This community, and gaming communities in general

Elphaba

After Stuneree's thread and what it descended into, this is probably a bad idea. However, I don't really want anyone to respond or comment - I simply wish for you all to read it and process in your own way.

I know this is rich coming from me, but: please be conscious of how you treat every player you come into contact with. I know everyone is not going to get along and personalities are going to clash. However, just because this occurs does not mean you have to go out of you way to be vitriolic or toxic. You don't know what's going on in their lives and might be using this as a way to escape. I, myself, am particularly guilty of this. And to everyone I personally victimised (Regina George style), I offer you my sincerest apologies.

Let me share a personal story. After getting permashrubbed, for who knows how many times now, I recently moved on to a different, more mainstream game. I won't name the game, but it involves cooperation and having to communicate with players via mics. I had a regular small group that I played with, and of course there was conflict/drama between a few of the people. Anyways, I developed a friendship with one particular guy relatively quickly and we became friends on Facebook. He was 22, had a fiancé and a kid with her, and she had a number of children from other relationships. He was the one working and supporting them all. His job got made redundant the other week, and he was actively looking. From the conversations I had with him, everything was fine. In fact, he told me on Monday that he had some bar work/training set up for the next day. Our conversation concluded at 9:30pm, and later that night he took his own life. I didn't suspect anything when I spoke to him.

I don't know what was going on, or what he was thinking. I hope the conflict/drama between our small group played a relatively small part. But, if he was using it as a way to escape other things then I'm certain it would have contributed, in some part, to what occurred.

So again, please be aware of how you treat other people. You don't need to get along - but if you don't, then leave it at that. There's no need to go out of your way to make it obvious.

Stuneree

The people that are problems here won't admit there's a problem, while the people who recognize the problem will be ripped into pieces for mentioning it. Sociologists have a good time looking at gaming communities, to say the least.

Shibumi

@Elphaba I absolutely agree with your post. You never know who is beyond the keyboard, so common sense should be the guideline for everybody.

I think that when playing this stuff, common sense is always abandoned (which is fine) but then it does not come up when needed.

Caoimhaen

Exactly. I agree completely. While yes it is a game, let's not be toxic. Many use games to escape, including myself. You never know what someone may be going through. Many, including myself, project onto their character when they are going through a hard time. Can be subconscious or conscious. Sometimes one can tell when the person isn't rping and is talking about themself. Maybe ask them in a message if they are okay. That is really sad to hear what happened @Elphaba. You make a great point. I am as guilty as anyone of forgetting about the person behind the key board. If there was an insightful button,I would hit it on your post. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

Tahquil

I have never used the insightful tag on the forums, but now I wish it was back so it could be used in earnest.

Seftin

Disagree, cry more. 

(aka - yes, treat everyone nicely and fairly, being a dick isn't good for anyone)

Herenicus

Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

Jules

I hope I'm right in thinking that Elphaba was mostly worried that people would attack him personally rather than read and consider his post, because this is definitely a comment, and it's definitely long.  

The 22 year old guys are incredibly more vulnerable than anyone to actual, put a bullet in it *tonight* suicide.  We probably should be more concerned about a 22 year old dude who's struggling just because that person in that situation seems to end in suicide more than any other group.  

Mostly though, the results aren't going to be quite that spectacular when you're a dick.  Mostly, finding someone vulnerable to be shitty to and "ride" is just going to be added to whatever miasma of shittiness they already have, whether they actually end up physically removing themselves from existence at some point or not.  

When someone actually offs themselves we're all good at feeling bad about it, and promising to do better, but actually doing better requires the right setting, which you might not have much control over, unfortunately (I cover a version of this below).  What you can always do is really think about whether or not you're supporting someone who's being a dick, either by not saying anything, or by actively supporting them.  People who are tearing someone down need at the very least the community's silent assent, and even better for the attacker if people give more active support by liking their just subtle enough to not get modded posts, or posting one of their own. 


The above captures most of what I really want to say if you want to tl;dr the rest.  

Some of the "offenders" have very difficult lives themselves.  This surprised me, because most of what I read about bullying says that the old "bully who feels bad about himself" is a falsehood.  Generally, it does seem to be false, though.  Those people are usually just along for the ride/lashing out.  

The worst offenders are always "bi-strategic controllers".  In brief, these people have very high self-esteem and are very well liked, but also feared.  Our little community is still pretty full of these people, though it's not so in your face as it would have been 10 years ago.  If this were a high school, they'd be the popular kids (the Plastics, even).  And let's be honest, to a scary degree, high school never ends in a lot of spheres.  To be a bi-strategic controller, you'll be nice sometimes, and not nice other times.  It's the most effective way to consolidate power in a social group.  Part of gaining and holding power is to pick on people at times, especially people who are a bit more socially vulnerable.  Of course if you're smart (and all of these people are), that's almost never going to include someone who's clearly disabled.  No, it should be someone who should be able to "take a joke" (always at their expense of course).  It gets more tricky though.  If you're one of the people at the very top, you can actually be "nice" most of the time.  Your minions will do most of the dirty work for you (and will sometimes jostle with one another for position, too).  It's the people who are just under you who will be the nastiest.  So, you just come off as a nice guy who is (very rarely) mean, and that's a lot easier to justify if it comes to it.

I used to deploy to a base in the middle east where an odd combination of not being anywhere near actual, perceivable danger and being very top heavy on "leadership" led to a more boring version of the good old Stanford Prison.  Lots of silly rules enthusiastically enforced by young officers and senior enlisted - far, far more rules than any normal military base, and far more than people getting mortared regularly would have tolerated.   Worse, our crews lived two to a (very tiny) room for months on end in a place where it wasn't really necessary - and I think people deal with something like that better when they don't know for a fact that the doubling up is sheer jackassery.  But wait!  We also had constantly changing standards that allowed some people to have their own room, which gave us even more reasons to be at one another's throats.  Our crews had been spending huge chunks of their lives there for 20 years, and they were still being treated like transients.  Beautiful new dorms had been built, but our crews didn't qualify to live in them, because they "weren't there long enough".  And yet most of our guys spent more than 6 months a year there, every year, even though we "got to leave".   It was also a really, really boring place to be, and I think making silly rules and creating drama helped break that up for people, not unlike us hitting F5 on slow days - Achaea forums will always provide something to watch.  There are enough of us that these forums are never totally quiet (which would force us to find other entertainment).    

So, instead of commiserating about our situation, people mostly tore each other to pieces.  Or rather, they'd tear a few sacrificial lambs to pieces.  And we are a tiny community, that mostly manages to be civil in any other situation.  We're small enough that you probably at least know every person's name in your field.  But we couldn't be civil there... It just brought out the worst in people.  Just as a little taste, I watched, horrified, as several people humiliated one young officer for daring to eat during the (longwinded) debrief after a 17 hour mission.  Because there were all sorts of ridiculous unwritten rules, too.  Even better, certain people might be able to flout them.  The people who verbally tore him to pieces throughout the rest of the brief were the most powerful people in the room (some officers, some enlisted), all "important" enough to have floor time during the debrief, and each one used part of that floor time making some snide comment directed at the young officer.  We, the rest of the crew, were a captive audience.

I generally had a bit less sympathy for our officers, because in recent years they'd tried to lord it over my own professional community, but it was horrible to watch.  I ended up pulling one of the (enlisted) guys who took part aside later, and we talked about it.  In his view, he was actually "punishing" the young officer for something else entirely.  At home station, the young officer would have been matter of factly counseled for that "something else", not made to endure some ridiculous scapegoating for daring to eat crappy chowhall food after a long mission where he probably had absolutely no time to eat (not kidding).  At a more forward base, he probably would have been simply and matter of factly chewed out (not in front of the entire crew, and not for eating).  

Trey

Jules said:

I hope I'm right in thinking that Elphaba was mostly worried that people would attack him personally rather than read and consider his post, because this is definitely a comment, and it's definitely long.  

The 22 year old guys are incredibly more vulnerable than anyone to actual, put a bullet in it *tonight* suicide.  We probably should be more concerned about a 22 year old dude who's struggling just because that person in that situation seems to end in suicide more than any other group.  

Mostly though, the results aren't going to be quite that spectacular when you're a dick.  Mostly, finding someone vulnerable to be shitty to and "ride" is just going to be added to whatever miasma of shittiness they already have, whether they actually end up physically removing themselves from existence at some point or not.  

When someone actually offs themselves we're all good at feeling bad about it, and promising to do better, but actually doing better requires the right setting, which you might not have much control over, unfortunately (I cover a version of this below).  What you can always do is really think about whether or not you're supporting someone who's being a dick, either by not saying anything, or by actively supporting them.  People who are tearing someone down need at the very least the community's silent assent, and even better for the attacker if people give more active support by liking their just subtle enough to not get modded posts, or posting one of their own. 


The above captures most of what I really want to say if you want to tl;dr the rest.  

Some of the "offenders" have very difficult lives themselves.  This surprised me, because most of what I read about bullying says that the old "bully who feels bad about himself" is a falsehood.  Generally, it does seem to be false, though.  Those people are usually just along for the ride/lashing out.  

The worst offenders are always "bi-strategic controllers".  In brief, these people have very high self-esteem and are very well liked, but also feared.  Our little community is still pretty full of these people, though it's not so in your face as it would have been 10 years ago.  If this were a high school, they'd be the popular kids (the Plastics, even).  And let's be honest, to a scary degree, high school never ends in a lot of spheres.  To be a bi-strategic controller, you'll be nice sometimes, and not nice other times.  It's the most effective way to consolidate power in a social group.  Part of gaining and holding power is to pick on people at times, especially people who are a bit more socially vulnerable.  Of course if you're smart (and all of these people are), that's almost never going to include someone who's clearly disabled.  No, it should be someone who should be able to "take a joke" (always at their expense of course).  It gets more tricky though.  If you're one of the people at the very top, you can actually be "nice" most of the time.  Your minions will do most of the dirty work for you (and will sometimes jostle with one another for position, too).  It's the people who are just under you who will be the nastiest.  So, you just come off as a nice guy who is (very rarely) mean, and that's a lot easier to justify if it comes to it.

I used to deploy to a base in the middle east where an odd combination of not being anywhere near actual, perceivable danger and being very top heavy on "leadership" led to a more boring version of the good old Stanford Prison.  Lots of silly rules enthusiastically enforced by young officers and senior enlisted - far, far more rules than any normal military base, and far more than people getting mortared regularly would have tolerated.   Worse, our crews lived two to a (very tiny) room for months on end in a place where it wasn't really necessary - and I think people deal with something like that better when they don't know for a fact that the doubling up is sheer jackassery.  But wait!  We also had constantly changing standards that allowed some people to have their own room, which gave us even more reasons to be at one another's throats.  Our crews had been spending huge chunks of their lives there for 20 years, and they were still being treated like transients.  Beautiful new dorms had been built, but our crews didn't qualify to live in them, because they "weren't there long enough".  And yet most of our guys spent more than 6 months a year there, every year, even though we "got to leave".   It was also a really, really boring place to be, and I think making silly rules and creating drama helped break that up for people, not unlike us hitting F5 on slow days - Achaea forums will always provide something to watch.  There are enough of us that these forums are never totally quiet (which would force us to find other entertainment).    

So, instead of commiserating about our situation, people mostly tore each other to pieces.  Or rather, they'd tear a few sacrificial lambs to pieces.  And we are a tiny community, that mostly manages to be civil in any other situation.  We're small enough that you probably at least know every person's name in your field.  But we couldn't be civil there... It just brought out the worst in people.  Just as a little taste, I watched, horrified, as several people humiliated one young officer for daring to eat during the (longwinded) debrief after a 17 hour mission.  Because there were all sorts of ridiculous unwritten rules, too.  Even better, certain people might be able to flout them.  The people who verbally tore him to pieces throughout the rest of the brief were the most powerful people in the room (some officers, some enlisted), all "important" enough to have floor time during the debrief, and each one used part of that floor time making some snide comment directed at the young officer.  We, the rest of the crew, were a captive audience.

I generally had a bit less sympathy for our officers, because in recent years they'd tried to lord it over my own professional community, but it was horrible to watch.  I ended up pulling one of the (enlisted) guys who took part aside later, and we talked about it.  In his view, he was actually "punishing" the young officer for something else entirely.  At home station, the young officer would have been matter of factly counseled for that "something else", not made to endure some ridiculous scapegoating for daring to eat crappy chowhall food after a long mission where he probably had absolutely no time to eat (not kidding).  At a more forward base, he probably would have been simply and matter of factly chewed out (not in front of the entire crew, and not for eating).  

Jules, I actually don't mind you but for the love of all that is good and holy put some version of tl;dr at the bottom of that? I got through it wondering what your point was.

Jules

The first few paragraphs are probably the best tl;dr  The rest is just background that shows how even people who are pretty reasonable in a more "normal" situation can become Regina Georges in the wrong one.  

Kresslack

Jules said:

The first few paragraphs are probably the best tl;dr  

Tl;dr's are generally kept to a very concise summary statement at the end.

In regards to the original story, I'd say that sometimes people are going through some really rough moments in their life and sometimes something happens at just the right (or wrong) moment to push them over the edge. I don't think any of that has to do with how someone treats you when playing a game, or rather, I don't think that it should. It's very likely that whatever argument (which is prone to happen when you play with the same people consistently for an extended period of time) had nothing to do with his decision.

There's a bit from In the Line of Fire between Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich that I relate to:

Mitch Leary: Do you believe in the nobility of suicide?
Frank Horrigan: No. But if you wanna blow your goddamn head off, go ahead, be my guest.

That being said, it would be great if gaming communities exhibited more restraint and better judgement when it comes to interactions with others, but this often only seems a reasonable expectation when there's some form of repercussions beyond being known as a jerk.

We can't control the actions of others, but at the very least we try to control our own actions and how we respond to them, if we need to respond at all. It's something we all lose sight of from time to time.

Khairt

 tl; dr: We are good at feeling bad without feeling responsible. We can't control the conditions of nor truly guide the hand of a person (especially a young male) who is grappling with that final step, especially when we allow bullies to do what they do through inaction or support the bully for their approval-however infrequently they get down to being manipulative assclown. To be better we have try harder and speak out more forcefully.  Dont be dicks guys, we all have to take responsibility here as people in order to have any positive impact on suicide rates.

I don't necessarily agree, but that's what I took away from it.

Nim

@Jules's paper will probably have an abstract once it's published. Still waiting for Nim assessments. :c

Jules

Nim said:

@Jules's paper will probably have an abstract once it's published. Still waiting for Nim assessments. :c

Crayon sharpener broke  Nim deserves her own paper though!

Khairt did a nice job of summarizing (or, making an abstract, which is like a tl;dr, but at the beginning :P).  Only thing I'd add is that people rarely actually commit suicide - more often you "just" hurt them when they were probably already hurting. 

Nim

Jules said:

Nim said:

@Jules's paper will probably have an abstract once it's published. Still waiting for Nim assessments. :c

Crayon sharpener broke  Nim deserves her own paper though!

are you callin' me complex? :c also just write it in forum posts, and put ordered links on someone's wall or something, make people work to read your paper.

Jules

Totally.  I also need more $10 words, although maybe I could just use "reify" over and over.  That seems to work...

Aepas

As easy as it is to get on a soapbox and ask for everyone to do something, pay attention, or act a certain way, the first step is always going to be with fixing yourself.

Trey

Jules said:

Totally.  I also need more $10 words, although maybe I could just use "reify" over and over.  That seems to work...

You don't need more $10 words. You need less -any- words. Substance over quantity.

Shirszae

Aepas said:

As easy as it is to get on a soapbox and ask for everyone to do something, pay attention, or act a certain way, the first step is always going to be with fixing yourself.

While I agree with this, sometimes the fact of the matter is that, like I read somewhere else, "depression and mental illnesses lie" in ways that the people affected can find very difficult or just plain impossible to fight on their own. Yes, that certainly does not mean they should just plain give up or content themselves with their situation until they finally lose it, but callousness about people's possible situation is not the answer either.

Aepas

Shirszae said:

Aepas said:

As easy as it is to get on a soapbox and ask for everyone to do something, pay attention, or act a certain way, the first step is always going to be with fixing yourself.

While I agree with this, sometimes the fact of the matter is that, like I read somewhere else, "depression and mental illnesses lie" in ways that the people affected can find very difficult or just plain impossible to fight on their own. Yes, that certainly does not mean they should just plain give up or content themselves with their situation until they finally lose it, but callousness about people's possible situation is not the answer either.

I've never said that the victims should fix themselves. While that is part of the solution, they do need help from friends and loved ones and I never said otherwise.

Vesios

Unfortunately the concepts of "fixing yourself", "why don't you be happier?" and everything synonymous don't really match themselves well to mental illness. To put it another way, that's like asking someone with a broken leg "why don't you just heal the leg and have it not be broken?"

Mental illness is a war of attrition over your mind and body. Suicide just means you've lost. You don't want to keep fighting anymore; you just want peace and quiet for once. Can internet bullies on some stupid online forum push you over the edge? Sure. But if it's gotten to that, the person was probably already distressed, and chances are they were already considering it. 

ETA: To clarify, that doesn't mean anyone has any right to be an asshole. The golden rule is still a worthwhile thing to follow, and all that. I'm a firm believer that people can entertain respectful disagreement and discourse without petty shots at character. All it takes is a little effort. 

Jules

So, all kidding aside, I'm definitely not any kind of sociology major or minor, but the feedback I always get from my writing advisor when I'm working on papers of any kind, is that I need to give my reader much more detail and background.  I end up writing entire paragraphs that I thought (wrongly) should be "obvious" to a reader, and which, at first, seem like excruciating detail that is almost condescending.  I also almost always clock in under the technical proscribed minimum for a paper because "welp, I said everything I wanted to say".  Go figure.

I wrote a lot on this topic because I felt it was important enough to write about, even while I understand it's almost completely pointless.  I don't have any illusions about what anyone says here actually translating into any kind of meaningful change (which isn't all our fault - it's partly the setting, because there are plenty of mostly reasonable people here).    

Bottom line though, is that these forums are probably never, ever going to change.  We just are who we are and we have the people we have, in the very particular setting we have.  Period.  Some changes in the setting (in-game and on forums) that limit people's actual ability (and incentive!) to be dicks could help, but those are outside our control (and some of us would fight them at first, but if they happened, they'd probably help).  

Even if we had someone from these very forums off themselves, and we heard about it, and had some idea that it was at least partly due to forum and/or in-game drama, *that* would probably not really change us.  You can bet that it would change our surface behavior (especially at first), but you can also bet that we'd find other ways to be nasty.  It's almost like the "Life finds a way" meme, but with social snipery.  I realize that's not the most hopeful way of putting things, and I don't mean that individuals can't make a difference (I've seen it happen, often in very subtle, but significant acts).  In fact, in our setting, even acts so small as to be almost imperceptible can have a critical impact. 

Santar

Shorter is usually better on a community forum like this. People aren't coming here to read a research paper or a full article about a subject. Write as few words as you possibly can while still discussing what you want to discuss. If your goal is to get your opinion across to other people, then you need to consolidate it into a form that they'll receive effectively. 

After skimming your earlier post, it seems like what you said boils down to:
-Young adults are fragile.
-Closed circuit communities have a lot of drama/hostilities(see: School, prison, Achaea, etc)

That's what I took from your post. The rest of your post is just anecdotes.

Exelethril

Sometimes, less is more(!)

Jules

You're totally right (Santar), in that you're normally going to need to keep things as short as you can here.  That's the longest thing I've written in a very long time, too.  I did put in a tl;dr after the first (I hope reasonably brief) section when I posted it.  

As well, when I've gone the be-brief route here, I've ended up having to do things like explain multiple times on a single page that "no, of course this wouldn't include bringing back items that were discontinued because admin/playerbase agreed they were horribly OP"... To me that was so obvious, I felt I didn't need to lengthen my original post by including it.  In fact, it didn't even occur to me that people would even consider it, yet it (repeatedly) came back to bite me in the ass.  Then again, someone recently admitted to pretending not to understand/read the OP on someone else's thread, as some kind of weird "joke", which definitely gave me something to think about.  I mean, that's the kind of stuff we do here.    

Blujixapug

Does Achaea share the problems of games like Dota/LoL?

In LoL it's more like, "wtf you picked Quinn ADC, started Longsword, and fed first blood? kill urself." People saying escalated, normalized, hateful shit to total strangers in the heat of the moment, feeling safe that they're peeing in the ocean of a massive community's online anonymity. Achaea gets some of this - the stress of the moment can make it hard to be civil and IC right after you die - but... not so much, I don't think.

Perhaps this is naive or denial, but Achaea is a different environment. It's smaller (a pool, not the ocean), more niche (more mature audience), and it's a persistent game where people don't just fade away when a match is done (shame is more quickly attached to bad behaviour). There's generally not so much trolling (not the mean-spirited type), raging, hate-spewing. For all the same reasons, interaction, even with strangers, tends to have more immediate depth and intimacy.

Achaea's issues, and I think they're often overblown but I won't say that there are none, seem more related to the legitimate difficulties of complex interpersonal relationships, especially involving organisations and hierarchies. eg. Giving one person a bad impression of you, and having this appraisal be relayed second- and third-hand so your name is vaguely blackened to a whole group with whom you're yet to ever directly interact. Consistently projecting yourself in the way you want to be perceived when you don't always know who's watching, or which of what you say will be relayed to others. Grapevines and gossip.

Toxicity in online communities is an increasingly popular subject, and it's a valid crusade, but I think Achaea is a different beast to most games.

I am sorry to hear about your friend, that is very sad.

Jules

That small pool is also why someone can and will casually turn a guy's name into an insult in a thread where said guy wasn't even a part of the conversation.  And that's one of the cases where there was probably less real venom behind it, because I don't think the person who did it was out to get the person whose name he used as an insult.  He was just probably thinking "people will like this post".  Not the worst we do, though.

All of our little digs are incredibly personal, and are usually designed to do maximum harm with maximum subtlety (which we can do because we *do* know each other).  On that note, I was talking to someone about our forums recently, and he added a good insight about our population.  Achaea, in particular, has a lot of members who are part of the first 'native' internet user generation - in short, many of our users are part of the generation that *invented* trolling.  Achaea also still seems to have the youngest IRE population in general, but with a twist.  Many of those young people have been here well over ten years and many of them really were still kids when they started playing (and posting).  There is an incredible amount of baggage and interpersonal conflict.   

You mention hierarchies, and my god, Achaea seems to be obsessed with e-rank.  We're also in complete denial about it.  It seems to be least prevalant in Ashtan (and possibly Hashan).  In my Imperian orgs, we have a couple of well-placed people who will actually say, point blank "e-rank is fucking meaningless", and in that spirit, they encourage plentiful promotions for nearly anyone who takes part in the organization.  You can't lord your e-rank over everyone very well if half the org is somewhere close to the same rank.  But having those legitimately powerful people in the right positions makes all the difference, because we do occasionally seem to get people (who I can't help but suspect are Achaean transplants) who are all about the e-rank.  

Shirszae

Some people like e-rank, some don't.  Just because you don't like it doesn't mean everyone else should do without it. Its a role-play game for a reason, and if some do actually enjoy having that kind of authority, then so what?  It takes all sorts. 

Jules

I think that is a very clear example of a case where both groups absolutely can't have what they want.  And both groups aren't currently getting what they want - certainly not in the same orgs.  There's also the IC/OOC separation line, that seems to inevitably get blurred when people who like e-authority get e-authority (especially people who like e-authority).  Beyond that, there's the attitude those people bring with them when they change orgs (or even games)!  

It's also really important to distinguish between real e-authority legitimately invested in a player (and their position) and people who just like to make sure that there's a hierarchy, and by golly, that they're somewhere on the top of it.  The first group is rarely a problem, and very necessary.  

Some of the discussions about Mhaldor lately were great for this, where someone mentioned that there's a trend to deemphasize the "slave" aspect in favor of an empowerment point of view (which sounds like it can bring only good things for Mhaldor).  

Vesios

That e-authority can be positive reinforcement, though, if utilized properly.

Saying to a novice "you have much to learn, but great things are in store for you if you put in the effort" is a fantastic motivator, one that wouldn't be possible if e-rank was not a notable, real thing. Just the other day an influential, high ranking Druid basically flat-out told Vesios "you can live up to the Le'Yuet name and do it proud". Like goddamn, that made me feel good even OOCly - but it wouldn't have had such an impact if the Druid wasn't HR15. 

I think the e-rank matters, it's just how you use it. Putting people down and trying to hog all the glory yourself is a bad use of it, but there can be a lot said for taking the "raising the next generation" approach and trying to make people of all houseranks feel included. And having all these different styles of leading makes for an interesting, ever changing game, and that's good. 

Jules

I feel like the distinction I'm trying to make is getting lost there somehow.  I see a big difference between people being overly concerned with e-rank vs. having legitimate, positive authority figures in game, and it's really hard for me to conceive of the first sort ever being a good thing.  Another big problem is that the first sort of person can and does easily convince themselves that they're actually the second kind of person.  All of this rings especially true now that I've had a good taste of what things can look like when e-rank isn't so heavily emphasized as it is in Achaea.  

EDIT:  and again, interestingly, Ashtan, pretty much the "military" capital is the notable exception.  There's something to that, and I highly doubt anyone questions Ashtan's leadership for the hell of it, because it seems to be real leadership, which most people easily recognize.  As well, those people do of course have a position to go along with their inherent authority, not saying that goes away.