First off, I love it when people feel that they can be themselves on a forum.
Second, your forum Elite rank is higher than your in game Elite ranks. lol
1) I am strongly of the opinion "It's not the game - it's you"
The choices you make in the game reflect who you are and what you desire.
(Although Slavoj Zizek argues that film is the ultimate 'perverse medium' because it teaches not WHAT to desire, but HOW to desire. And you could make the same case about the game. It guides you into emotionally investing in some aspect, and then offers you an ethically poor solution and no consequences.)
2) I'm into the game politics in-game and out.
I care about the playergroups and how they interact. I believe certain personalities are attracted to certain groups. I also believe that this forum is only a slice of the playerbase, and that Group oriented players spend less time here. Group oriented players have their own villages - this forum kinda scoops up the loners. While still being a social platform.
It's one of the reaons I get annoyed when the mods shuffle good ideas of to the less populated outer reaches. I always hope that suggestions will get left in Dangerous Discussion for a couple of days to get kicked around before being put out to grass in the suggestions sub. Same with astronomy news, it could usefully hang around Dangerous Discussion a little longer.
There was a thread on the topic of forum rep and I got to thinking about what counted. Number of posts? Amount of rep?
I decided that what I liked most was the ration of Rep to Posts.
Someone like ToSoCo doesn't have a lot of posts, but he gets a whole lotta rep.
posts 2227
forum rep 1428
infractions 5
ratio of Rep to posts: 64%
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That's just your view on the Alliance with rose tinted glasses. Take a look at how the Alliance acts. It's an expansionist superpower. If anything the Alliance are the bulldogs that force systems to compliance.
How many systems "joined" the Alliance in the last two years? How many of those systems joined via elections and how many joined by war or civil war?
Be honest, the Alliance is not that different to the Federation (just maybe more successful in actually taking over systems).
We don't view it as Empire building - we see it as a greening initiative.