HMD | May 2013

[these_balls]

EVALUATE MY BATTLING!

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Comments

[pianosongs]

The new ruling isn't new at all, actually. It's been a policy we've had in play for a while, and it only applies to knives and objects that are more for fighting or injury. It just hadn't made it to the FAQ list directly, but it had been the consistent answer given in the questions asked underneath.

When it comes to cooking utensils and utility knives, those get dull but not to dangerous levels. (Think of a nice kitchen knife slowly going down to butter-knife levels of cutting.) The weapons policy on dulling knives and rusty weapons is more or less towards those ones like shivs, shanks, and swords, things used almost exclusively for injury of another or defensive purposes.

So in short, cooking and utility weapons are the general exception to the rule.

[lightningbearer]

Actually, unless a determination was made that I overlooked, the original "ruling" on weapons getting dull was a player specifically asking if that could be the case for their character's knife in order to prevent the character getting into trouble. Prior to that the only mentions I'd seen in the Q&A regarding knives is simply that something like a pocket knife or for cooking is allowed. I mean, obviously if someone buys a kitchen knife and then goes around TRYING TO STAB PEOPLE they would get into serious IC trouble, and not allowing actual weapons without permission effectively nerfs that without the additional "everything gets dull/rusty superfast" ruling. Though for what it's worth, a rusty/dull sword is also in many ways just as nasty as a perfectly sharp and clean blade. Personally I would be MORE fine with just limiting access to weapons in the first place than insisting they require extra maintenance all the time, unless a player specifically opts in to that maintenance to keep their character out of trouble. But with all the pokemon with natural weapons on their bodies, the occasional rare combat knife or such really doesn't seem as great a concern to me as much as long as it's given a very good, played out IC reason to be there.

[pianosongs]

The rule is mostly in place to prevent the excessive usage of violent weapons in Route. Hence the 'child lock' feature of it. So if a kitchen knife was used as a weapon, it'd just begin to fall under that weapons lock and begin to dull. Perhaps my memory is slipping on where we specifically said it if it wasn't listed down there (it may have been listed in the old post, I'm unsure), but that's been the ruling for quite a while when it's come to weapons. Hence the reiteration in the post. Not all of the weapons will be come rusty, just more and more unusable in terms of weaponry, so they would either need to perform some routine maintenance after almost every usage until the weapon is nothing more than a blunt, dull object. The goal is to make a weapon less usable to the point where throwing it away would be the ideal goal.

Limiting the weapons allowed in Route has been the point of the weapons policy since the get-go, but tools of the trade and characters in-game have found ways to create knives and other tools, and as long as it's a logical method of creation, it technically wouldn't work for it to suddenly not be in existence. That is why the dulling of weapons that are created is in place. It's rather difficult to limit what weapons are allowed without limiting the characters who can create them, which would put more restrictions on the players themselves. That is why the restriction is on the weapons, as the characters themselves aren't the issue.

While normally it would be agreeable that if it wasn't a problematic issue there would be no problem, we have had incidents of individuals using weapons to harm others or pokémon in-game to a point where it is beginning to become more of a concern, and because weapons aren't to be used as such in the world due to the fact that everyone can just pokébattle their differences, the world adapts to try and prevent usage of it.