I've been holding back my opinion on this as I've done some moderating with regards to a few of these threads and I wanted to stay impartial. It seems like this particular drama isn't going to require the mop any more, so I can contribute.
I know that a lot of this has been said before, but I'm going to reiterate it here anyway.
It is my opinion that the event cards in general were a good idea that brought some challenge in deckbuilding to the war. There are many examples from the list of ones posted that would have been extremely interesting. However, in my opinion, there were specific examples of ones that were not good ideas. The "Age of..." series was a particular culprit, and probably should not have been included as part of the War. I can go into quite some detail about why I believe this to be the case, but I suspect that given the volume of discussion on this subject already, it would be lost in the pandemonium. This outcome was always going to be a risk in an environment where a single person is leading design without inviting comment (arguably, this was necessary despite the risk).
Was the action advocated by some of the players with regards to these cards appropriate? Absolutely. There is no question that what they did was entirely within the rules of War, and also within the context of the game.
Let's break this down carefully. A team leader, faced with an event rule which he regarded as being unfair
[1], chose to not take advantage of the bonus the rule allowed him to
optionally take. There was no rule breaking here whatsoever. There is no equivalence between flouting the rules and deliberately playing sub-optimally, and to suggest so is disingenuous.
To make an analogy to football - when a football player is injured and the ball is still in play, usually the opposing team will kick it across the sidelines or pass it to that team's goalkeeper. They could choose to continue play with their new-found advantage, but they choose not to do so because it would not be sportsmanlike. You would never dream of claiming that because they didn't play on that they would be breaking the rules.
If you want to argue about the threats to leave the game, then we're riding an entirely different beast. There is at best a minor social contract that you enter into when you sign up for War which binds you to compete, based on social standing within the community and the promise of further events. This social contract cannot be easily enforced by necessity, as War needs to be flexible enough to deal with inevitable dropouts in a field of 108 competitors playing a free online game across several months. However, there is no hard-and-fast obligation to complete the event if you enter. Argue all you like about that one, but from a practical standpoint it makes no difference because this is the internet and if a person were to want to stop playing for any reason whatsoever (their grandmother dying, loads of homework, or simply boredom) there is nothing anyone can do about it.
The only ultimate rule which governs participation is "do I want to do this, will I be having fun?". This is the same with any event run on these forums, whether it is a large and complex tournament run by the site admin or a short tournament run by a newbie for other newbies. Players have absolutely no inherent responsibility to the tournament organisers, who volunteer, and work for free. This does not mean that the tournament organisers cannot moderate their games and exclude people with poor track records, but to suggest some sort of inherent ethical structure which means that the players owe the tournament organisers their participation is ludicrous. It is especially ludicrous when you consider the context - that the tournament organiser broke the social contract first by deviating from expectations about how the event was going to be run.
In the social context, could it be considered disrespectful to Scaredgirl to walk away from her hard work? Quite possibly. Would Scaredgirl be within her rights to be upset, and perhaps bar people from future games? Again, quite possibly. Is it inherently unethical to threaten to walk away when you consider that you are no longer governed by the social contract of the event? I doubt it. In particular, the two claims being made that a) not taking an optional bonus in protest of an unfair competitive situation is equivalent to breaking a rule, and b) there is some inherent ethical tie between organisers and players that makes people choosing to leave a game "unethical", are separate issues, and should not be conflated.
[1] Where unfair in this context means it gave an arbitrary random bonus to individual teams which was not evenly distributed across the game, and thus altering the "level playing field"-context of the game.TL;DREvent cards were a good idea but not all of them were perfect.The so-called "boycott" might have been disrespectful, but didn't actually do anything
wrong.Forum shopping for the sake of an argument is a dick move.[/list]
EDIT: heh, this probably should have gone in the Feedback and Suggestions thread. I can move it over if people want.
