It's a shame how it took 4 OOC wars to finally make an announcement about this. I remember having to deal with everything while I was helping Ravenswood and how the Reinmar NL and Celia'nor NL at the time kept trying to make meetings with the Ravenswood NL, but never sent a bird In Game. All their attempts at communication were done through Discord and there were a few occasions where, even after a meeting was set with one of them, they just ditched even thought we were around to accept the meeting. Even after the war has been posted, the Celia'nor constantly sent messages OOCLY to our NL saying stuff like "we can still negotiate."
Also on the topic of war, once word had gotten around that it was going to happen, several groups OOCLY contacted us offering help or offering to participate in the war, usually in exchange for mina. I believe only one ever actually did anything RPly.
While Im happy that this post has finally come out, it's too late for some communities. Even when attempts had been made to show that things had been done OOCly and had no real IRP basis, or just weak IRP basis(having 1 meeting), nothing was done and narratives driven solely by OOC wants were allowed to happen.
I'll also briefly mention that I was an NL back in 2019 and things were also mainly done OOCly in discord DMs/group chats. While there was some RP involve, it was significantly more than what happens these days.
Edit:
Going to briefly touch on the whole RP Quality Standards thing. I semi-recently(in the past few months) had an absolutely BS interaction with a group of bandit "rpers" that led to a Mod being called. I explained why I thought the situation was against RP Quality Standards, and thus against the rules. The Mod who took the ticket said the following:
"that is banditry for you
it is not something the mod team enforces unless it is in extreme circumstances
if people want to make lame emotes like this, they can
its dumb but it is what it is"
as well as
"you're not creating a narrative by doing this, only being shitty to others
Apparently Mods don't actually care about holding up RP Quality.