Before your time I suppose Pie, but here is a forum post from Altruist that sums it up pretty well. Another post in the thread mentions that all this was dead by MW round 7. RIP Honor Code
Of course we are getting a bit off-topic with this deep-dive in the mystical lore of IC and the forgotten forums.
Regarding the original subject of this post, I’ll stick with my original response, as well as add that I do not envy those trying to solve this new problem that has arisen. I’m not even sure that there is a good solution to the problem. But better to try and fail, then not try at all.
Altruist[11-Oct-2010 09:01:22]
Re: The Eras of Imperial Conflict
RiotingVirus wrote something I certainly disagree with but nevertheless I had never remembered this specific beta-era feeling without him bringing it up:
> RiotingVirus wrote (in another thread http://www.imperialconflict.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=120198 ):
> The lose of the true Honor code that stood for the beta’s that was thrown out after round 5 or 6…
Or rather: The horrible realization that things have developed as worse as thinking that a Code of Honor would be needed.
The Code of Honor worked only in its unwritten form and under several conditions:
- only at the very beginning of the game, roughly beta 1+2+3
- no mods (because the “not coded Code” was actually enforced by the players… what nowadays mods would call an illegal alliance)
- no coded Coded/no written form: for as long as it was a kind of ongoing consensus within the player community it needed no writing down and after it wasn’t an ongoing consensus anylonger writing it down didn’t help it neither
The name “Code of Honor” was trouble from the start. “Honor” is a stupid empty word normally used by politicians or kings to convince other people to fight and die for them, to convince people to do something they would usully rather do not.
At the beginning of IC quite a big group of individual players had come from another big online game: Utopia… the 2 programers of IC, too. While the programers had in mind that a better game would need a map, and right they were, for many players it were the huge alliances and the kind of farming going on in Utopia which they had fled and took away their fun of playing. So it was kind of a weird player community at the start, one who was strongly opposed to huge alliances and one that thought that it was also the players’ responsibility to keep the game “balanced” and to support some ways of playing while trying to keep out or ban other ways of playing.
Probably it was a good part this shared feeling of Utopia refugees which bound together the early IC-players and the programers: It was like founding a new colony to start over and make everything better. Additionally this made IC a lot more “our” game than any other game could had been and was, I guess, one of the main reasons why the betas were so glorious and distinct to the later time and game… besides of the thrill of the new, of course.