Criticisms of Rules

Support Feedback
1

If I am breaking in rules by starting / posting criticisms of rules in this thread, oops in advance. :wink:

“The Imperial Conflict Rules have recently been updated. To continue playing, please read and accept the following rules.”

Is it possible to change the term ‘accept’ to something to the effect of ‘commit to abiding by’ the following rules.

Is it possible to not have to indicate such a commitment but still play? If rules can be changed and each time you change them doesn’t this force everyone to have to click some button to indicate they ‘agree with’ / ‘agree to following’ the rules.

It is unclear the language used whether or not by clicking the button I am ‘agreeing to following’ the rules or ‘agreeing with’ the rules. In any set of rules, EVERYONE must necessarily ‘disagree with’ at least some aspect of the rules (by sheer law of probabilities it is impossible that any single person can ‘agree with’ any set of rules), and so I think it should eb clarified that we are being asked to commit to following the rules rather than being asked to indicate our carte-blanche agreement with the rules (which, again, can change any time)…

More criticisms of rules to follow, that is if I am not suddenly banned or account-deleted for starting this thread…

2

:roll_eyes:

I asked you to make this thread, why would you then get banned for doing so? This seems just a tad bit dramatic. =P

Anyway, that’s a good point regarding the meaning of “accept”. I’d say instead of changing it we could remove it entirely and defer to the “Global Rule” section, which immediately addresses the commitment to the rules as a whole.

  1. Global Rules
    By logging onto your game account, you agree to the rules described on this page. These rules are subject to change without notice.

Note again here that this is asking a player to agree to the rules, not with them. In other words, you are saying that even if you don’t like a rule you will still abide by it. In fact, nowhere do we require that players agree with the rules themselves.

Is it possible to not have to indicate such a commitment but still play?

Possible yes, but doing so would render the rules useless. These only work if everybody is bound by the same terms. If a player didn’t commit to them, they’d be permitted to cheat.

If rules can be changed and each time you change them doesn’t this force everyone to have to click some button to indicate they ‘agree with’ / ‘agree to following’ the rules.

No, players don’t have to re-accept every time. This is actually what makes it possible to say “These rules are subject to change without notice.” That phrase wouldn’t be necessary if we forced players to re-read every time there was a change.

In any set of rules, EVERYONE must necessarily ‘disagree with’ at least some aspect of the rules (by sheer law of probabilities it is impossible that any single person can ‘agree with’ any set of rules)

I don’t follow this logic. I think it’s the other way around actually; given even a totally bizarre and weird set of rules, the probability that a single person would agree with them in totality would actually increase over time/sample size.

It seems an odd statement that every single person in our community “must necessarily” disagree with some aspect of the rules. That just doesn’t make any logical sense. It is entirely possible that a player is 100% fine with the rules.

I think it should eb clarified that we are being asked to commit to following the rules rather than being asked to indicate our carte-blanche agreement with the rules (which, again, can change any time)…

That’s not what the rules say though. No player is being asked to agree with anything, they’re being asked to agree to them. To your point though, I can understand how this isn’t sufficiently clear to a casual reader. I’ll consider clarifying language.

Also, to be clear to everybody here, we are entirely open to feedback regarding this kind of stuff. In fact, we highly encourage it as can be seen from a very similar conversation here and resulting changes here. I don’t understand where this perception of hostility/oppression comes from. :man_shrugging: Feedback and criticism is always welcome.

Anyway, @xeno, thanks for the feedback.

3

Seems to me that it is asking a player to agree _emphasized text_with the rules, not merely to abide by them.

What makes rules completely useless is a significantly high percentage of people not following them.

People know that that there are rules and if they are going to break / bend them, they could get in trouble regardless of whether or not they are codified. They also know that not knowing the rules does not give them a license to break them. People are not idiots.

If people are going to bend / break the rules, making them sign that they agree with / to the rules won’t make them not try to break / bend them less.

It only makes IC seem tyrannical to make people sign such an agreement with / to the rules in order to play the game.

It’s already understood they are expected to know the rules and keep up to date on any changes.

You seem to think that by making some rules and enforcing them people will ‘learn’ to obey them and even start to agree with them over time, regardless of how absurd such rules might have seemed to them initially. This is tyrannical, very scary.

Don’t take this personally, I find most systems tyrannical / oppressive.

4

I’ve already stated above that this isn’t the case. It doesn’t say “with”, it says “to”. Again, you are not required to agree with anything.

Here’s an analogy: If I were cooking a steak for you as a dinner guest, and said to you “No, this isn’t a pork chop, it’s a steak.” and you tell me “Well, I don’t eat pork and it seems to me that it’s a pork chop. I prefer steak.”, then at that point you are taking issue with a set of circumstances that don’t exist. You’d be ignoring the fact that what we have is already what you want.

It’s the same thing here; you’re concerned with a problem that doesn’t exist.

This is an incorrect assumption. Having structure around expectations reduces violations. This isn’t an opinion of mine; it’s something that we’ve directly observed.

Yes, I do think this. We have also seen this proven to be true. This is mostly visible in Discord but has also been apparent in the game with regard to people cheating.

I don’t see why this is a bad thing, especially compared to the alternative where nobody knows what is or isn’t off limits.

I agree. Thankfully we don’t have this problem. The large majority of players have never been punished for any rule violations.

That’s your opinion, and you’re very much entitled to it.

That’s fine. What I don’t understand is how you can perceive our implementation to be “tyrannical” when we’ve directly incorporated several of your own suggestions in 2016. Surely, if we were as oppressive as you fear, we wouldn’t be as open to feedback?

Do you still take issue with the rules knowing now that you are not required to agree with the rules? I don’t exactly understand what you want us to do, given that the problem you want us to solve doesn’t actually exist.

5

It doesn’t matter what you say the rules say / mean. It matters what the rules actually say and the first thing the rules say is to ‘read and accept’ them… And the last thing the rules say is to click a button indicating you agree or disagree. The button you have to click doesn’t say ‘agree to abide by the rules’ or ‘disagree to abide by the rules’; it says merely ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’, unless I am mistaken… Hold on. Let me check…

Actually the buttons say ‘I agree’ and ‘I do not agree’.

It states what it means to click the ‘I agree’ button:

“By clicking “I Agree” below, you acknowledge that you’ve read and accepted the rules above.”

Again, it is vague. So by clicking the ‘I agree’ button this means I ‘accept’ the rules. But I don’t ‘accept’ the rules. In fact I think the rules are necessarily ‘unacceptable’ to some extent < %100 and that nobody can ‘accept’ them 100% because everyone is different and has differIng opinions. I take the document as a whole as a solicitation to ‘agree with’ the rules in order to play, which is absurd, dehumanizing, and tyranical.

The document is an excersize in brainwashing and mind control!

But so are all such TOS docs, so…

/shrugs

6

That’s been my point this whole time. I am not cooking up some secondary interpretation of my own rules. I am literally showing you what they say. Here it is again for reference:

rules
rules.png1040×322 28.5 KB

What else do you expect? The button is a button. Its purpose is to indicate an affirmative/negative response. It’s absurd to suggest that we start putting sentences into our form buttons. It’d likely not even work on mobile due to the screen size restrictions.

Anyway, I think you are onto something there regarding the wording. Here’s the lead text with your suggestion:

By logging onto your game account, you agree to abide by the rules described on this page.
These rules are subject to change without notice.

And then the last part:

By clicking “I Agree” below, you acknowledge that you’ve read the rules above and agree to abide by them.

That’s not an unreasonable adjustment. Despite your hyperbole, I can see that as an improvement. Would that be an effective resolution to this issue in your opinion?

7

After reading your posts I am guessing either you or me is having a stroke because I have no idea what message you are trying to convey. Are there any specific rules you’d like to discuss @xeno?

8

Yes, now that the rules clearly state that the expectation is for people to ‘agree to abide’ by the rules rather than agree with them, it might not be futile for me to take a look at the actual rules to see if I can’t offer some suggestions for changesthat might enable me in good conscience to actually be able to commit to ‘abiding by’ them as requested. :wink:

9

The proposed changes are a good first step.

As for the rules themselves, I think a series of punitive measures / penalties should be devised in proportion to the particular rule violations. You see, IC has always had bugs or loopholes, etc., that players / games could take advantage of to their benefit (if they could get away with it and not get caught). This is partly why IC was so fun. For instance group of mid-sized fam’s market aiding a small fam to whom to they are secretly allied to jump their fleet to break top fam’s main attacker’s port - how would IC authorities punish the players involved, exactly? Would there be a hearing, evidence provided, etc. would it be a public hearing on forum, maybe?

I think the punitive measures / method of prosrcuting each violation should be stipulated to help players decide if it is or isn’t worth trying to get away with rule violations.

10

I don’t consider cheating against rule-abiding players to be “fun”. To the contrary, this line of thinking erodes the integrity of our collective experience. It compromises our sense of fairness, which is critical to the game and community.

The rules are designed to promote fair play. Breaking them is by definition working against this fairness. That is not “fun” for the players who are getting cheated, even if it’s a thrill to you personally that you cheated the system. That’s pretty selfish, actually.

That’s ridiculous. Violate a rule and expect to get punished. That’s the only factor that needs to help the player make that decision.

We’re not here to run court trials for every offense. We have 4 staff members right now that are handling things and have been doing well enough with the current system. This isn’t a representative democracy; it’s a privately owned product. Players who violate the rules are not entitled to anything other than a ban at the staff’s discretion.

If people find that unreasonable, they are free to find a different game.

11

The internet has become increasingly controlled, regulated, etc.; it started out as something many regular people could exploit for their benefit but has increasingly become something an increasingly fewer, elitist (and often state-sponsored) ‘entities’ control and monopolize in order to exploit people. The internet needs more democratic systems, not less. IC has taken the route towards the usual sort of totalitarianism becoming increasingly prevalent elsewhere online and elsewhere in tech and ‘design’. IC had a chance to grow organically and incorporate aspects of gameplay and design that players were devising for themselves through various mods and additions and tools, external programs. Instead of recognizing this as an organic, natural process of innovation and encouraging and participating in it, the direction taken was to prohibit and penalize such a trend. IC, like most of the internet (and by extension society at large is increasingly treating citizens the same way) treats players like they are the product when IC should rather be treating them as if they are majority shareholders of their own company.

Goodbye

13

The tragic part of this is that we’re actually moving exactly towards the direction of greater player freedom, with things like allowing unofficial alliances instead of restricting play options. Players can also now vote on galaxy setup instead of being forced to play with whatever the moderators set up. They can also now create custom games with all kinds of custom options, even custom maps.

We’re doing exactly what you say you want. IC has never seen a greater amount of player freedom than what we’ve gained in the last 2 years since the ownership transfer. This is by design. Unfortunately, your distaste for formalized rules is preventing you from experiencing this.

You are mistaking gameplay mechanics for community guidelines. They are not the same thing. Thus, your characterization of our design direction is based on an entirely faulty premise.

Regardless, the rules are here to protect players from malicious activity. You seem to prefer a system where players are free to harass each other and play unfairly without consequence. In that regard, you are correct that we don’t support such a direction.

We’re always here if you change your mind. Have a nice day.

1 Like