Unfortunately, BM is just too big and diverse for consensus-based enforcement of the rules. There are inherent adversarial qualities to the game (political and military conflict), and relatively few of its players know each other in real life. Not everyone will willingly adhere to the spirit of the game as conceived of by Tom. Some people just want to win, and are perfectly willing to abuse game mechanics and use OOC methods (like multi-accounting) to do so. Others want to role-play elves, pirates, ninjas or stranger things. Some people cannot escape their modern mindsets and conceptions of peasants (especially adventurers) as some sort of noble proletariat. Or shake the conviction that democracy is the best form of government.
Consensus will *never* be had in a community of this size. Every decision made will *always* make some people unhappy. This is inevitable.
I agree to that completely. And
still I think and open discussion will give us
more force. Right now, many of the people who want to play ninjas will get a reprimand, and largely shrug it off. Because it comes from nowhere, has no context, it's just a message.
Remember that I said "consensus", I never said "equal votes". If someone goes about insulting another players' (not characters'!) mum for three pages, the consensus would clearly be that that's not ok, even if the accused recruits 20 of his friends to chime in "nah, just fine". My hope is that this consensus, with many different voices, would have more force than a single out-of-nowhere Titan reprimand.
