Capital Rule Examples

[Joshuamonkey]

As a step towards clarifying the Capital Rule etc., what are all the general examples you can think of for what is or isn't against the Capital Rule? It doesn't matter if you're "right" or not- just need examples so that we can discuss and make a fairly comprehensive guide.

This includes not only things that are directly against the concept of the Capital Rule, but policies that make the Capital Rule reasonable to enforce (like not having two characters help each other, despite good reasoning).

Thank you.

[Joshuamonkey]

Against the Capital Rule
Having one's characters directly trade with each other.
Participating in the same organization.

Not against the Capital Rule
Having a character pass through a town where another of your characters resides.

[Wolfsong]

Uncertain

+ Two characters of yours live in the same town (acceptable in Polish zone, unacceptable in English zone - why the double standard?)
+ One character of yours often visits and engages with others in a town another of your characters resides in, staying for years at a time but not living permanently
+ One character of yours carries information to a town where a second character of yours lives, allowing the second character to act on information that you already know about
+ Two characters of yours live within the same empire, but in different towns

Breaking CR

+ Talking OOCly to other players about ongoing events
+ Organising OOCly to coordinate log-in times
+ Using OOC in the game (apparently?)
+ Harassing another player OOCly, be it through social media, OOC, the game, the forums, discord, IRC, etc. (This includes bullying by staff of players in public or private mediums)
+ Sharing logs and maps outside of the game world
+ Having multiple accounts
+ Threatening to blackmail another player using IG events

[sherman]

Uncertain

+ Two characters of yours live in the same town (acceptable in Polish zone, unacceptable in English zone - why the double standard?)

This is also been generally accepted on smaller language zones (Like my Finnish one due lack of players..)

[Joshuamonkey]

Thanks for your input! These are good examples, and I'm sure there are more.

(acceptable in Polish zone, unacceptable in English zone - why the double standard?)

I don't know what cases might have implied a double standard, but I had two English characters in the same town as part of different organizations for a while without a problem. It's not recommended, but it depends. (As Sherman mentioned, a whole language group may only have a few active towns) If both characters are part of the town leadership, that's a slippery slope for sure. Hopefully by clarying what's acceptable and not we can clarify the reasons in different situations, both to ensure that there aren't double standards and to know whether or not there is.

+ Harassing another player OOCly, be it through social media, OOC, the game, the forums, discord, IRC, etc. (This includes bullying by staff of players in public or private mediums)

Are you referring to harassing due to in-game events or characters? Otherwise harassing in real life is a whole other issue separate from the CR. e.g. staff Code of Conduct, rules of the forum and Discord.

+ Two characters of yours live within the same empire, but in different towns

I like that this is uncertain. Let's say there's an empire or alliance for a whole island- you could technically have multiple characters as part of it without directly helping one another.

[miirkaelisaar]

Is it against CR for a character to spawn with the memories of their past characters? I always thought we weren't supposed to reincarnate characters or know things only the other character would know even if they're dead now. And if not, I wish people would stop regardless and just play non-magic characters like cantr is meant for. People in cantr aren't supposed to be magic or psychic or all knowing, now it's one thing if the character themselves are faking these visions and they aren't real things that happened and you're just playing a delusional character, but when people have a character consistently motivated by their past, dead character and knowing things they shouldn't know, I can't acknowledge it in RP, and it makes it super hard to play around.

[Joshuamonkey]

Is it against CR for a character to spawn with the memories of their past characters? I always thought we weren't supposed to reincarnate characters or know things only the other character would know even if they're dead now. And if not, I wish people would stop regardless and just play non-magic characters like cantr is meant for. People in cantr aren't supposed to be magic or psychic or all knowing, now it's one thing if the character themselves are faking these visions and they aren't real things that happened and you're just playing a delusional character, but when people have a character consistently motivated by their past, dead character and knowing things they shouldn't know, I can't acknowledge it in RP, and it makes it super hard to play around.

Well said. It is definitely against the CR for a character to have knowledge from another character without receiving the knowledge in-game, whether the other character is dead or alive. That is a basic definition of the CR.

[Joshuamonkey]

Thank you Wolfsong, Sherman, and miirkaelisaar for your helpful thoughts.

Here's a draft of official explanations on the Capital Rule and Players Department policies. I'm sharing this here because it's important to get feedback to make this document comprehensive for all types of situations as well as understandable for all players. I'm also bringing this up in the #player_board Discord channel.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Dj ... 8fUDo/edit?
usp=sharing

I'm hoping to roll this out soon, preferably within the next few weeks.

[PaintedbyRoses]

You might not know that the character received the info in game.

It's possible that a character could be pretending to communicate with the dead or be a reincarnation of a dead character by having found and read old notes. I've seen long and detailed notes (which amount to journals) in game and I wish that I had thought to have my character use them in this way.

Another way is that the character could have heard stories about a well-known character who has died and then they move to another town and pretended that they are the reincarnation of the dead character.

Of course, this would not be true for newspawns.

[Joshuamonkey]

It's possible that a character could be pretending to communicate with the dead or be a reincarnation of a dead character by having found and read old notes.

Yes
This goes without saying but I just wouldn't recommend doing that with your own previous characters (since that's almost certianly due to player bias).

In my time of playing Cantr I did find myself in one interesting situation that's probably hard to believe was just a coincidence, and as it was such a long time ago I'll give names. One of my characters (Adam) lived at and then led a town for many many years. Later another somewhat younger character of mine, Joshua, on behalf of another organization visited this town sometimes to help out at an outpost of the organization there (AT&T), whose capital was in another town nearby. At some point a younger fellow leader decided to kill Adam off to secure his position of power (Joshua wasn't there at the time, I think I would have remembered that). Later the leader of AT&T requested Joshua to help manage the outpost at what used to be Adam's town, and things must not have turned out well for the killer of Adam as he was gone and I think dead, though I'm not sure exactly. Since the town was somewhat abandoned Joshua ended up becoming the leader and was so for many years. It was an interesting turn of events for me as a player at least. It was a town whose activity mostly depended on visitors and traders, and Joshua found himself alone eventually and after forgetting to feed him he died, which is sad as he still had the friend who led AT&T. That's the last character I've had die.

[voyagerventures]

I think if Cantr was to evolve and scale, the capital rule is a huge hurdle to overcome. This is because I don't think it is feasible to have so much policing and subjectivity in a game that has gained wide popularity.

Just imagine if World of Warcraft had similar rules in place where it constantly relies on PD to do the policing - the cost would be through the roof! Not mentioning the policing is itself controversial, as it is subject to abuse. Just have a look at the Reddit comments and other places, how many times has someone complained about the PD? There are even maps on Reddit to show that the Dragonloft area on Treefeather is full of PDs and should avoid.

I think the next chapter of Cantr's evolving should be focused on 'hard-coded' rules rather than soft rules that are subject to subjectivity. For example, make it impossible or extremely difficult for two characters of the same player to interact in certain ways (e.g. spawn them on very distant locations, disable the characters while they are present in the same township (i.e. cannot perform actions other than to leave town), disallow them to perform certain interactions with each other, etc.). This is how I can see Cantr should scale.

Lastly, I see Cantr have plenty of opportunity to scale in regions such as India and China. However, it may be very hard to explain and also monitor the capital rule if we have an influx of new players.

I think we should gradually move away from the need to 'police' towards a 'smart contract' type of setting which is much more efficient.

[Joshuamonkey]

While it will always be necessary to have good explanations of the Capital Rule in order to understand Cantr, and I think we've made good progress in that regard, I also very much agree that we should hard-code restrictions. I'm pushing for this because I think it's silly to let players do things and then punish them instead of making it impossible in the first place. Anyway, it's really a matter of getting around to program such a thing, though I think certain restrictions like directly helping another character of the same player should be relatively straightforward to implement.
Other things will be more difficult to hard-code, like discouraging collaborating outside of the game. But there are evidences of this in-game and if we really get to the point of scaling large we can use machine learning to predict this kind of thing.
There's also potential to identify external references to real-life songs, etc. But collaboration outside of the game with other players is the real issue and that's the hardest to code into the game.

[voyagerventures]

It is very good you mentioned machine learning, we need to keep up with the trend! I mean regardless whether the game is run by volunteers to evolve into a more commercial venture, people's time is valuable. If we can automate the policing while removing the subjectivity, then I am all for it.