1. No one is being "punished," in the sense of bans or fines.
Not by bans/fines. But that's not the only way to punish someone. They are having their reputation damaged by being kicked out of the Senate. Which could in the future lead to them not getting other lordships or council positions.
3. No one is specifying that a player must log on at specific times or intervals. Five days is a quite reasonable window of time to grant, and almost all players who aren't about to auto-pause will log in at least once within this time frame.
Yes, five days is a good length of time. Not impossible to imagine a situation where someone gets busy,and logs in once, quickly, during the middle of that time. Still, there is a limit to how many hoops a player should have to jump through to make sure they are being fair.
I still think the voice vote is a better alternative to try before adopting this system, but as it stands I'm not sure I would call it an IR violation. I don't care for it, but as Vellos said, just because it's not optimal doesn't make it wrong by definition.
I definitely agree. Just because a system is byzantine, inefficient, or whatever doesn't mean it can't be used, or violates the IR.
However, just because you're not *intending* to violate an IR doesn't mean that the system you use can't end up doing that. I suppose that if you're going to track people's activity (which is really what's happening here) then your rules should really include some OOC notice about RL inactivity, and a notice that having OOC reasons for occasionally not participating won't have IC consequences. This isn't letting them use OOC inactivity as a shield for poor IC performance, it's just a nod to the fact that sometimes !@#$ happens, and that as fellow players we're acknowledging this.
