Ah the dilemma. The history. The mayhem.
Back in the day, when Altis was but a twinkle in Lord Wilco's eye, everything was game. The only rule was basically "don't be a dick".
Trouble is, there are rather a lot of these Dicks about. The Island used to get regular visits from people who thought AltisLife was basically Battlefield or Call of Duty, and who assumed that running around randomly shooting people in the face for no reason at all, was what you're meant to do here. Wrong!
Hence the original 'No Random Death Match' rule was born, and RDM became a thing.
W00t!
A special NPC called Ardy Emban even owned the gunstores just to remind people when they bought their shooting sticks, what might happen if they ran around being gunwhore Dicks.
And for a time, it worked. People got banned for RDM, and there were fewer Dicks.
But time passed. The dinosaurs came and went, and soon after, the Island cave people got lazy. And the Dicks got very slightly smarter. Now, instead of just randomly deathmatching people, the Dicks worked out that if they simply added the famous phrase (Latin, I think; maybe Swahili)...
"Hanza Pordye!"
...then they were no longer RDMers, and their dicks shrank and became invisible!
Or at least, that's what they thought. The rest of the Islanders believed the exact opposite, and feared that the Dicks were now even bigger, and returning in ever greater numbers. What to do? How to stem the tide of dickishness? How to maintain a degree of cool banter, fun, edgy drama, skirting-with-death, and excitement, when there were so many content just to spout the evil magic phrase and pop their pistol?
Answer?
More roolz.
From this was born the New Era™. Stone tablets from the mountain-tops decreed that henceforth,
There Shall Be Quality Roleplay!
...and the criminal punishment of 'FailRP' became a thing. Now, it was no longer safe just to yell the pat phrase and open up a clip in someone's face; you had to be somebody. You hadda be cool. You hadda be interesting. It wasn't even enough to simply repeat the magic words over and over multiple times giving someone time to react... you actually had to say something worthwhile!
And for a time, this was enough. Life was sweet again, and people went about their business on Altis with renewed vigour and vim. Encounters happened, people talked, Roles were Played, and people were happy.
The Dicks had gone, again.
But sadly, history repeats itself, as we know only too well (eh, Donald J?). Dicks always come back. Much, much later, the Dicks realised that they could play the flipside game. Instead of being the RDMer, they could antagonise people in such a way to make them be the RDMer! Huzzah!
All it took was to allow some small kind of roleplay to be established, by the other party who was attempting a robbery, say, and they could simply run away! And then afterwards, when the dust had settled, they would make plaintive, whining reports to the Island Gods in the hope that their frustrated, hapless murderer would be cast asunder from the lands forevermore. And sometimes, if they edited their transcripts and videos very, very cleverly, it really did look like they had truly been wronged, and thus many people were exiled. There was much wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth.
Even better, the Dicks learned the even-more-special tactic of placing oneself in harm's way, extracting some 'Innishi Hayshun' (another Latin term, I believe, but quite possibly Mandarin) from their honest, well-intentioned counter-party, along with a goodly amount of time given for their own reaction. The Dicks then used this freely-given reaction time to simply run away, take cover around a corner, get their weapon from its holster, and shoot their aggressor without a second thought. Yay! Success!! Justified inverse "Innishi Hayshun" with a suitably Scot-Free amount of value-added RDM. "Fucking marvellous!", thought the Dicks. "We have won, at last!"
At that point, the Island Gods were completely bereft of possibilities. The line between 'FailRP' and 'RDM' became so blurred that it was no longer possible to distinguish who was in the wrong. Some gods banished the running-shooter Dicks, being wise to their little games; whilst other gods felt it was 'just so' for the original roleplaying robber to die, and that it was 'realistic'. Others just simply lost the plot entirely, banned the innocent robber victim just as the Dick had intended, then realised their godly hypocrisy, drank way too much holy nectar, and started their own terminal decline by inhaling ethereal dopeclouds 24/7 as a futile means of attempting to understand this topsy-turvy world. It was, as the Good Lord said:
"So Bloody Sad!"
I wish I could tell you that the denizens of Altis had a resolution. I wish that it was recorded history that the Dicks had gone, at last, never to return, and that the gods were all-powerful, omnipotent, and always, irrefutably wise. But alas, life is not like that, nor is AltisLife, and the history is now. No matter what roolz the gods lay down, there will be always be someone who thinks not of the spirit, but of the self. Who strives to cause chaos and destruction whilst getting his or her cheap jollies. Man, woman, adult or child, there will always be the Dick.
The only workable, solid, undeniable rule of Altis Life is, and always will be:
Don't be a Dick!
Here endeth the lesson.
