S28 Rules Summit

[slate]

6. SD must remain in ISFL HO. Forever.

We should question whether the users that proposed and voted for this rule should continue to be eligible for voting in the future. An overwhelming majority of the userbase does not have a direct vote in league matters, and seeing a proposal like this along with 9 joke votes to add it to the rulebook does not inspire much confidence that a large minority of the voting base takes their role seriously. Fortunately we have been given an offseason task that addresses this exact topic, so thank you to HO for giving us this type of platform for feedback. If you proposed or voted for this rule and simultaneously believe that a players' union type body is a farce, your position is untenable. Please reconsider using your exclusive ability to propose rules on a joke and instead solicit feedback for a proposal from other users as has been done previously.

Ok this was added as a joke on a whim because GM chat was having some fun. Didn’t expect it to make it to the official post but it gave me a chuckle. Half the GMs didn’t even know it was a joke by GM chat because they weren’t online.

So to be particularly clear - no one proposed this to be in the rule book and the people voting yes were part of the joke, there wasn’t even a no option for a while anyways, and we should all relax a bit

I'm all for GM chat having a bit of a laugh, but I also think Mag raises some good points about the optics of this and how it reflects on the rules summit process. For anyone who has been directly involved in rules discussion (as Mag has been in the past as a former GM), it's clearly apparent that there are many involved in the process who don't take it very seriously. Discussion moves extremely quickly such that it's hard for people to follow if discussion happens while they're away, lines of argument frequently get derailed in several directions at once making it impossible to hold a sustained conversation about any one particular topic, and in general there are almost as many jokes made in the rules discussion chat as actual points.

I'm not trying to cast blame at any one party, because the environment is too deeply entrenched for any one person to change. Hell, I myself have often given up and just made some low-effort humor at times because it's a nice way to release some steam that builds up from all the arguing. But I think that a joke rule proposal getting not just put on the ballot (which is itself a big issue), but also making its way into the publc-facing announcements post, is a symptom of all of these issues as Mag successfully identified. I dearly hope that we can change the cultural norms and/or structures surrounding the rules summit in the future (i.e. placing slow mode on the rules discussion Discord channels) to make it a much more productive use of everyone's time and maybe even improve how the league functions. Or at least giving the players a vote, since concerns about meme voting are irrelevant if half of the people currently involved are doing it anyway.