A rebuttal - the Rise of the Metagame

Mainly the issue is that you CAN'T get anywhere in any kind of timely manner without heavy codeplay. I for one would genuinely prefer to fully embrace RP and let that be the only thing that dictates my character's actions, but if you do that, it'll take you many, many months to get a codedly useful character up and running. Considering how rarely any realistically played character finds a reason to use their skills that isn't motivated by the player's OOC desire to raise said skills, it would be nearly impossible to bring most skills above journeyman.

I mean, it's basically not possible to get backstab to a usable level without extreme twinking; you have to attempt to murder people 200+ times. How do you roleplay that? So you don't, you just decide that being deadly with a dagger is a reasonable part of your character concept and pretend that all those random alley stabbings aren't a thing that actually happened, and that your character got good at backstabbing in ways that actually resemble a life that makes sense.

So people twink, and that sets the standard, because who's gonna handicap themselves in the name of fair RP when other people who might become your enemy don't do that? That would be ridiculous. For this reason, skilltwinking is okay as long as you don't go to completely absurd lengths (don't stand with a trigger overnight spamming peek) and don't grief other players in the process. But the preferable solution would be for the game to be designed in such a way that people more readily have RP-worthy reasons to use skills, and where you can get good in a more reasonable amount of time.

The other RPIs have generally handled this much better. In games like Atonement and SoI, I used to feel like I could just play my character and trust that the game would supply me with skills in a reasonable and timely manner. Those games were also designed so that it made sense to do things. You needed to hunt to get food, you needed to take groups out and scavenge in dangerous territories, you needed to use ranged attacks at times because it was the only way to take down certain types of animal. It wasn't all built on some fake premise. And it didn't take the better part of a year to get powerful.

You have to fail backstab about 90 times to max it. That takes hundreds of attempts, because your chance to fail eventually ends up being <20%. Each backstab officially counts as an attempted murder, you can't explain it away as "getting in a tussle" or something like you might with regular combat; and while you can use it on animals, that's both vaguely frowned upon and only really feasible in the northlands. Backstabbing beggars in the 'rinth is a time-honoured tradition, and you can bet nobody actually RPs that their character goes out every day and attempts to murder a random stranger. One would have to play an insane mass-murdering psychopath to rationalize that.

But if you don't do that, and only use backstab when your character is legitimately attempting to murder another person, how many RL years does it take to rack up those countless backstab usages that it takes to get good? If you play that way, you'd probably never even hit apprentice, and your character would literally never become even slightly deadly. You would almost certainly die the very first time you attempted to use backstab on somebody you had an actual reason to want to murder. This is why people twink. It's basically necessary if you want to use certain skills. This also compels players to want to find the best methods to raise their skills in the least possible attempts, because staff might still smack you down if they notice you doing it. So they ask around for secret tricks, or skill lists. The game's mechanics create this behaviour.

It's not just about backstab, that's just the most obvious example. The same thing basically goes for any skill whose usage is significant in any way. You can max shit like sneak, hide, listen, hunt etc. without having to resort to cheating, but when it comes to most things combat-related or anything like steal or spells, you simply have to engage in shameless grinding if you want to get those skills to safely usable levels before your character dies of old age, or from attempting to employ said skill in a live situation without having twinked up first.

Armageddon isn't exactly a fun game for social-only roles in this day and age. It has become text-based Skyrim, so it's hardly any wonder that people want to create codedly powerful characters. Playing the perpetually unimpressive Private Amos isn't appealing in a game where absolutely nothing happens to such a character. I'll twink up a ranger/warrior/assassin and go on adventures instead. I used to like to play roles where I didn't have to worry about my skills, but as that became increasingly unsatisfying due to the diminishing emphasis on roleplay after Sanvean's retirement, I didn't have any qualms changing my game to accomodate the shifting nature of Armageddon.

I agree that there is room for multiple playstyles.  I like the original post a lot, and there's merit in discussing this in part because of hypocrissy.

Synthesis is right, too... the highest karma players I've ever known have always had maps and shit.  It's hypocritical to sit there and try to act all high and mighty like malken is, being a hypocrite really.  The same guys who admit having fallen into OOC cliques that undoubtedly expose them to all the juicy tidbits of the game's mechanics are the same people who will try to act snobby towards others for just having been more public about what those very same OOC cliques discuss.

Let's all try to be honest, at least, instead of some lying, backhanded little shit.  Who's a liar.


RE:  Nergal's response


Hey dude, I think most people will do shit like worry about skills because they aren't in a position to constantly roleplay.  If someone like Malifaxis is playing a sponsored merchant, then they have all these built in fucking excuses to interact in a meaningful way with everyone from a nasty Byn runner to a fucking Borsail noble.  The world is their roleplaying oyster, and often, tangible rewards are there for these interactions for someone playing that kind of character, in that sort of position.

ON THE FLIP SIDE, if you are Not Important, then you will find yourself with lots and lots of downtime.  The only way to have less down time is to make the character "good" at something in order to presumably be hired to do Cool Shit, like Assassinate some Fucker, or Kill Something Rare for its X.

If you are bored and by yourself, then you should not have your balls busted for taking the time to practice archery.  or backstab.  or maybe just fighting in general. 


If someone is the type of player to put in ten hours in a day, do you honestly expect them to sit around solo RP'ing by themselves and thinking and feeling for the entire time?  No.


Nergal:  "I think the visible skill levels didn't necessarily cause the metagame"....... how long has this guy been playing this game?  He's flat out wrong.  I don't think it's a bad thing - personally, I hated skilling up combat skills before this change, and I know for a FACT that this change has influenced my tendency to be open to playing more fighter guys.  I very seriously doubt I'm alone.

"
Ultimately we are trending toward giving players the information they need to build a character they actually want to play"

Well, I think you need to be careful with some ideas.  I very rarely react strongly to discussion about the skill code - hey, look and see how many Tuff Fighters I've had out of 16 years, then try to call me a liar - but when I see shit like Adhira suggesting that players start with buff skills so they don't have to practice as much, I'm just like... no.  That sort of huge change is hard to reverse.

Trying to beat the shadowboards at its own game is just something you need to be careful with.  You don't need to get too caught up in doing that.  I DO think that some sort of OOC supplementation to the whole skills thing would be good, but listing EVERY skill for every guild/subguild is maybe not for the best.


For example, the shadowboards are incomplete.  I played an extended subguild over a year ago and branched something that surprised the shit out of me.  I was like... oh, well THAT'S cool.  Nowhere on the shadowboards was said branching mentioned, despite the fact that it was an extended subguild that would be THE most popular with most fighting non-warriors.  I still haven't seen that skill pop mentioned at all.


I think a lot of shit that is Really Useful to people wanting to get their skills up is still concealed a bunch.  They don't want it to get nerfed, heh heh, and as such don't mention it like some other things are mentioned.



I feel like there is a lot more to say about this subject.  I will say, that for over twenty years, there has ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS been a schism between focusing on the code... and focusing on roleplay.  It's just that NOW, people are better equipped with tools and information to make their grinding not so fucking painful.  There is less wasted time, but it still takes FOREVER to get good at shit.  Look, I just put 14 days on a ranger in a month, mostly by myself.  I am aware of how long it takes to get skills up.  Even armed to the teeth with information and over a decade and a half of experience, it is still ARDUOUS AS SHIT trying to skill up a character.

If you are taking time out of the IC day to rest, and if you are roleplaying... then taking the time to focus on skills, even if it is thinly veiled, shouldn't be frowned upon.  Unless it is somethig lame as hell... lol, I am not hating too much, though, I think it is funny as shit when I see a desert elf boxing a turaal.  It literally makes me LOL.  Heh.  I ain't even mad.

Yeah, pretty much. I brought that up in another recent thread: the potential for advancement in combat skills is too vast. When you make a new warrior/ranger, you're looking at easily six RL months of serious grinding to hit your peak. That's just too much. It makes the power scale too big. You shouldn't be able to put an entire summer's worth of nolife play into a character and still feel that there are still stronger characters of the same race and class in the game.

I keep comparing it to games like Shadows of Isildur, but I think it's a very important comparison. In that game, two or three months of heavy play and you'd be at your skillcaps. There was still a difference between characters because you could kind of build your stats and they would determine your actual skillcaps (I wish Arm's stats weren't so random), but people didn't feel so fucking compelled to go all-out Abuzer because they knew they'd get there anyway.

Armageddon is the only RPI I know of where there's a rogue forum dedicated to discussing the code, where there are cheat sheets of game mechanic info being circulated on AIM, and where your character's coded power is determined mostly by how well you know the obscure workings of the code. If Arm's community want people to stop metagaming, stop making it so that metagaming is so hugely tempting and advantageous. It doesn't need to be that way. The game creates that behaviour.

Yeah, the grindy combat skills will take forever no matter what. Last time I rolled a ranger, I got EG wisdom. After 40 hours of non-stop hunting and living off the land, fighting shit every hour and grinding to the best of my ability, none of my combat skills had gone up a single level from their starting point. I probably did as much fighting in a week as a character roleplayed "responsibly" (the way they ostensibly want you to) does in a month or more.

And before some Ghaati comes along to defend the code and claim that playing that way isn't meant to be effective: as long as you manage your ~1h skill timer, there's no loss of efficiency from training in that manner versus using your skills once or twice a RL day. As long as you don't overlap your skill timers, 40 hours of consecutive grinding is the same as a total 40 hours of hunting or whatever spread out over the course of a month. You just have to account for skill timers.

After ~40 combat grinds, weapon skills were still novice. Dual-wield was still appprentice where it started. I raised stuff like sneak and hunt to advanced, and would have hit master in probably about 48 hours total; and in that amount of time, my combat skills hadn't gone up from their starting level. One can't really be surprised that people metagame and do what they can to find the information that lets them overcome these unreasonable hurdles.

Out of curiosity, how high did your weapon skills and dual-wield end up getting in 14 days played? I'm guessing apprentice or maybe low journeyman weapon skill(s), and journeyman dual-wield. That's less than 20% of the way to your peak, accounting for the increased difficulty of raising the skills as they get higher. 14 days played and you made a small dent in your progress.

It's possible to advance faster than that, but only if you truly know the secret twink-fu that you can only learn from old, bearded twinks in the mist-shrouded mountains. And even then it takes months and months to peak.

Grinding combat isn't technically difficult, it's more about knowing the best places to do it once you start getting good, and being aware of just how much is actually required to increase your skills. The mistake that less experienced players make is that they go out and kill one scrab, missing two attacks over the course of the fight, and think that they've gained anything. They then do that twice a day for a month and notice that their skills are all still apprentice.

So they start looking for secrets and "forbidden" information, which is kind of a slippery slope. It is better for the game if people don't go browsing for OOC info, because once you've set your feet in that world, it's hard to just pick up the information you need and not peruse all the other shit that the game is better off not having everybody know about. It's pretty harmless to learn the skill lists, but a map of the subterranean cave grid spanning from Allanak to the Shield Wall isn't really supposed to be common knowledge. But somebody who has popped his OOC Info cherry will find that very quickly.

In short, it's the game's own fault for leading players into metagaming. Overly oblique mechanics and a lack of basic information like a reasonably detailed world map (but without 100% accurate room grids and a million footnotes about every secret exit or spawning plant) is the reason people do this. Not because they're shitty players.