Possibly a Cabbage Posted:

I think part of the problem is in tying down a precise set of guidelines for how each clbum is supposed to RP. Before episode 2, the only clbumes were the three simplest to RP: Jerks, Attention Whores, and Whiners. Those archetypes are simple, well understood by most everybody, and if you don’t really understand them by your other internet experiences, actual gameplay gives a reasonable guidelines as to how they’re supposed to behave.

But Hackers are problematic. Hackers don’t actually generally participate in the forums they’re attacking. If you go by gameplay as a guideline, hackers have only one attack that involves actually posting to the forum, and IRL it’s not something that’s really going to get anybody upset. There’s no well understood set guidelines in popular internet culture, as far as I know, as to how hackers behave. I personally chose the clbum because I’m not a jerk, attention whore, or a whiner and I didn’t want to go for a challenge clbum, so I basically picked it as “other”. In terms of actually RPing a character, I could base it of any number of antisocial computer science folks I know, but would that actually be apparent to anybody that I’m behaving like a hacker?

If you want people to seriously RP in clbum, some serious thought has to be put forward to explaining to people how certain clbumes are supposed to be RPed. But in the end, is anybody going to want to moderate this? Would anybody in their right mind want to ban someone for being insufficiently emo, or trolly, or hackery if they’re otherwise a fun person to be around?

I agree, and this is why I wasn’t proposing any new rules per se. Rather, I think the overall atmosphere needs an overhaul. CZ can’t force anyone to do anything, and in something so subjective as RP, there’s no way to say “oh, you’re not playing sufficiently like a hacker.” That’s where the community comes in—good posters will be popular, whereas bad posters will be ignored (and downvoted). It is up to the community to decide what good RP is on a case-by-case basis, and reward originality and a sense of humor.