Pacifica Reform

[im_a_waffle1]

I’ve written a couple of proposals and I am ready to post them here for input from all of Pacifica. Please read the entire post before commenting- some concerns you have with the first proposal may be answered by the second proposal.

The first one is this:

Pacifica RP reform

This primarily focuses on war reform. Currently, live war RPs (with minimum or no planning beforehand) are very chaotic and can cause lots of frustration among those who are participating in the war. After the war, large revisions may be made or the entire war could even be retconned. Recent examples I can think of are the Ryccia-LoC war, where the entire LoC joined without asking for permission from any party, causing the war to become a complete mess, and the ECW which was just last week retconned by TEM because, to me, it was a mess- the only thing I knew beforehand about what was going to happen to Goutafelo was that it was going to be invaded and it was going to be puppeted. Mandating a full war plan would help keep a war controlled and prevent it from going completely wild, frustrating everyone participating in the process.

I added the wiki requirements because, at least to me, it is difficult to find information about nations who don’t have wiki pages. Specifically, nations that have been here a while and do not have a post on the national survey thread on the new forum. This also helps with nations who fill out the national survey thread but omit critical details, like GDP.

As an added bonus, mandating the basics of a wiki page could be a good jumping off point for more worldbuilding on the wiki, which would help to create a more in-depth Pacifica.

Second proposal:

TSPRP moderator reform

This proposal will help with the heavy moderation load produced by the previous proposal, especially the war rules. Senior mods would be the moderators we have now, and canon mods could be taken from senior roleplayers or anyone who the moderators believe is active enough and has been around long enough to take up the role.

Aurora could be an issue but its size is so small it can just be moderated by senior moderators until a large enough active community arises to warrant its own moderator.

Discuss below and ask questions if you have any; I am happy to answer.

[LordGianni]

I find the proposals interesting starting points for a discussion.
Actually I would support the idea of the roleplay moderators or, generally, a neutral 3rd party keeping an eye on wars and whether rp-rules are met and agreed upon goals are kept. I’m sure there are counter-arguments to that idea too though and I’m open to hear them.
As for the Wiki, I’m also supportive that it gets used more than it is now. I can understand, why we have threads like the National Survey, however I always thought we should aim for the Wiki to be the replacement of any kind of fact threads here on the forum. While it is indeed a little more difficult to write on the Wiki than on here, I think there are more than enough resources to at least write up something basic as what you have suggested or to add yourself to the existing lists on the Wiki. I’m unsure, if we should tie this to our activity rules though and I’m also unsure, whether data like the GDP should be mandatory to ask for. If so, what data is mandatory? Does it also include military numbers, government spending on education, main industries, a political subdivision map, etc.? What is feasible for a roleplayer just starting off? How are retcons dealt with, that countries like Valkyria, Huawan or Gianatla also went through a lot (or you yourself too by just retconning entire countries twice now already)?

As for your executive reform plans, the main thing I’m unsure of would be, whether we have the capacity to provide as many “executive/moderator positions” as you imagine them.
Also, do I understand it correctly, that the new canon moderators will take over the duties of the map managers?

[im_a_waffle1]

@LordGianni

If so, what data is mandatory? Does it also include military numbers, government spending on education, main industries, a political subdivision map, etc.? What is feasible for a roleplayer just starting off?

Most of Template:Infobox country - Wikipedia. Not the entire thing, but I would assume everything except the images (map, coat of arms) and the anthem should be easy to fill out for a new roleplayer. Everything is editable later, so if someone doesn’t like what they put when they started, they can just… change it.

@LordGianni

How are retcons dealt with, that countries like Valkyria, Huawan or Gianatla also went through a lot (or you yourself too by just retconning entire countries twice now already)?

I’m not sure what you mean here. Do you mean on the wiki? Someone should have the pages deleted. I asked to have my old pages from the nations I retconned deleted, so I’m not sure why someone who is retconning their nation and not leaving couldn’t do this as well. This could be streamlined with the use of a Category:Delete where someone with delete perms on the wiki could go through there once a week or maybe every couple of weeks and delete all the pages in the category.

@LordGianni

Also, do I understand it correctly, that the new canon moderators will take over the duties of the map managers?

No, the idea was that a canon moderator could look at someone and see that they haven’t done their wiki requirements yet and tell the map managers “Hey, x hasn’t done their wiki and they’ve been on the map for x months, can you delete them next update?”. Then, at the next map update, if the nation has still not met their requirements by the time of the update, they would be removed by the map managers.

[Pronoun]

I struggled a bit with wording this post, because I sympathize with a lot of your sentiments, and I understand a lot of your intentions. One of the things I value about our community is the freedom and creativity it allows — and part of that, to me, comes from not putting up too much red tape. I value, for example, how anybody can get started with roleplay even while their map claim is pending. And I similarly value how anybody can jump into creating a storyline without needing to apply for approval or have all the details figured out.

Wars

I think there’s a difference between moderators keeping an eye on our rules, and getting too heavily involved in what storylines are and aren’t allowed. Having a neutral third party is valuable, but I’m more skeptical of putting up an approval process and limiting the freedom in our community. To me, it feels like we now have a better recognition as a community that, maybe, we all have more fun when we actually plan out our wars… and I think that we’d be better off working towards that goal communally, rather than litigiously. With any rule, we’d probably end up in a gray area or with different interpretations at some point, and while not seeing eye-to-eye is perfectly natural, I am a bit concerned that we’d end up with petty squabbles over the ‘letter of the law’ rather than the intentions.

Perhaps there’s a path forward that doesn’t involve putting up more rules or restrictions? I’m thinking we could maybe have a stickied topic on roleplaying wars that recommends things like planning in advance, being extra careful with the consent rule, and so forth. I found guides like “Realism and Population” and “How to Write the News” to be extremely useful, and I would imagine one on wars would be useful as well.

If we have lingering concerns over the state of our war storylines — and it seems like we do — we can and should have open, honest conversations about that, and work towards deciding and adopting ‘best practices’ as a community. In general, we rarely need our mods to put their foot down and override a player’s own wishes, and that system works because we all have good intentions here. With things like realism, for example, a lot of ‘enforcement’ just comes from discussing and listening to others’ feedback.

Wiki

I’m also skeptical of the wiki requirement, for a few reasons:

• Not everyone values the same kind of information. GDP might be a ‘critical detail’ for someone who’s more interested in trade and economics, but maybe not so much for someone who just wants to write stories about their country’s official religion.
• Making people produce data doesn’t mean it will be high-quality. We already have issues like this with voluntary data submissions (if you have an HDI over 1.000, I’m looking at you ), and I’m concerned that if we put new roleplayers on the spot and make them come up with a number, those values might not be so realistic.
• Not everyone has the same style of roleplay. Some of us may value worldbuilding through narratives, stories, and characters, while others may value laying out facts in a wiki-like format. I’m wary of prescribing a ‘right’ or ‘required’ way of doing things.

@LordGianni

I always thought we should aim for the Wiki to be the replacement of any kind of fact threads here on the forum.

I’m afraid that I have to disagree there. Both platforms have their advantages and disadvantages. For example, the forums are much, much easier to pull data from, and that makes it possible to do things like compile the national survey answers automatically into a spreadsheet. I’m skeptical that would be possible at all with the wiki.

Moderators

I’m more ambivalent on this — I trust our current moderators, and if it’s something they’d like to pursue, I wouldn’t mind.

[im_a_waffle1]

@Pronoun

Perhaps there’s a path forward that doesn’t involve putting up more rules or restrictions? I’m thinking we could maybe have a stickied topic on roleplaying wars that recommends things like planning in advance, being extra careful with the consent rule, and so forth. I found guides like “Realism and Population ” and “How to Write the News” to be extremely useful, and I would imagine one on wars would be useful as well.

I would be satisfied with a guide on how to war instead of hard rules. In the end, as long as we lower the number of wars that end in lots of retcon, I am happy, and I assume many others who are here will be as well.

@Pronoun

Not everyone values the same kind of information. GDP might be a ‘critical detail’ for someone who’s more interested in trade and economics, but maybe not so much for someone who just wants to write stories about their country’s official religion.

I value general information. I don’t think your argument here holds up very well. If I was looking for, say, the percentage of the national GDP spent yearly on tourism infrastructure, then this argument would hold up because that doesn’t seem like something that the average RPer who is looking to write about religion would think about, like you said. But I’m looking for the GDP of a nation, something not very complicated. Sure, a RPer may come here just to have their nation as a backdrop for their characters, and that is a perfectly valid reason to participate in Pacifica, but at some point you need to provide the most basic information about your nation and GDP is included there.

@Pronoun

Making people produce data doesn’t mean it will be high-quality. We already have issues like this with voluntary data submissions (if you have an HDI over 1.000, I’m looking at you ), and I’m concerned that if we put new roleplayers on the spot and make them come up with a number, those values might not be so realistic.

This is a fair critique but the power of a nation in a national RP like Pacifica is perceived. I could say my nation has a GDP of 50 trillion, but nobody would believe it so nobody pays any attention to it. I can throw out huge unrealistic numbers all day but the community could just say “No” and there’s not really much I can do about it. Although generally, people like this will either never RP and disappear or come down to earth and choose something that is more realistic.

Although if you are really concerned I could write a guide on the wiki guiding new roleplayers through every point of Infobox country with links to calculators and giving people the general idea of how to come up with these numbers, as I’ve had to come up with them a lot. I don’t think it would solve very many of the cases you’re thinking of because these people are coming in with the vision of their country being just “the US”, but if it would help you accept these requirements I am happy to do it.

@Pronoun

Not everyone has the same style of roleplay. Some of us may value worldbuilding through narratives, stories, and characters, while others may value laying out facts in a wiki-like format. I’m wary of prescribing a ‘right’ or ‘required’ way of doing things.

And I understand that! This isn’t prescribing a “right” way of doing things. Spending maybe an hour on the wiki writing a very basic wiki article isn’t telling someone that they must write a comprehensive wiki, at least in my opinion. If I am trying to find a nation’s GDP- maybe from my own curiosity, or maybe I’m looking to evaluate their economy, or maybe I’m looking to distribute aid and I want to see if their economy is really bad- I would rather go to their wiki page and find it in 30 seconds than spend an hour digging through months or years old forum posts just to find a simple number that may not be anywhere.

And, I know there are exceptions to this, but generally, if you can’t find an hour to write basic wiki then I struggle to understand how you will ever find the time to comprehensively worldbuild through long forum threads.

@Pronoun

I’m afraid that I have to disagree there. Both platforms have their advantages and disadvantages. For example, the forums are much, much easier to pull data from, and that makes it possible to do things like compile the national survey answers automatically into a spreadsheet. I’m skeptical that would be possible at all with the wiki.

I don’t see why this would be an issue. You could do it for comparison… but you yourself have said on Discord that comparison causes inflation of stats even more than they are already like you mentioned earlier in your post. The spreadsheet you linked acts as a kind of search feature through the national survey, but if I can just search the wiki quickly for facts then why do I need to see it on a spreadsheet? That seems unnecessary.

[Pronoun]

@im_a_waffle1

I would be satisfied with a guide on how to war instead of hard rules. In the end, as long as we lower the number of wars that end in lots of retcon, I am happy, and I assume many others who are here will be as well.

That’s good to hear. And personally at least, I definitely agree with your goals — there’s a reason neither of my countries have really been involved in many wars.

@im_a_waffle1

at some point you need to provide the most basic information about your nation and GDP is included there

It sounds like we have different views, then, about what counts as ‘the most basic information’ about a nation . And I think that’s the underlying reason here for our different perspectives.

Personally, I think roleplayers will tend to figure out the details relevant to their roleplay — I mean, it seems hard to roleplay otherwise. I don’t really mind if someone hasn’t quite figured out the year their nation was created or the GDP of their nation; if those aren’t the aspects of their country that they’re building up at the moment, then I’ll just enjoy the storylines they are creating.

Perhaps I could better understand your perspective if you could share some more details about why knowing this information about other players’ countries is valuable to you? (And apologies if that comes across sounding passive-aggressive — it’s genuinely not meant that way, it’s just difficult to accurately convey tone online sometimes.)

@im_a_waffle1

You could do it for comparison… but you yourself have said on Discord that comparison causes inflation of stats even more than they are already like you mentioned earlier in your post.

Yeah. At one point in time, I put everything I could find into a spreadsheet and used it to generate tables for the wiki (like this one or this one, for example). A lot of the competitive spirit that I remember sensing came from around that time. I don’t think it’s something unique to which platform we use.

[im_a_waffle1]

@Pronoun

Perhaps I could better understand your perspective if you could share some more details about why knowing this information about other players’ countries is valuable to you?

Whenever a new nation comes about that I am interested in, I like to get a feel for how life in that country is. Personally, I find it easier to determine this on a macro scale with numbers. Sure, stories about life in a nation are nice, but it is hard to determine how the entire nation is generally without these numbers, given that these kinds of stories are usually told for things like war or for major diplomatic figures in the past.

I find these kinds of basic facts also help as a backdrop for news- if a nation has lots of protests in the news, I can figure out if this is a one-time thing or if it has likely happened before based off of the HDI, income inequality, and government type. I am usually a strong proponent of realism so I like to ask questions about the background of the nation that I can link to current events in the RP.

[Pronoun]

Let me know if I’m oversimplifying, but a lot of that sounds like… your own curiosity? I mean, if you want to get a feel for what other countries are like, fair enough; I doubt you’re alone there. But, maybe a bit bluntly, I don’t think we are obligated to satisfy each others’ curiosity. It’s one thing to encourage each other to contribute to our collective projects (such as the wiki), and another thing to make it a hurdle everyone must jump through. I’d be totally fine with prominently displaying a guide on creating a wiki article to newcomers, saying our community has a strong culture of realism and statistics, and encouraging them to check it out; I just feel it shouldn’t be mandatory, if that’s not their cup of tea.

Maybe wiki infoboxes are what’s useful to you; maybe others find it easier to learn what a country is like through news articles, social media posts, short stories, and so on. Should we require all of them? I’d rather just let people roleplay how they want to roleplay — unless it’s somehow disruptive to the community, of course. But I think that not having some details about your country figured out isn’t really disruptive in the same way that it’s disruptive to declare you have a trillion nukes and are starting a world war. In the case of the latter, we’d probably have to talk about the consent rule and realism and so on… but in the former, do we really have to lock them out from roleplaying entirely?

[im_a_waffle1]

@Pronoun

Let me know if I’m oversimplifying, but a lot of that sounds like… your own curiosity?

That’s a fair view of what I said, and reading back through it, it really does seem like that. I feel like I start kind of getting to the point in the second paragraph. The point I was trying to make is that if you’re going to participate in Pacifica roleplay, you need to at some point participate in Pacifica roleplay. Yes, roleplay is in the name, but if you’re going to make a nation and be a part of Pacifica you need to eventually make a nation. That includes generating these statistics about your nation. Hopefully that clears some things about my point of view up.

[Pronoun]

I think we’ve both shared our perspectives at this point; I get where you’re coming from, even if I don’t full agree, and I hope you can say the same about me — but at this point, I don’t want to turn this topic into just a back-and-forth between the two of us. I think, at least for now, we’re better off agreeing to disagree and seeing if anybody else has thoughts they’d like to share

[Maverick]

While I commend the effort to bring discourse to the realism of Pacifica RP, I do have some practical thoughts as well as ‘ideological’ ones.

RP Mods
First of all I’d like to ask the current RP mods whether or not it’s wishful to have such a hands-on approach to RP’s and also if they have the time for it? I think not everyone is 24/7 disposable to read every little tidbit of all RP’s. Though as I understand it, these reforms would expand the number of RP moderators. Which raises the question, does our current community have sufficient candidates to fill those role? I don’t think it’s entirely my place to decide for that and more so for the current RP mods to decide as they have first-hand experience.

I’m open to the proposal and maybe a candidate for it myself, but I think I can bring some valuable insights. For example, I may have pointed out in my last ‘official’ days in the A1-0 canon of some irregularities to the canon’s general ruleset. This didn’t quite have the same effect I wished for and was told to let things evolve as the community has changed. Or maybe I didn’t have the rank to pull in those conversation. I think in essence, enforcing ‘harsh’ rules – or perhaps interpreted as harsh – does need to be a careful process with the right tactfulness, something to be considered when expanding the number of RP mods to not change an open culture to a nitpicky one. Which brings me to my next point of our RP culture.

RP Culture
I think our RP culture is fairly open for different RP styles and something we should keep. I fear that if we were to enforce the suggested rules, we might push people into a certain RP style. Granted it may bring more realism to Pacifica, but I believe a change in rules to be the short-term solution. However, we may achieve the same result by taking another path with a long-term implementation: the cultivation of an onboarding RP culture.

As stated, unrealistic RP’ers are easily ignored and then retconned once they fail the activity check which creates a retcon cycle. While somewhat unavoidable to an extent, I do believe that by implementing an open onboarding RP culture we can successfully ‘integrate’ newcomers to our open RP culture. By helping newcomers settle in with our RP standards, we can more easily integrate them and form more durable RP’s with them.

That being said, I do believe the suggested reforms do have some merit to form guidelines. I think if we frame it like that, it doesn’t feel as forceful, but it still accomplishes our wish for more realism & lasting RP members. I’ve made an example of the A1-0 canon a while back. Maybe something similar needs to be redone on the new forums for Pacifica as there were previous iterations on past forums. Furthermore, I do believe that the war section of my A1-0 guide still holds guiding principles which also apply in the Pacifica canon. Perhaps an interim solution could be to advertise that aspect more for now until a general Pacifica guide is made. Something which I might have an interest to help with, I might add.

Website & Discord Onboarding
The thing is that these guides should become more visible to our RP community. Be it through posts in Discord announcements, pinned on the forums or showcased in the wizard when new members register to the forum. It could help a long way in my opinion to help newcomers realise what the standards of our communities are.

In addition, we maybe should be a bit more proactive in a sense concerning unrealistic elements of Pacifica RP. For example, ask newcomers why their GDP is so high? Or why they believe themselves to be the new top dollar nation. It invokes dialogue which is necessary to further cement the realisation that such big claims require time to make them believe. What good is a 17 trillionaire nation with 2 billion citizens if it doesn’t RP like one? Dialogue is what makes people stick to our community, not a strict enforcement. Though admittedly, this will take efforts from the community at large maybe to truly make it feasible. Though again there might be a solution to that which I’ll address in the next point.

Senior RP’ers
We have recently installed the role of Senior RP’ers in our community. Perhaps they could be leading members to help onboard newcomers as well. Or primary members of the community to which newcomers can come with their question by say ping them through Discord. Though again, this should also be advertised similarly to the above stated onboarding methods for the guides. I think it gives the role of Senior RP’er a bit more meaning and direction for newcomers to start a conversation with the community at large or one-on-one. I guess one could describe them as ‘RP Mods lite’.

Anyways, this pretty much summarises my insights & ideas to resolve the core problem to my understanding.

[im_a_waffle1]

@Maverick

That being said, I do believe the suggested reforms do have some merit to form guidelines. I think if we frame it like that, it doesn’t feel as forceful, but it still accomplishes our wish for more realism & lasting RP members.

I would not be opposed to creating guidelines instead of full mandates for the wiki and war rules. I would much rather prefer we have hard mandates for the wiki, but if there is community consensus for guidelines that would be shown to new players- preferably before they begin RPing- I would not object.