Clan Faction Representative Candidates

[Anarrina]

The candidates for Clan Faction Representative are Dagget and -Zagadka-.

Each candidate will be encouraged to write a speech about their qualifications, and this thread will be open until June 30th. Voting will begin July 1st and last one week.

[-Zagadka-]

Greetings to the Clans,

The clans are about freedom. We are a loose federation that will not accept a government dictation. And, as a group, we do not agree on a number of issues. Working for several years in the Clerical Staff in the Council of Truth, our mission was to handle the bureaucracy and organize the functions of Clan operations.

Our role was to be neutral to the will of the Clans as they voted, and facilitate their requests and plans. The CoT Clerical Staff handled the running of meetings, keeping records of events, diplomatically reaching out to the other factions, planning functions such as rallies and other events (such as our Clan Day celebrations), and generally being a central source for official Clan activity. Sometimes, in these roles, I did things that I did not agree with. It was important to us to put our own politics aside during Clan functions. It is easy enough to bitch about people in a bar afterwards. We took our roles as an honor to be able to help in the process. It would be an honor again to lend services to the Clans.

I've been on Rubi-Ka since the floodgates of settlement opened, and I have seen how our community operates. I was honored to be able to help get the attention needed to have the poison Omni-Tek dumped into the Tir River cleaned up, and those waters have been fresh for over a decade. The Clans have always had to come together and meet on even terms to accomplish our continued struggle. Omni may be able to issue decrees, but we have to find a consensus from a wide variety of groups. Is it less efficient? Definitely. It can take us a while to chew through a topic and get leaders like Commander Silverstone to play nice with others, and that has been our role... we facilitated conversations, not handed out orders. Our word wasn't binding until the Council agreed to it - and that is how civil service should work.

The Council of Truth ceased regular operation late last year, handing over the proverbial key to the city to Sir Tristram after the vote. It was a very sad time, knowing the friends I had made were heading off, but even moreso, that the Clans would be left without a council for mediation. This left us voiceless and diffused our efforts and our wishes.

I was very excited to hear that a new effort is being made at gathering together again. We left almost everything unfinished! Especially at a time when we face Omni encroachment past the Neutral cities, aliens rain down from the sky, and the Shadowlands fluctuate. If the interest is in building our future once again, I wish very much to be a continuing part of our story. If not, I will still lend any support I can to our cause, and I can only hope other citizens feel the same. I am not looking to be a leader - I am looking to be your representative.

Thank you for your time, I cede the floor.

Aleksei "Zagadka" Volya ((/ Cindi "Razishlyat" Bolieu ))

[Agentcora]

Firstly, good luck to both

I'd like to know from an OOC point of view what both plan to do in boosting Clan sided RP and what steps they plan to take in keeping interest once it has been sucesfully gained.

There have been talks within the RP community recently about being more co-operative about cross-faction RP in a bid to boost overall RP experience and activity. Is this something you would both agree with?

[-Zagadka-]

OOC, I am very interested in cooperative cross-faction events. Last year I was trying to work with the NLC, attending their meetings (we had an official envoy, but nothing came of it), and tried to contact Omni-Pol. I think the player factions should have some OOC meetings every month, either immediately before or after our scheduled faction meetings happen.

When I was doing events for GVRK/Forsaken like 10 years ago we did some PvP events with Omni orgs, and we had a good time, using a pre-determined set of "rules". Occasionally, ARK will arrange a fight over a bridge or somesuch, and those are fun. Unfortunately, we are a bit limited by the engine/rules. I had a vision to make the entire area of 4 Holes a big battlefield; it is an awesome zone with the mining town etc that I think can be fun doing street fighting in. One extremely overlooked resource is the Will To Fight dungeon. It has a good idea in having a non-overpowered resource to fight over, but needs to be a bit better to lure people in.

But there is plenty of motivation to fight over Borealis or Wine or Avalon. I kept trying to bug them to get some story going with fighting over the terraforming equipment or an ambiguous attack on OA's water supply... was it Omni or Dust?... that kind of thing. It would help a lot if we could agree on some system for the players to take initiative and handle the outcomes as something more substantial than the current tower war mob justice debacles. For instance, my "Omni or Dust" plan would work if we could get support from Omni RPers. I mean, even very simple moments like, in the middle of a CoT meeting, we detected an Omni, so we spent an hour hunting around and making new protocols. That was exciting, for a bit. Any kind of disruption of normal events brings up the possibilities of other disruptions, and makes it more enjoyable.

But many players need some kind of incentive to break out of powerleveling/grinding. We can't hand out goodies very well and we can't make a city a conflict because of the gas levels, so we have to work together to provide some catalyst.

That said, the main reason we closed the CoT last year was because there was very little interest and some storylines just died out so we had nothing to go on. I felt, if ARK will excuse me, that there was nothing we could actually do (and I understand the limitations ARK Events has, not being tied to FC directly). Cooperation between the factions might give us some flexibility, if we can agree on a way to "penalize" or "reward" victory from a conflict without necessitating ARK or FC doing something. On the other hand, if it would be possible for, say, at our inter-org OOC meeting, we had an OOC ARK representative to nudge us along what would be acceptable, or current plans, or some compromise...

One other idea I had going on was to include the Legacy characters more, but that is heavy on the ARK end. Many players get pretty giddy when they see some blue names marching around, especially when one is Silverstone or Jacobi. If they had more presence, perhaps more players would be aware that there *are* faction meetings. Once again, though, we have a problem with ARK not being able to decide a storyline for FC.

I am somewhat rambling and this is just another thought I had - ICC needs to be another faction handled by ARK. Their presence on RK has grown a lot, and they are a real intermediary between the Clans and OT, so we can link together events that way.

And finally... this is going back to the days of AO-Basher... we need a good RP news feed, which is what I was trying for with Basher before we closed (including working with GSP to announce news etc). The forums aren't quite ideal since they are hard to follow (even the CoT forum was not visited by meeting members enough), and the article submission system kinda died out. We do have several great community sites to tap into, if we can get a consistent storyline going. But if a CoT meeting is only going to do "so, what should we do? ... attack Omnis! ... <end of story>", then it just isn't going to work.

I hope that helps.


EDIT

(BTW, this is something I'd be interested in helping with regardless of who is chosen.)

[Towerblock]

Something tells me were in a better spot in putting the community back together then we did before, with the combined might of RK1 roleplayers and RK2 now playing on the same server. It's been a sort of fantasy of mine to see us all come together and really put some fun work in. I'm really looking forward to the next few months.

[Dagget]

(Sorry, was traveling when this thread initiated. As the Representative position is essentially an OOC position, that's how this post will be framed)

I'd like to work as the Clan Representative because I like the back story and how it is relevant to the game, and it's unique setting in the MMO world. I think I can be a good representative as I've been role playing in AO since 2004 and have a good idea what works or doesn't work within the framework of the game.

As a Representative I would work to see that both ARK and the playerbase are on the same page in regards to what to expect from roleplaying, and help communicating back and forth between each. I would encourage ARK to work with the Devs on adding some in-game means by which players can access Rubi-Ka's rich RP history (ex: NPC's or library data crystal's which can recite vast blocks of RK history on demand). I would work to educate the playerbase on what is realistically doable in RP in terms of actual game mechanics (ARK Events can't have Simon Silverstone assisting players to take down tower fields, for example). As well, I would work to reconstitute some sort of RP social govt structure (aka the CoT).

AO Roleplay not being formed from some prior tome-laden IP (such as is the case for LoTRo or Star Wars game) we have a great deal of flexibility in where we can take roleplay here. I believe in the community steering towards creating viable chars and organizations that work within the framework of the game lore, outfits like RuR being a classic example. While the laid down canon does have some inconsistencies in its' detail, I believe it is easy enough to gloss over those and have a productive RP experience rather than driving stories towards those lore cracks.

I believe that for most every MMO, the Roleplay community is a pretty consistent small % of the total userbase. I expect that when the Engine and NPE arrive and AO turns up on Steam there will be an initial flood of new potential roleplayers and we need to be prepared for that time. Some MMO's tied to widely known IP's have an easier time bringing in Roleplayers as they know the background from day 1 - this is rarely the case for players new to AO. The most consistent problem I have had in the past with getting players who have an interest in roleplay to actually RP here in AO is they are terrified of their lack of knowledge of the background. They get drawn into a conversation and as soon as someone else mentions something like 'according to the Tir Accord' they start to button up and withdraw from the conversation. Hence my aim to get something of a lore mechanism in-game for ppl new to RP here to get up to speed and to access whenever they need to refresh their memory on some point or another.

I believe the roleplay community can play an integral part in the future direction of the game, and there are opportunities for us to impact that course in a positive direction. Examples of Roleplayers interacting with game developments would include the CoT's call for, and subsequently getting early views of, the rework of Old Athens; and the drive to collect alien weapons with which to equip the NPC guards. Developers often create new content w/o being driven by the ongoing story, and we should be a voice for that story.

Thanks for your consideration.

.

[Dagget]

Just a little follow-up on the role of the 'Blues'. While it is great when ARK can spend time roaming on RP chars, I do think there is a tendency among the roleplaying players to look to the blues for storylines to follow, rather than create their own material. I'm more inclined, at least with current staffing levels, to let Events have random legacy/LTC chars pop on that are there to be seen and to chat/gossip a bit, but not be there to drive major stories and let the RP community get used to the fact that seeing Simon Silvertone etc doesn't necessarily mean something big is about to happen. When Events wants to run a story, I think they should come at it from several directions, including early tips dropped by the legacies and articles in the forums and then kick off the stories with never-before-seen LTC's. This approach should help keep players expectations in check and let them get used to recognizing the signals that a *story* is starting to develop.

.

[Anarrina]

Poll is open for one week. Good luck!

[Lazy]

I don't know either of these people so I will base my vote solely on who's avatar I like better (just like real politics!)

[botbolter]

Poll is open for one week. Good luck!

/me swings around with finger pointed looking for the Poll button and it's ............?

[Novagen]

.. at the top of the page.

[Pinknpinker]

I read both candidate's texts and found Daggett's more cohesive. For that reason he gets my vote and my support.

[Anarrina]

And Dagget appears to have taken the vote! Congrats!

[-Zagadka-]

Congratulations Dagget! I look forward to seeing what you will accomplish, and if I can be of any help, let me know. Currently, I am planning on getting the CoT database, and that is open for your use.

[Dagget]

Thanks all, and I look forward to doing what I can to serve you and get the Clan roleplay community (and roleplay community in general) energized again and providing impetus for adventure in Anarchy Online again!

.

[Merit]

Oooh, nice, gtz Dag!

[Novagen]

Congorats Dagget!

[Anamelle]

Congrats, Dagget

[Youny]

Congrats!

[Ciyanid]

Congratulations