ti-legacy.com

Greetings,

Someone recently told me:

"... my experience in RP is that subvert is viewed as a shady thing to do..."

Is this true? I find that surprising and upsetting because casting these social judgments on people wasn't the aim of the system I was trying to build. As a political game, I imagined people supporting and subverting one another being like Republicans and Democrats disagreeing with one another's politics and jockeying to see their agendas pushed or limited - maybe ousting the president to push in someone they like better. It's not intended to be illegal or nefarious, just a natural way to play the rise and fall of factions. In fact, the help file specifically says there's nothing illegal about subverting, and it cannot be used as the basis for treason charges, etc.

I do understand that conformity is a game theme, but we need some area and outlet for people to be able to disagree and flex their IC power, for what it's worth, to effect without being labelled shady. Is there any way we can facilitate a change to this view so we can allow a more political game to occur?

Hrmm. I've never thought or had it expressed to me that subversion in and of itself is shady.

I would assume that the belief comes from, a) Shady characters being those who typically go out of their way to subvert, and b) Confirmation bias on that premise.

I've subverted the hell out of some people, down to and including the Regent when my character was super-duper exasperated and/or furious with him. Never thought or felt it was shady.

I'm glad to hear that it may be a misperception.

What do others think? Are we content that it's fully okay to subvert people?

Me, personally? Absolutely. Subverting people is an excellent tool. If anything I wish it had more of a tangible effect for the individual being subverted -- the influence numbers and such are a great pool, but I would love to see them have more of a real, in-play influence over things. If you're the #1 most influential guy in the Knights, for example, how does that really play out? It works if you're the GL, but what about if you're not even a member of the guild? Does it really make any difference to have that support score? Not really. :/

I can't actually think of any way to change that, but if we figured out some way of doing it, I think subverting would be waaaay more significant. We might be more inclined to use subversion if the pools it affects made a tangible change.

We can certainly let it impact things.

Right now, being more influential gives you more IP, which in turn converts to silver if not used. What other suggestions would you have for how it might affect people?

I personally think that subversion should have a bit more of an effect than support, rather than them being symmetrical, in cases where they're both taken into account - or at least it might be something to try. While this may tip the scales in favor of dissenters, I imagine this could also end up being used to effectively quash dissent before it occurs.

Hrmm.

The leftover IP becoming silver thing was great! Definitely helped to that end.

Visibility would help, I think. I can see that I'm #X most influential in a guild, but no one else can, including the members of that organization. Could we have a command that allows guildmembers to see who the most influential people in their guild are? I might be dealing with a guy that's the most important person in the Merchants and have no idea because he's not a member, or isn't the GL, right now, regardless of his support score.

The other ideas I have are pretty weak. NPCs responding certain ways to highly supported people, etc. I don't know that it would work. How do you classify a "guild NPC" for starters, and how would they respond to the highly supported person that would matter beyond a single-line of greeting? Might help them in combat, or something? I donno.

I'd like if people could see how well-ranked within specific guilds you were so that we could flaunt that more easily - a few of my characters have occupied top positions in guilds to no tangible benefit. My own experience has been that it's difficult to get anyone to subvert anyone else because they don't want to get in trouble with the powerful crowd, but I suppose that's not unthematic.

I've tried several times to put into clear words my frustrations with the support/subversion system, but I will say that I do think it's far too unrewarding both to subvert someone and to be subverted. Seeing 'You are being moderately subverted' is so daggum boring a message when it could be so much more. I don't think that the reason or, perhaps, the affect of a subversion should be hidden behind an RPA request. Forcing the person who is subverting someone else directly to provide a more in-depth explanation to the person can help create RP rather than just be a bland, often meaningless-feeling stat in 'support show'.

I'd really like the support system to be expanded to allow more messages and personal sleuthing to enable the RP that it can create; I think that the METHOD BY WHICH someone is supporting or subverting another person — for example, are they spreading rumors at court? Nasty rumors with shopkeepers? Stirring up a bit of contempt amongst freemen in the Vavardi Quarter? Praising the person in after-mass gatherings? Glowingly offering praise to Reeves watching a crossroad? — along with a hint of the reason should be supplied by default, with the ability to both use RPA to uncover who it is doing this and the ability to spend weekly IP to protect yourself from being uncovered through RPA.

On another point, I've found the recent change in separating support and subvert slots to be incredibly frustrating. While I do greatly like that subversion has its own reserved slots now, I think Staff should seriously consider upping the default number of slots. As a guilded noble, I can support exactly one person and subvert exactly one. That's really frustrating for me as it feels like it's far too harshly limiting the influence I feel my character should have; the changes have had another side-effect of forcing people to save their slots for their guild leaders in order to ensure they're not ousted. THAT isn't a problem at all, but I think it's far too heavily directing people to use support on guild leaders and not on the majority of other players. After the changes went into affect Farra's support nose-dived, which affected how many people I can support/subvert, which affects how many meaningful decision I can make with who to support/subvert. Which frustrates me not because my character is suddenly less supported, but because guild leaders are suddenly MORE entrenched than before while the characters in the margins of society maybe not being quite so well behaved are easier to shove to the side and squash as players are more hesitant to remove the support of a GL they do like in favor of offering social support to a more loud-mouthed unique flower.

For characters like Farra who are easy to hate but probably not entirely important enough to support, what about adding another wrinkle to specifying how support works: make it where support (not subversion!) slots are doubled, but half can ONLY be used on guildleaders and the other half can ONLY be used on non-guild leaders? I think a change like this can be very thematically explained: supporting a guild leader requires a different level of social commitment than, say, supporting Rain Reed as your favorite barkeep or Emma as your favorite noble or ... well, you get the point.

I do think that, as one of the biggest advocated of the GL Approval system being changed and subversion slots being reserved, the system needs a bit of a check-up on how well it's working. I think the intent was to allow more political RP where non-GLs can build a support network to oust a GL they disapproved of, but it seems to have had the opposite effect entirely, allowing established power-circles to direct the subversion slots they have to crush the chance of change building steam.

I can honestly say I hate subverting people because I am one of those people that views it as cowardly and shady. I think my biggest problem is you don't know who is subverting you so there is no way to get them to stop subverting you. Maybe I am a people pleaser but yeah, I have have always associated it as a bad thing that needs to be dealt with. The fact that it gets passed on (If you subvert one of my supporters) doesn't seem right either but I digress.

I also disliked the previous ousting system because it gave players too much control over the vNPCs.

That being said, there are a lot of western connotations associated with the phrasing and color scheme. When you are a GL and run support show and see a bright red line item, people take that as a warning or bad thing.

The general consenus seems to be "Stop taking it personally" despite it being a rather targeted personal thing so I'll just go with the flow.