 'lesser' alliances who are performing decently and who are being constrainted in any way often get an invite for Ascendancy too; being it this round or the start of the next round. Because we like those people, we think they should have fun. We have fun in Ascendancy so why not share some of this fun?

Conclusion:
Because anyone can invite anyone and most of us like Ascendancy and do not deny others that joy, people can get in fairly easy. The only players that do not get in are players who might have loyalty issues or who we consider to be complete ****s. And even then votes might be barely tied and a re-proposition might occur. Add to this that noone ever said, proposed or suggested that we should mass recruit, the idea that there is some kind of active and conscious policy to recruit every man and his dog is completely false. The idea that we wanted to recruit ourselves 'to the win' to make our opposition weaker is even more rediculous.
What you can understand is that cool people randoming in an Ascendancy galaxy can get easily guiled or wanting to go to Ascendancy. This is what happened.




PS A lot of people within Ascendancy think we have recruited too much and that a lot of new gimps do not fully understand the level of commitment and personal responsibility that is expected from them. How that is dealt with is something we will see later or at the end of this round I guess, however that is not the topic of this post.