None of the actions of your characters should be on the basis of your Out Of Character (OOC) knowledge as a player about other locations, fellow characters, maps, resources, or the history of the game; nor on the basis of your communication OOC with fellow players.
You may never use multiple characters together to help each other. Character death is permanent, and reincarnation or other transfer of knowledge or possessions from one to another is not allowed
You may not plan or coordinate any in game events with other players OOC, even when to log in. It is not allowed to share maps, resource locations, or any other specific in game information with other players OOC.
The Four Day Rule: It is not allowed to discuss events Out Of Character with other players that might influence any ongoing action. Even concluded events such as character deaths may not be discussed OOC in the forums, irc, or private communications for a minimum of Four days. This is known as the Four Day Rule.
Given the breadth that the subject seems to encompass, ranging from an individual using their own knowledge to a group communicating OOC, I decided to just ram it all into the term OOC cooperation. It sounds nice and allows me to write without a bunch of caveats about exactly what I'm talking about. Obviously it's weird to say someone who uses their IC knowledge of locations from one of their characters to help another is OOC cooperating with themselves but such is life.
Now the goals of this ban seems to be:
(1) Separation of characters - every character needs to be a fully realized individual, they shouldn't be a hydra like telepathic hive mind nor should you just be playing with yourself
(2) Keep things "fair" - not all players can coordinate OOC to the same degree or even at all, the motivation being to level the playing field and allow everyone to be competitive.
(3) Keep things in game - Cantr is the game we play and therefore it is the proper arena in which the game should be played. OOC cooperation can remove a large component of the game from the game which doesn't seem desirable if you want player of the game to play the game.
I think these goals are reasonable ones to have and I do find them desirable but a number of factors get in the way of achieving them. As evidenced by the need to lock "The characters whose player you want to know" thread after running successfully for so many years and numerous cases of OOC cooperation exposed in the past OOC cooperation has been and continues to be indulged in by the player base. This to me suggests that without radically increasing the level of monitoring by staff, seemingly impossible with a volunteer group (note: not a criticism, staff keep it up!), OOC cooperation will continue to occur. I believe this is being further exacerbated by the fact that more and more ways of communicating online are becoming available, IC knowledge has become easier to obtain through widely spread notes and ties between players have strengthened over the years as the player base solidified. So on top of OOC cooperation being impossible to stop we also have it becoming easier to achieve without notice thus directly impeding the achievement of all the goals listed above. Given such a situation the only reasonable response in my mind seems to be discussing the ways in which these goals can be considered achieved with minimal effort.
I'll be posting my thoughts on how exactly we might go about doing this later on because I've been typing for too long but I thought the discussion could start right now. Cheers!
Tl;dr Stopping OOC cooperation is already hard and its becoming easier to accomplish as time goes on. Given this it seems reasonable to talk about what we want to accomplish by stopping/discouraging OOC cooperation and how we might accomplish those things with minimal effort.
