HMD | August 2013

[these_balls]

EVALUATE MY BATTLING!

Trainer Tip: play nice and keep it civil.


things to keep in mind:
→ This is encouraged, not mandatory. We will not penalize you for not using it.
→ Feel free to link your personal HMDs if you would like, just in case someone doesn't want to use the mass HMD post.
→ this is more for actual critique and discussion. Please don't just blindly praise a person or just call them horrible. If someone's doing a wonderful job, you can tell them, just tell them why, or even where they're showing off bonus perks. If someone's doing a not-so-wonderful job, tell them why, give them things to improve on if you can. Examples, links, things that can give them something to work on. Meaning, no bashing, flaming, or nasty behavior. Please keep it civil.
→ Anonymous is turned on! But note: anonymous is a privilege, not a right. If it's being abused to bash players, please be sure to let one of us know and we'll step in or freeze threads if necessary. If anonymous is abused too much, it will be turned off for the next HMD.
→ Don't take this all too personally! Remember that roleplay is a game, and crit is supposed to help, not make you feel horribly. No one is perfect, we've all got room to improve. Please keep that in mind.

→ MOD/GAME HMD

Comments

[these_balls]

Hey! We appreciate the critique and thank you for taking the time to respond to us. However, we disagree that members of Team Rocket "constantly get away with things" or suffer no IC consequences for their actions. During this past round of Rocket missions, several Rockets suffered IC consequences in direct result to the plans they presented us; several failed to earn a promotion because their plans went awry, and one attempt at a stealthy mission turned into a large-scale production that caused three Rockets to be positively identified. Had their plans failed outright, those Rockets would have been caught. However, the choices they made enabled them to escape. Furthermore, the three Rockets on the Goldenrod mission specifically opened themselves up to IC plotting here, and received a small handful of takers on that. There is also always the option for players to plot with Rockets individually to craft their own scenarios with consequences, and we highly encourage people to participate in that variety of player plots as well!

As moderators, it's our job to create opportunities for our players. For the Rockets, this comes in the form of Rocket Missions, for which the reward is occasionally a promotion. These missions are one of the built-in perks of playing a Rocket, just as breeders and trainers have their own class perks included in other facets of gameplay. We explicitly told the Rockets during their previous round of missions that, in the event their plans failed or caused mass damage that would warrant the attention of other player characters, they would be required to accept as consequences the fact that we would provide the player characters the chance to stop them. The Rockets all presented us with plans that justified their ability to escape and mitigate some of the consequences they could have potentially suffered.

There have been times in the game's history when we have required the Rockets to fail at their missions; in fact, this was one of the critiques that originally led to the creation of the Rocket community in the first place, because the Rockets felt it was unfair for player characters to be used effectively as plot devices without standing any meaningful chance of success. More recently, during our Pokemon Prom event, we outright required that any Rocket plots conducted during that time must fail; the fact that no Rockets suffered consequences for breaking that rule was due entirely to the fact that none of them chose to conduct such a plot and fail at it.

It is not our place as moderators to require Rocket player characters to suffer consequences for their actions unless the players of those characters consent to it or those consequences are the reasonable outcomes of their actions. When a Rocket signs up for a mission with us, they are doing so with the knowledge and consent that failing and accepting the consequences of that failure are a possible aspect of the mission. Likewise, if a Rocket presents us with a player plot they wish to run and the actions taken in that plot would logically lead to negative consequences, then we will impose them. However, that is an exchange between the moderators and the player; it is no more our place to require a Rocket to plot with another player character than it would be for us to mandate any character to forge CR with another character.

However, that position extends only to player characters; if the PGC, any group of players, or an individual player comes to us with a request to run a plot in which they would succeed at stopping Rockets, we would be just as happy to accommodate them as we are to accommodate the PC Rockets in their nefarious ventures. The player character Rockets are far from the only Rockets present in Route, and we would be happy to arrange acts of villany for heroic characters to defeat if requested to do so. We will not, however, require player character Rockets to lose to player character heroes unless their IC choices explicitly warrant it.

With regard to the Rocket community, we would also like to dispel the notion that this gives the Rocket characters a "direct line of communication" to us. The Rocket community is no more a direct line of communication than are any of the other ways of contacting us (the FAQ page, PMs, private plurks, IMs, etc). The Rocket community is used for plotting Rocket missions, much as the breeding community is used for arranging egg hatchings and sales. It is an organizational community; it is not a moderator hotline. Outside of specific events where we are using a single post for plotting purposes — the same way we would use a general plot post in the public OOC community for plotting purposes among the general playerbase — the Rockets utilize the same venues for moderator contact that all other player characters do.

We do acknowledge that we need to improve our response times for questions, and appreciate the critique with respect to that. However, we hope this sets the record straight with regard to the rest of your feedback.

[tearsofademon]

...Okay, I guess I didn't explain my problem well enough for you to understand?

First of all, thank you for the clarification on what the Rocket community is for, but as an outsider who does not play a Rocket and has no intention of playing a Rocket simply because it doesn't fit my play style, I have no idea what goes on in that community. It's not like the breeding community, because the breeding community is not screened. I can see what goes on in the breeding community. Heavy plotting does not go down in the breeding community, or at least, I don't consider egg sales to be heavy plotting especially with the number of people who don't put up IC egg posts, which I see as wasted opportunity, but that's their choice and not my problem and off topic. And as I can't see what goes on in there and the community was recently revamped, how am I supposed to know that it's not a direct line of contact? Or at least, a direct-er line. After all, you guys will see entries from it on your friends lists, while you miss PMs and e-mails. So while maybe I've come to the wrong conclusion, you have to admit that it's a pretty easy conclusion to come to.

More pressing, however, is the consequences thing, which I still have to disagree with you on. A bunch of characters didn't get promotions because the mods decided such - I wouldn't know that if you didn't tell me here, because it isn't a thing that would come up in any posts ICly, and please point me toward where it was done OOCly because I haven't seen that either, since it's probably in a screened Rocket post. One stealth mission was botched and three Rockets were positively identified. Okay, but that doesn't change the fact that nobody else could affect that. One of the players put up a plotting post. That would have been fine, if there had been any way for other characters to affect the outcome. But there wasn't, because you said "Please note that all of these Rockets will get away with these missions; though we encourage you to react to and plot with our mission participants, we've guaranteed their success (and even granted a few promotions) this time around!"

And it's not like these are small, isolated incidents, either! They were attacking major landmarks! The Goldenrod Pokemon Center is the Pokemon Center in the middle of the most populated city in Johto. There would be lots of player characters around, some of whom have powerful teams. And it being a Pokemon Center, some of these teams would be there at odd hours of the night, too. And yet you're telling me that merely three Rockets would definitely get away with things, facing all of that? How? You can't tell me that no super-strong trainers would be at the Pokemon Center. And yet the Center was broken into and destroyed and the Rockets were merely identified, not stopped, Gyms are constantly attacked and the culprits get away with it despite the Gyms housing elite trainers who hang out around them, and it's always assumed that he player characters won't be around to do anything useful, or that any of their efforts would be in vain (like the fruitless battle to stop Suicune from being captured).

If a group of player characters were to get together and attempt to attack the Radio Tower and get away with it, I'm sure all of Team Rocket would be up in arms, and rightly so. So why isn't the same courtesy given to the Pokemon Center in the most populated city in Johto? Maybe if it was, say, Cherrygrove, which nobody above level 10 visits ever, then it would be one thing. But you can't just assume.

That's my problem.