Invasion Criteria

[Tydeus of Tion]

In the law, we often talk about the term "reasonable." On its face, it sounds nice. An easy criterion to use for judging cases. Right?
Wrong.

Reasonableness is a meaningless word. What is reasonable to one person is completely unreasonable to another. It is great for attorneys who think they can use it to sway a jury. It is not great outside of a trial setting when you have to predict whether or not X course of action is actually ok for a client.

Currently, the judging criteria for invasions are as follows:

• Teamwork. The amount of teamwork each faction exhibits over the course of the Invasion will contribute to victory, including its organization, cooperation with the faction's members, and how it executes its vision for the Invasion. This also includes members from opposing factions working with each other, rather than against each other, to provide entertaining role-play.
• Story. Does it make sense? How exciting is it? Are the factions trying to weave a purposeful story or put up points on a scoreboard? This should not include the reason for the Invasion, but rather the story that proceeds once the Invasion has begun.
• OOC Drama. Negative drama instigated by either side, publicly, can negatively impact a Faction’s chances for victory in an Invasion. Entertainment. The value of entertainment provided by Factions in an Invasion can positively impact a Faction’s chances for victory in an Invasion.
• Effort. The amount of effort put into the Invasion by each faction participating will positively impact that faction's chances for victory. This includes, but is not limited to - active writers participating, quality of writing, and responding to your writing partners in a reasonable time.

Personally, I think the OOC Drama, teamwork, and effort criteria are all great*, but the one that comes up most often is "story."

My proposition is that this is a poor mechanism for judging invasions and here are two reasons why.

• Arbitrary: "story" is an arbitrary judging criteria. What makes something exciting to one person could be entirely boring to another person. Consequently, when an RPJ judges an invasion it is impossible to tell how it is going to come out if both sides have put in a lot of effort, there is teamwork, and there has been no OOC drama, because the storylines of one or two characters on one side might simply color the lenses. Furthermore, let us say that I write a story about how Ryan Korr turns to the dark side over the course of invasion and for whatever reason instead of being atrocious people actually love it. Let us also say that in turning to the dark side he proceeds to eviscerate his entire army. Ok, wow. Interesting story. Who gets those points? Does that mean I get story points that go to the Alliance? Or does that mean those story points go to whoever our opponent is? Right now, I don't have the first idea.
  This means that the rule's inherent arbitrariness acts as a disincentive to the very sort of thing it is supposed to encourage: storytelling.
• Even if it does not disincentivize storytelling, it leads to my second point -

[*]Moving Goal Post: There is no way to know how an invasion is going to turn out ahead of time. It could look like one side is completely crushing the other, but the ruling could come out that the "story" of a rag-tag band of heroes fighting through adversity and having to escape from overwhelming odds proved more "compelling" and thus the side that by all appearances actually loses the planet by having their armies decimated, fleet destroyed, etc., instead actually wins. Not only is there no way to predict how an invasion is going to turn out, but the results of one invasion might come out entirely the other way depending on who the judge is because that judge found a particular storyline more compelling than the other side.

Writing an invasion where you actually win the IC battles, but then end up losing the overall invasion because your story was not compelling does not make sense from a faction perspective.

Writing a story where your character or platoon or whatever suffers heavy losses/loses a battle/goes to the darkside and then not knowing whether or not that story actually contributes toward your side or the other side does not make sense from an individual perspective.

To be honest, I am not entirely sure what the new criterion should be, but I know that the current one is non-sensical without further guidelines.


*Addendum:

Effort is also arbitrary. One person writes 2,000 words. This other person only writes 300. Who wins the effort criteria?

Who determines quality?

What if I have dyslexia so my posts do not flow as nicely as others, does that mean my posts count for less now?

 

[Kurayami Bloodborn]

From my understanding it is the overarching story as told by all involved on a side in an invasion that is judged. So while your example would make for a good story how does it fit with what else is going on with the story of the invasion, and does the way it happened mesh with the way other Alliance members have interacted with you IC during the invasion, etc? Admittedly I am not active as a PVP writer,so I may be way off base, but this is the sense I have gotten from reading through invasion threads and their judgements.

 

[Tydeus of Tion]

So while your example would make for a good story how does it fit with what else is going on with the story of the invasion, and does the way it happened mesh with the way other Alliance members have interacted with you IC during the invasion, etc?

See, personally I think Korr falling to the dark side is a dumb, humdrum story, but maybe you think it makes for a good story.

What makes a good story is an opinion unless you are judging by some sort of objective criteria. Nothing about the current criterion appears objective.

Example:

The Eragon inheritance trilogy is a best selling book series.

I do not think it has a good story. I could probably provide you with some objective storytelling reasons why it is not, but ultimately it will probably just come down to my subjective opinion.

 

[Soeht]

From the Invasion rules, one could take:

At any point, a Major Faction may “invade” another Major Faction's occupied planet. This involves one Major Faction's members fighting for control of the planet against another Major Faction's members.

And

Story. Does it make sense? How exciting is it? Are the factions trying to weave a purposeful story or put up points on a scoreboard? This should not include the reason for the Invasion, but rather the story that proceeds once the Invasion has begun.

And conclude that the Story element of the victory conditions is about building a story in which one's Faction takes over the planet.

Yet I have heard from an RPJ that not all RPJ's interpret the rule this way and that, theoretically, one could roleplay not taking over the planet yet write a better story and somehow win the Invasion. An extreme example I've been given is the possibility of the Sith losing an Invasion against Jedi - the Sith writers write about how their Sith take over the planet, the Jedi write about how their Jedi sit there an drink tea on another planet. Yet with the Victory conditions written the way they are, an RPJ could justify the Jedi's victory.

I think [member="Ryan Korr"] is highlighting something that I see in a lot of rules: they're written without the logical consequences in mind or rely heavily on the opinion of one or two people. These opinions could vary wildly, create variance in judgement, which causes dissatisfaction in the end user (us writers).

 

[Kurayami Bloodborn]

I get where you are coming from. My phone freaked out on me and changed 'could' to 'would.' So what criteria would you like to see the story aspect judged by and the effort? That is left up to the discretion of another as you pointed out, but no matter the list there will always be bias. This objective list you talk about is also in the end based on opinions, even if widely agreed upon.

 

[Boethiah]

Criteria like these are better broken down into a set of questions, that way people aren't expected to form an abstract answer based on nothing but their own interpretations and opinions on the subject. [member="Ryan Korr"] is right. If judgment is transparent and done solely on the victory conditions he quoted, then it's simply matter of perspective.

A classic example for me is Napoleon Dynamite. That is a film where the audience either got it, or they didn't. And if you went around asking people about the film or even looking at reviews, it was either. "This is a hilarious film," or "this film has no sense of humour." And that's an example of where taste comes into play.

Every writer looks to roleplay different things. Some people will see the impact of duels in a story, and look to them to be the climatic result of good storytelling. Others will see to the dialogue or maybe even comic relief.

So if all the other criteria are met and both sides show a good sense of teamwork, low OOC drama, and solid effort. Then when it comes down to story either faction could be justified winners because of how the story criteria is written.

 

[Caid Centurion]

My man finishes one year of law school...

[member="Ryan Korr"]

 

[Amarant]

I can't remember exactly previous iterations of the rules, but they've always ben somewhat arbitrary, and yes, there are undefinable methods. As for goalposts, I'd rather the admins be the ones setting them than the users. When we created things like objectives and rules for them prior to admin-oriented judging, all those goalposts didn't just move, they tap-danced. By the very nature of beign ap lay-by-post site, I don't think all our criteria can be perfectly objective. The letter of the law allows for braod case-by-case intepretation, and I feels that's wiser, as it gives rpj's the fleixibility to use their own discretion. Barring that, I can't say that there is a purely "objective" means of determining victory in invasions, or even a more objective criteria. So, if I might be so bold, is your suggestion here that we remove the story criteria entirely? Or that we replace with soemthign else? And if so, what?


[member="Ryan Korr"]

 

[Soeht]

So, if I might be so bold, is your suggestion here that we remove the story criteria entirely? Or that we replace with soemthign else? And if so, what?

In the law, we often talk about the term "reasonable." On its face, it sounds nice. An easy criterion to use for judging cases. Right? Wrong. Reasonableness is a meaningless word. What is reasonable to one person is completely unreasonable to another. It is great for attorneys who think they can use it to sway a jury. It is not great outside of a trial setting when you have to predict whether or not X course of action is actually ok for a client.

Going off of this, it'd be to change the Victory Conditions to minimize the need for arbitration - or at least redefine what a person would judge upon so that it's not vague and open to wildly different interpretations.

Apparently, we got an example of this happening due to the Chiloon Rebellion. Two different staff members gave their judgement and produced two different winners. It isn't ideal when the winner of an Invasion is heavily dependent on who judges it.