So we implemented a new rule targetting concessions. And as usual, we get the storm of questions and complaints on how bad this new rule is and how it will break everything we love about FUMBBL.

The rules page is written in something I refer to as "legalese". It's designed to be short and concise and give the staff members some amount of leeway to interprete the rule. Yes, the rules are designed to be slightly flexible because we feel that every situation is unique, and require some amount of consideration. If the rules on this site were set in stone, the staff would very often be forced to be excessively hard on people, or break the rules. None of these options is acceptable so we have the rules that allow some amount of interpretation and flexibility.

Another important point of the rules is that they are not written to protect the individual coach. Yes, that's right.. They're not written to protect you. They are written to protect the community as a whole rather than the individual. Think about it for a while. I won't be surprised if that statemnt results in people telling me that FUMBBL is ruled with whatever political doctrine fits the bill.

But I digress from the topic at hand here: Concessions.

The base intent of this new rule is for the staff to have something concrete to point at when going after the coaches who blatantly concede in games where there is no reason whatsoever to do so. Turn 1 concessions, turn 15/16 concessions. The kinds of actions that essentially give away free gold and SPPs to the opponent. A lot of people are stating that tournaments is the reason for this, but to me it's about more than tournaments. I want teams to compete on similar terms, and if someone gets a "free concession" in a shady way, it's not fair to the rest of the community. Most people fight very hard to get their teams to where they are. They struggle to build stars that hit the top 10s. Building that special blitzer or whatever is HARD, and I don't want that effort to be belittled by someone who gets it all for free due to stupid concessions. Thus the new rule.

The staff won't go on a crusade and hunt down the witches here (how's that for an analogy? :) ), but we will act on coaches trying to abuse concessions (and on people trying to abuse this new policy). We've seen an increase in this type of behaviour lately, and felt that it was time to address the issue.

Mind you, I am not disillusioned enough to think that cheating will disappear because of this rule, but I hope that it will make people think twice before conceding randomly. It's about the community and about being fair to the rest of the community. For most of you, this rule won't make much of a difference anyway.

Someone said that this rule is not necessary, and that we could easily have done without it. This could be said for just about the entire rules page. It would be great to be able to write "Be good, use common sense" and leave it at that but time has told us (the staff) that this isn't possible. In order to not waste hours on end explaining why we feel that someone has failed to "be good", we can point at a specific rule and say: "That's what you violated". It makes it an order of magnitude easier to deal with people who do silly things. You need to remember that all of the staff members do what we do because we feel that FUMBBL is a fantastic place; it's not our job. We want FUMBBL to run smoothly because we love the place, and let me tell you - Dealing with people who cheat for hours on end (sometimes the same person) is not very fun. But we do it anyway, because we feel that it's worth the effort.