Sangwa, I read your posts. I just happen to disagree, not with the specific things you're pointing out but the consequences of the principle of allowing people to police RP.
My point is that you cannot punish people just for the quality of their RP, even when their RP sucks because what constitutes good or bad in terms of RP is relative. And if you seek quality control you need a standard or "optimum", a bar to separate good from bad, which cannot be defined fairly. We intervene when there are violations of game policies and OOC disruptions (like excessive OOC in the main tab, for instance).
If someone is RPing outside settings what we can do is just point out the flaws. It would be up to them to correct them. If they don't, the community will probably reject their plot and it will not come to fruition. We see it every now and then in the Guilds Forum, whenever someone makes a thread about their fantastic new guild that has nothing to do with PS settings. The community is quick and effective in these cases. Even when they are within settings but pushing the limits a bit, they get a reaction.
And, like I said, even if we had the authority to censor bad RP, at this point there are way too many gaps in the settings that force us to guess and interpret what we do have so we can cover that which has not been developed yet. This means there's no black and white. Someone's interpretation can be as valid as the next person, even though they might be completely different. The only ones who can rule over those issues are the settings guys and girls, not game masters, and even then, the settings department will need some time to discuss and evaluate the facts before they can pop an answer.
I understand there are blatant cases in which you know when someone is not RPing well. But what about those that are not so clear, those that dwell in the gray zones of what's still to be developed? Are we to use our judgment for that? GMs have good judgment but if there are no clear standards and guidelines to follow, it will be a mess. Some people would get away with some things and others would get the axe for much lesser things, depending on who was around to enforce good RP and what their mood was at the time. I can already hear the favoritism and harassment complains from players. That's not a professional or effective way to moderate. It would be very self-righteous for us to presume we can do this without hurting people and RP.
There is no need to punish people who are learning how to RP. The point is to teach them. Do we really want to be that unwelcoming as a community? Do we really want to have a RP police that will interrupt any RP for quality control? I'd be very annoyed if that happened to me. GMs cannot be online 24/7 and therefore we can only see bits of RP here and there, and there are other issues that need our attention when we're in-game, many of them far more important than following players around trying to detect any bad RP. And since we do not know everything that happens in a plot, we can easily jump to the wrong conclusions and shut down someone's RP arbitrarily and drive them away when maybe they had a valid reason for their plot we just missed or simply never allowed to be revealed.
If we are too inflexible in the learning curve, people will leave, and among them, valuable people who just needed to play and learn and whose contributions could make PS a better game; and those with experience will also be affected when they see their creativity limited by someone's (mis)understanding of good RP. Instead of being intolerant we need to be patient.
I think it's a good idea to be proactive and offer advice to help people improve their RP skills. It's a bad idea to enforce it, however.
Let's keep it fun. Let's keep it free.
