We're drifting off the actual topic of course, (which is about a process of review; and a way of presenting the rulings) but I don't think you're being very fair there @Section9. Or at least, there are plenty of us that do remember when PsychoticStorm weighs in on rules! He's made a lot of assertions about the Rules As Intended by the design team, and made plenty of clarifications about the Rules As Written that were so unpopular at the time people came out and said he didn't have the authority to make those statements!
So what you're saying is that the community's memory of Storm's participation in rules debates is that it increased rather than clarified the furor?
Hey, let's try to continue this thread in a way that doesn't involve bashing other forum members. There is no rules cabal, and even if there were, its membership would not be decided via public debate. There's nothing to be gained except hard feelings by listing who you feel should or should not be a member.
I think the thing is that pushing Psychotic Storm as some kind of rule adjudicator comes across as a political move to further the interests of players who insist on Play As It Lies (or whatever we are calling it now) since he has seemingly been quite vocal in his support of that interpretation of the rules as the only valid one. Therefore it ends up miring an issue I think the great majority of the community support a simple solution to (let IJW's clarifications be temporarily official, as long as the are published on the wiki) into a messy fight about things that are very contentious in the community and only tangentially related instead. If people in good faith would like the issue in the OP solved, I would ask that they leave such contentious side issues out of it, and concentrate their support on the core things we support as a community consensus - i.e., that it would be very beneficial to everyone if CB enacted more effective system of rules clarification, whether it be the one I suggested, clearer more regular FAQs, or something else. If we get sidetracked into petty squabbles about other unrelated issues, the issue we actually all agree should be addressed is less clear, and easier to dismiss.
Very much this. I admit, it's been a long time since I've been in the rules forum (heck, I'm not sure I've been there since this forum went up!), and I don't remember PS weighing in on rules.
Yeah, People saying they dont perceive Storm as a rules guy on par with IJW really should be taken in good faith. Not held up as if it were a personal attack.
I've seen it happen once or twice, his accuracy isn't as good as IJW (in this game, that's not much of a criticism, though), but in a pinch he's official enough to settle an argument. Far better than the "Warcor" label that some people mistake for meaning "know their shit" which isn't exactly true all the time :)
Not when even Bostria gets rules wrong in games. Crud, I'm pretty sure we've found some rules that my group has been playing wrong since N3 came out...
Thank you. At this point, there are a series of differing proposals in play and it's probably worth identifying them. i) Proposition #1 was my original suggestion that Corvus Belli implement a system of ongoing rules review, and a process for continuously publishing the rulings in a form similar to that used by Oracle on Gatherer for Magic: the Gathering. @Del S Yes, you're right that MTG is a very different game and in particular, it's probably a lot easier to write questions and answers in that brief style that Oracle uses so well for that card game; but I do still think the principle should hold good for Infinity. I proposed that @xagroth could use currently unresolved thread about G:Sync and Immobilized Engineers self-repairing as a working example of how the situation and the (as yet still un-obtained) ruling might look. Others are welcome to try of course. ii) Proposition #2 was originated by @Hachiman Taro suggesting that someone like IJW, who's formally associated with Corvus Belli and properly involved in their rules development could provide official-but-interim rulings on issues as they arise. These interim rulings would be published on to the wiki until such times are they were supplanted by another ruling. There is a debate about who is or isn't partisan on divisive rules topics, but for what it's worth, I don't think either side of any particular debate should hold out much hope for 'their guy' to somehow represent their personal views - the whole point is that they won't. iii) Proposition #3 is that an unofficial working party, likely made up of the well-established forum members, would produce the same result as the above but independent of CB, and presumably not being able to take advantage of their wiki or other official resource. This is essentially a return to the forum summaries that were previously provided by forum members. So these are the propositions as I understand them so far - are there any others I've missed or that we should add?
That thread was resolved at the 3rd response by the common forum standards. Can we just continue applying those standards? This thread is a perfect example of what I mean.
Either i) or ii) would be great, as would CB just paying more mind to FAQing regularly and clearly and on the most relevant questions. iii) I would have concerns about, but would still probably be better than what we have now, depending on who exactly the members were and what the process was.
I want #1 If I can't have that then I want #2 If nothing else can be done then #3 is still better then nothing but it represents a failer of CB to handle the game. If we do have to go with 3 then I think it is important to still collect those answers on to a wiki or document for TO clarity.
personally I dont think 3 is really a workable solution. Not only is there the arguments over who should or should not be part of whatever council this is, it lacks any insight into the designers intentions and how the rules are supposed to work, which is where most of the arguments actually come from. Finally I dont see why the posters most elligible for such a "council" would be more likely to reach a consensus than they are now. which is to say they are probably unlikely too.
Number 3 is basically what Games Workshop has with each local tournament meta having points lists that forces people away from what the meta thinks are overpowered units. Their approach is to address the units that make use of broken rules.
Is anyone here familiar with GW's now-discontinued Epic games? Epic 40k or it's replacement, Epic:Armageddon? Well, those ended up with a living rulebook and a bunch of volunteers to keep the game going after it went OOP (with GW's permission, apparently). Even those guys can't manage more than one rule update a year, and that's for a game that I think they play exclusively (I much preferred E:A to 40k, even though my Tau ended up going through a lot of convolutions) So I'd be very surprised if CB could do it much faster than yearly. PP manages things with their Infernals, so I think it'd be good to give a couple people (obviously IJW since he maintains the wiki, I'd add anyone else involved in rules translation/proofreading) forum titles and limited forum admin rights. I'd suggest O12 Commissioner as the title, once a rules question has been definitively answered by them they can lock the thread (and add it to IJW's list of FAQ/wiki updates). Someone with a question or need for clarification can PM the thread-closer to re-open it (particularly in cases where the rulebooks differ!). I think Infinity is probably big enough a community to support an Infernals system, but not big enough to support WotC's Oracle system.
One of the gripes here is that CB uses FAQs as "rule update/revision" mostly, while actual FAQs are hard to find. There is a whole set of FAQs for this season's ITS with official responses from Hellois (no longer maintained, sadly) and the only place to find it is in the ITS english subforum... and it's not even pinned, nor has it been integrated on the ITS PDF. So no, no "rules rewrite" has been asked (much), aside from a consolidation between rulesets (since there are differences between the english and spanish version!), but the Frequently Asked Questions to be that (about questions), and more regular. Hell, I was told the judges at the last Interplanetario had a whole pack of FAQs handed to them, a recompilation of questions made on the Warcors subforum, I think... and it hasn't been placed in the downloads section -.-U
I'm the NetEA Death Guard Army Champion, so yes I'm familiar. :-) Unfortunately this is slightly back-to-front - unlike Blood Bowl, EA never officially had a 'living rulebook', so the rules themselves have been completely static since 2008. There are irregular FAQs, but even they tend to be divisive as there are at least three separate (but overlapping) groups maintaining slightly different sets of FAQs (NetEA, EpicUK, EpicAU?, EpicFR?) and separate army lists. I've still not been able to find any poster who can tell me what was in it, or even confirm that it existed. :-(
