Sunday, July 15, 2007

Calmer words

I blogged mad last night. I am mad so rarely that when I am so, I seem to revel in it for a time. I am doing my best to calm down now, but I should make some things clear.

First, I do not hold the referees accountable for the disaster in any way.
They did the best job they could given the circumstances. They did there best to try to assure fair play, which brings me to point two

Secondly, I have an overdeveloped sense for fair play, like that of a child.
I know that the world is not a fair place. I know that unfair things happen all the time. In most circumstances I do not expect things to be fair. But in a game, in a competition, I expect fairness, and its directly tied to my ability to enjoy the game. To have had things so skewed last night robbed me of the opportunity to enjoy the play. Even if I am to accept that it was third party griefers that was doing the pushing and caging, (and I now recant the last post finding out that both sides were griefed) there was still unsporting behavior on the Blue Side. As it has been pointed out this was a GAME, but I expect games to be fair. If I play battleship, I expect my opponent to put all his ships on the board, not hide the two hit PT boat in his pocket to make a situation that cannot be won. In short there are situations where fairness can be expected and when my expectations are not met, I get very angry like a petulant little child.

Which brings me to my third point, When it was clear that the conflagration was a disaster, it should have been called "on account of rain [griefing and lag]" fixed and rescheduled or just given up, instead Mordecai Scaggs touted his "victory". We (red team) didn't have the whole story at the time, and while I understand the desire to wrap it up and put it behind us, Scaggs was unwise in his manner and words in doing so. Where Scaggs could have been gracious, he chose to be pompous. As to the players that were in our camp early, I have since learned that they were not in the group to receive the orders to return to starting positions, not their fault, I give them full pardon, but do believe it was the oversight of their leader, again Mr. Scaggs who should have seen that they were added to the proper groups, or at least inform them that they needed to be. Scaggs still took the points of the unfairly captured flag to count towards his "victory".

I am not mad at the Blue Team as a whole. I am not mad at the referees. I am mad that something I had been looking forward to for a week was robbed of any enjoyment. Like I said it is rare that I get my Irish up, and I thought writing this would help put it behind me. But the feelings still linger.

Of the three major RP events in Caledon, there have been hurt feelings every time. I don't think conflict-oriented RP is a good idea in Caledon, and we should just quit. Although its hard to ignore that in all three instances there was something in common in the middle of the conflict, I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to find this common thread, though I have given enough clues in this post to make it most obvious.

5 comments:

Amber_Palowakski said...

I agree, all three conflict-based rp's in Caledon ended in drama and/or fiasco. The only rp that brings us all together is the "alien" rp. They attacked us first, and started shooting us and burning our forests and laying our homes to waste. Besides, it's hard to feel any sympathy to a metal orb with spider legs shooting heat-rays claiming to come kill all humanity. I say we stick with that rp. It presents a common enemy for all Caledonians, a good, fun, shoot-out, and an opportunity to try out all our newest Steampunk gadgets.

Current Population: 2 said...

None of us came home covered in glory from the events of the weekend. Perhaps more of a true reperesentation of true warfare than any of us ever wanted to simulate in SL or any RP.

The way forward is definitely with encouraging the spirit of cooperation and community in Caledon rather than attempting to engineer plots in which it is torn apart.

A deliberate decision was made to establish the Invaders as the enemey from the start, we wanted no grey areas. They burnt and they attacked. The idea was to reunite the militia, to show that everyone worked better as a team than as seperate units. It was intended to be a step along the way of the two halves of the Caledon militia coming back together at the end of the battle.

Hindsight is easy, I honestly wish we'd run the whole week as a War of the Worlds RP with the militia united against a common foe, but in all honesty the idea for the alien invasion didn't occur until the day of the alien attacks. It was truly one of the best moments of this entire RP and is one of the true moments I will treasure of this mess we seem to have created.

I did have plans to maybe run a continuation of the alien plot somehwere down the line, possibly a full War of the Worlds type RP week, but that was all before the final battle. My enthusiasm for such things is a little dented at the moment and I'm going to give Caledon and myself time to settle before I even think of anything like that.

One of the real mistakes I made was turning this weekend into more of a competition than a true RP. As I've said elsewhere, some people seemed to want more structure than just blasting away at each other with weapons. I should have just stuck to the RP idea. As soon as I put up the scoreboard, I'd really change the whole feel of this entire weekend...

I think the organisers and referees do have to take some responsibility for things that go on at these events and so I do.

Yours,

Alfonso Avalanche

Kacy Despres said...

I will say here, exactly what I said on our blog:

Enough of all of this. We had fun, we raised some money for SLRFL, which was the whole point. No more Red v. Blue, let's all just let it go. We could rehash this and go back and forth about who is better, smarter, more proper, more civil, more blah blah blah. Let it go, we raised money for a good cause, and it's done. Let it lie.

Lavendar Beaumont said...

Kacy,

I don't agree with everything that Zen has said here by a long shot, but we all have the right to express our opinions for as long and as loud as we wish. Mord is the ONLY person who seems unwilling to face up to his mistakes and apologize. His misguided, pompous, overblown speech at the Anvil did NOTHING but throw gasoline on a hot fire. If I had been a Blue team member I would have resigned on the spot. He embarrassed himself and everyone else.

L. Beaumont

Eladrienne Laval said...

Let's move on and past this, can we? It was supposed to be fun and in the end, for a very good cause. Let's not lose sight of THAT.

I agree with Lady Amber's comment about the "alien" rp. That was really fantastic, well thought out and brought everyone together. Not to mention that we seemed to enjoy ourselves and it was a LOT of fun.