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OK, sorry if I got confused. I thought the Dominion was vampires and they defacto lead the city?

Might be best to avoid these sorts of threads until you're acclimated to the game and have your sea legs back. A lot of things have changed, and this is a really messy topic full of nuance, and really only people who have a solid grasp of the situation and the wider game should be weighing in.

And since I'm posting again it's another opportunity to say:

The producer of this game is agreeing to give people that play his game special treatment over other players. That is bad. It is not just Bloodloch players that should be mad about this. Everyone should be mad that any group can be given special treatment to how they can play the game. That is bad and should be changed.

Edit: what do you disagree with, @Callidora?

@Evalyne I don't mean to be dismissive, but you've been gone for a while and don't know the stuff that's been done IC and OOC to address this. IC action at this point as reached a place where players have to essentially grief other people and ruin their playtime if they want to send the IC message. It's a large reason why a big OOC meeting was called by the administration to begin with. Addressing this IC is no longer viable, and is clearly causing more problems than it's solving. So point #2 isn't really contributing much.

That is never the only means of affecting change; if you think it is, I doubt you're caring all that hard. There are several object lessons in precisely this cited in the thread.

I'll be honest, most of the Bloodloch news posts reads like a series of people throwing childish tantrums that they seem to think will result in them getting their way, and then further childish tantrums when it only serves to alienate and marginalize their position further. This is the behaviour of toxic, abusive people, and let me state in no uncertain terms that it is why I choose not to engage with other players on Evalyne anymore.

[edit:] As an aside false leads "I don't want to do this but" are a pet peeve of mine. If you don't want to do something like that you won't. Spare me the patronization.

Another thing I would point out is that, having peeked in on my alt (didn't have enough credits to retire him), I've noticed that Bloodloch seems to have 3x the population of Enorian.

This is understandable since vampires are pretty much the crux of this game. But it would naturally raise up some issues like this. I have no idea how many vampires and undeads Spinesreach is pulling away but here's my two cents.

1) A system to fight over leadership would be cool but to a certain degree, with so many players in Bloodloch, this is arguably just a substitute for a war system.
2) If we had a war system back in, Bloodloch could just try to conquer the world instead, which to me would be way more interesting than endless civil war in one city that has the most players.

To take a reference from another IRE game, Glomdoring (in Lusternia) basically had the world conquered for several years real time and it didn't really detract from the game.

Rhyot, I love you bud, but you're muddying the waters here a lot. You're trying to make fairness this thing that's thoroughly subjective and can be framed as a "anything that doesn't benefit me directly is 'unfair.'" We're not petulant children crying over candy here.

We're talking about SOCIAL SYSTEMS, and what's more/less equitable is actually really simple. There's no reason Eno/Spinesreach have to have their governments changed, because BL moving to a more fair system is specifically addressing s city that is already itself a special case. Bloodloch is out here being the normal city leader system with a big fat wart on it, and avoiding fixing it because of a slippery slope argument regarding other cities that, to my knowledge, don't have a system that half the population utterly loathes and is causing massive IC and OOC acrimony and infighting is just...not helpful.

Fair - adjective - in accordance with the rules or standards; legitimate.
Fairness - noun - impartial and just treatment or behavior without favoritism or discrimination.

From an objective point of view, the admins are acting in fairness because they are acting in an impartial manner, within the standards of the rules, without showing any favoritism to either side because either side wants a specific outcome (one side says it's ok for the Dominion to have a seat while the other wants it to be completely contestable)

The ideology of fairness though here is completely subjective. Due to the fact that everyone wants something to happen that falls in line with their view. Only when something falls in line with their view, is it deemed as fair.

For example:

When Chaos Lord was first released, I was able to go into a fight of 1v5 and walk out the victor in three rounds. This was due in part to the fact that the Havoc hits were hitting for nearly 2K damage apiece while Shock was able to give instant sensitivity (without the need to strip deafness). Chaos Lord is hectic as all hell and has no real ability to hinder/aff someone down, so it's kill method is primarily damage. I thought the high damage output was fair due to the inability of being able to have an actual instakill route, while other players thought it was completely unfair to have such strong hit abilities. After it was nerfed with the only real reason of "Chaos Lord is not meant to be PVP viable", I felt it was unfair while others felt it was exceedingly fair. In both cases, fairness was subjective because we both wanted a specific outcome. Though in the defense of admins, they had allegedly received a bunch of issues/emails regarding the fact that I had a really strong level 200 class that others couldn't use and were forced to do -something-. Sure, nowadays I think it's a fair assessment that getting level 200 through primarily bashing alone doesn't mean I should get a class that does 2K damage every 2.6s, but at the time... it was seen as subjectively unfair/fair.

When the forums ended up having a thread about there not being enough gold sinks in the game, everyone wanted a fix to the gold system. People made comments about how bashing for gold was absurdly easy and people had stockpiles of millions (still not sure how accurate that statement is, but sure, I'll bite). Admins decided to nerf the gold drops gained from bashing, later changing the curative system and providing more gold sinks. However, despite the gold sinks now, gold is still somewhat difficult to gain via bashing while more emphasis is put on questing. A lot of people saw this as both fair and unfair, but the admins saw this as far.

When forums blew up about the Bamathis thing that caused the player behind it to quit. Many points were made as to the perceived negativity behind some of the symbolism and players viewed this as unfair to the point that they were exceedingly nasty in their messages about why Bamathis shouldn't be a god or about why his symbolism should change. When he stepped down, a portion of the playerbase thought this was fair while another portion thought it was unfair that he stopped playing.

Lastly, about two years ago when the way experience was given in group combat, because of the fact I was level 212 the code behind it broke when I died. This caused an integer overflow and made people -lose- experience when they killed me rather than gain experience. Obviously, this led to a couple issues because of an abused bug for some shits and giggles type of laughter (of which there were a lot of and to note I only died four times on purpose even after realizing it was a bug). Tiur made the decision to Curse me for 14 days AND tack on the fact that any added experience would result in lost experience. I thought that was a fair punishment for abusing a bug, but others did not. Others wanted me banned/shrubbed for abusing a bug, as many others in the past had been banned/shrubbed for bug abuse. Had that been the decision that was made, I would have deemed it unfair had I been shrubbed for something that was inadvertently easily reversed within an hour, but others would have felt it was (and probably would have been thankful).

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Fairness -is- primarily subjective in nature by the very people who are trying to call it fair/unfair, because one side feels is fair the other feels is unfair. The admins are in a precarious position otherwise about making sure they follow the rules given before them by IRE as a whole.

Changing things in radical, sweeping things when half of a population advocate for it can be equally seen as bad! You are justifying changing the entire process in which Bloodloch operates as a government because people hate something that benefits the other half. But those radical and sweeping changes would be okay because now it benefits the people who hate the system that they have now.

There is a reason radical and sweeping changes tend to require a 2/3 majority to institute to ensure some sense of acceptance lest you run into what @Rhyot pointed out, that the silent portion now finds their voice when what -they- wanted is changed, ignored, or otherwise taken off the table.

Doing nothing is wrong, I agree. Is the change 100% fair? No, but given that the referendum was, as you stated, a 50/50 split, it can be easy to see why a radical and sweeping change that impacts the entire Bloodloch Council rather than just one seat may not be seen as a favorable motion.

If closer to 2/3 voted in favor of changing how the seat was filled, I think we would have seen a more radical shift, but we didn't. We saw a split down the middle.

I don't think we need to look too far to players' reactions when radical and sweeping changes are made to systems in Aetolia without overwhelming player support to understand why ANYONE may be reluctant to institute such a change.

If the argument in return is that adopting a system like the Speaker system from Duiran into Bloodloch is not a sudden and radical change, well, then we've identified another talking point. But I'll leave that to others to debate.

I've been reading everything that's said, so allow me (if you will) to sit here and make a post that's a little more realistic of an analogy/observation too and possibly a bit hard to read for some, and for that, I sincerely apologize.

Take real world politics for example:

On Nov 4, everyone was told to vote between Trump and Biden. There's people on both sides of the spectrum that would say as to why either person would be best to be the next US president. When it came time to counting the votes, Biden ended up winning the electoral college and became the President-elect (51% to 47%, the Dominion referendum was 56-53 with a 54% voter turnout). People went out into the streets demanding recounts, demanding democracy come to a charging halt, claiming that there was voter fraud, court cases filed, and people saying that Trump was the actual winner while others were arguing that Biden was the winner. Furthering the lead up to the election, there was -excessive- toxicity, fighting, and even families being torn apart by the very politics that are meant to govern a single country. There have even been rumors of entire discord servers of Aetolian nature being torn apart because of the huge divide in terms of real world politics and people getting verbally attacked because they stand on one side of the fence or the other. In the end, democracy won out and the president was still selected by majority vote.
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There has become this culture of people demanding change because they don't agree with a decision/ruling made and while protesting is a good, verifiable way of laying down the foundation and walking the path to get something changed, it's also bred an environment of negative reinforcement behavior as well. By negative reinforcement behavior, I mean rewarding those with the outcome that they wish to see which further makes them believe that if they do it again on something else, they'll get what they want on topic #2+. This very same behavior is similar to giving a child candy to be quiet when they won't stop crying, but now the child knows they'll get candy when they persistently cry, but then when you deny the candy then they cry even more. It becomes problematic in and of itself, along with a feedback loop of behavior that is undesirable.


Countless times over, things in Aetolia have changed because the players in the game have started a motion demanding change. The admins, for the most part, are forced to change things due to the demanding nature of the masses because one side is extremely vocal in their belief and half the playerbase is completely disregarded under the guise of "You stayed quiet, so your opinion doesn't matter.". Suddenly, when it was changed, the people who were on the other side (the generally not so outwardly vocal) suddenly become vocal because -their- belief was disregarded and -they- make demands to get it changed back. However, the admins being the admins, have to stick by their decisions (regardless of how difficult it might have been) only to get very hateful and toxic comments spewed at them from the now negatively affected side, while the winning side preens themselves because they won.
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Iosyne and Tiur made a decision that was a compromise in (ultimately) two parts: lore/history and the outcome of the democratic referendum. While the Speaker system is viewed as "fair" to one side, it is adversely viewed as "unfair" by the other. If BL did get the same outcome in the Speaker system, you're now sitting at 50% of the cities having this new electoral system. So in order to squash any further problems such as this arising ever again, they'd start having the discussions to turn both Enorian and Spinesreach to have the Speaker system as well. This is both fair and unfair, because Enorian and Spinesreach haven't done anything wrong to warrant such a political shift in nature (unfair), but then they'd be in line with the other two cities (fair).

If BL stayed with the system of making Primus an uncontestable OL, you'd still run into the problems of comments being made about fair/unfair. Half the playerbase would want it changed, but the other half would prefer it stay. This leads to the same outcry we are seeing right now.

If BL moved to the "All OL seats are contestable", you'd still run into the problems of comments being made about fair/unfair. Half the playerbase would want it changed, but the other half would prefer it stay. This leads to the same outcry we are seeing right now.

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Ultimately no one is happy, no one wins, and the admins have to stand by the decision that was made until such a time that it proves to not be working anymore.