Ing The Puny
Junior Member
Don't make me go all tribble pointy on your butt!
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I'd like to start a discussion on how the betleH competition differs from a standard Joint Mission where a group of ships (SIMMs) go on a mission together with the same objective.
Here are the key differences as I see them and some consequences thereof:
I. Volition, How You Join The Action
On a JM, the decision to go on the JM is up to the CO of the SIMM. Which means that the players in the SIMM may or may not want to go on the JM, but that the choice to participate is made by the CO, rather than by the individual players. For the betleH tourney on the other hand, not only does each individual player have to decide to attend for themselves, but the player actually has to do a considerable bit of work to attend as well - filling out the join forms, and taking an LOA from their usual SIMM.
This difference brings up several consequences:
1) By choosing to attend the Tourney, players implicitly agree to participate in the Tournament and follow its rules. By joining the Tournament, you are agreeing to abide by its rules, just like you would if joining a new SIMM. On the other hand, there is no such contract on a JM. Players merely agree to continue to abide by the rules of their own ship, which is participating in the JM.
As a result of this, expectations for people to follow the specific rules are naturally much higher here at the Tournament than on a JM, because everyone involved has made the choice to attend.
2) Because of the additional work involved in attending the Tournament, players who do attend are far more invested in the Tourney than they are in a JM. This is a very special event, one which causes a lot of inconvenience just to attend (since you have to LOA from your own ship) and, as such people have invested a lot of time and emotional energy to be here. As a result, any inappropriate actions which occur here have a much greater negative impact on the participants than similar actions would on a JM.
3) Because a player can simply vanish back to their own SIMM at any time, the Tournament will frequently encounter players who simply leave. The lack of long-term consequences for quitting on the Tournament makes it simply a fact of life that people will be dropping out all the time, for a much broader variety of reasons than people would leave a JM - which would mean leaving their own SIMM. So there needs to be an expectation that, because of this, people will be dropping out all the time.
The flip side of this is that if someone doesn't post for even a single day, the presumption can be made that they have dropped out, since people are expected to drop out without telling anyone. This is equally a problem, and will raise perhaps more difficulties than the people who drop out cause directly.
II. Compartmentalization, Where You Play
On a JM, players are still part of their own ships, with their own COs. Here, everyone is getting together with a completely new group of players under unfamiliar COs, outside the authority of their normal chain of command. This also has several consequences:
1) Inappropriate actions that take place on another ship in a JM can be easily ignored. After all, it happened on another ship, so you can just not recognize that action within your own SIMM. Such things can easily be dismissed as not 'really happening' for the purposes of your own SIMM. At the Tournament, on the other hand, there are no such natural dividers. Everything that gets posted at the Tourney 'really happens' here. Which greatly compounds the effects of any inappropriate actions, since they directly affect everybody at the tournament.
2) Players on a JM are still part of their existing SIMM. Their primary interactions are with the people they are used to interacting with, and the authority over them is their own CO. A CO will be familiar with his own players, and the players familiar with the CO, which helps things run smoothly within each compartment of the game. Here at the Tourney, however, the Judges are complete strangers to most of the participants, and there are dozens of participants to only 3 Judges. This means a lot more conflicts as players interact with people that they are not familiar with, under constraints of a set of COs they are unfamiliar with, in an environment where the player-to-CO ration is far higher than usual.
3) If there are problems in a JM, each player recognizes the authority of their own CO, who is right there to ride herd on them. Given the fact that most players do not know the judges, the same recognition of authority is not present. Additionally, the vast number of players here makes the Judges very distant and impersonal figures, which makes it harder for them to make their presence felt to the individual players.
III. Disciplinary Action
Taking disciplinary action in a JM setting is completely different - and the consequences are completely different - from here at the Tournament.
1) Each CO in a JM has the right and responsibility to discipline their own players. So if something goes wrong, you talk to that player's CO, and they take care of it. However, CO's can't discipline players on other ships, which isn't much of a problem because of the compartmental separation of the different SIMMs as mentioned above. Here, everything falls on the Judges, who have to take disciplinary action for anything that happens among the very large group of players here. The chain of command structure is vastly different. With no individual COs to manage their players, the Judges are responsible for the management of everybody at the tournament, and it is their responsibility to deal directly with any inappropriate actions. Which is made much more difficult by the lack of compartmentalization, as I mentioned above.
2) If a player is kicked out of a JM, they are getting kicked out of their own SIMM, which is a part of the JM. That is an exceptionally severe consequence. However, if a player gets kicked out of the Tournament, they just head back to their existing SIMM, which really isn't a huge deal. So all disciplinary actions ranging up to being kicked out, have very different consequences at the tournament from the same actions, were they to be taken in a JM setting.
3) Players in either setting need to have confidence that inappropriate actions will be dealt with, and that they are being protected against inappropriate actions that directly affect them. In a SIMM, there is much more direct contact between a player and their CO, enabling such communication to flow easily, and that CO has a lot of say on things that directly affect the CO's ship. Here at the Tournament, however, this is much more difficult. Again, the ratio of players to judges is far higher than on a JM, and the players have no experience upon which to base their confidence in the Judges' authority. So extra effort should be made to make it clear that the Judges are taking and will take appropriate action to protect the players from the negative actions of others.
Those are my general thoughts. Please restrict your comments to a general discussion of how this is different from a JM, and what things should consequentially be different in this setting. This is not an appropriate place to discuss individual incidents or specific posts at this tournament.
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A Joint Mission or Not? (Read 724 times)
