What is meta? Petition for clarification and/or modification of meta rules.

  • 1. Metagaming; good or bad?

    I have done some LARP in the past, where metagaming in an of itself is often seen as value neutral. You can have good meta and bad meta. When harnessed for good, metagaming will cause more interesting player interaction, create cool scenes and stop rule breakers from ruining good gameplay. When used for bad, people will be excluded from fun stuff and people will strive for selfish goals.


    I think under the current rules most people intuitively agree that some meta is of course okay. Especially if it is not a current event. Stuff like announcing the boxing events and posting gameplay videos long after the events within took place (streaming is somehow an exception though, hehe).



    2. Good meta

    Still, there are several things I would consider good metagaming that might still be considered against the rules. My examples:


    1: Posting time and location of a public event that's going to happen or is happening.
    2: Announcing that you have a shop open at X location where people can buy and sell stuff.

    3: Agreeing to having a fight between two factions at a certain time and place.
    4: Posting a riddle to the village location.
    5: Publicly calling out someone and challenging them to a duel (obviously calling out their character, not the player. That could be harassment).


    Basically, I think of good meta as things that would be announced in the local newspaper, on the radio or on a town square IRL. We have no newspaper and because we don't all play at the same time there's no functional radio or town square to announce things from.


    3. Radios right now

    Some of this could be fixed by the devs eventually. Currently the radios don't work well, since the signal is dropped in a stupid unrealistic way when you push and release the PTT button, and because they are fairly rare. I've tried and failed to talk to someone I heard on the radio, but the voice was just chopping out. I held the button down for very long and tried to tell him to do the same, but we could only hear fragments of each other, I think. If/when they fix this and add a noise filter for long distances like they did with the voice filter for gags I think we can change the meta rules to be more radio-based.


    4. Forum vs. discord?

    Also, is there a difference between the forums and the discord? Which things are allowed on the forums but not on discord? Personally I don't see why there should be any difference between the two.


    5. In character / out of character channels on discord

    What if we had separate channels for in character /out of character messages? The in character channel could function sort of as a replacement for radios in the game and a bulletin board, but should still have some restrictions since it would be quite a bit more powerful than the in game radios ever will be. This would also create a clear separation between accusations and arguments between players and player characters (some confusion has arisen regarding this in the past, where crass language has been censored).


    Cheers,

    Doc

  • This is the actual deffinition:


    The Metagame, or game about the game, is any approach to a game that transcends or operates outside of the prescribed rules of the game; uses external factors to affect the game; or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game.


    Basically, in a straight way to understand it, you shouldn't even send a message to a friend of yours about where you are right now, so you both can meet together.


    Appart from that, I'm agree with your point 4. And about the point 2, I think is good to publish about public events (otherwise some people might never realize it and the idea is to do things together I guess). But any info about the Village, even hard riddles, won't be good.

  • Really? Is that not allowed?

    I'm fairly sure the answer is yes that's fine and I do think that exact example was brought up and found acceptable but only in certain instances I.E. "let's meet up in Gorka" over steam before you get on the server. Once you are in the server I believe the expectation is you aren't going to use external resources like 3rd party comms. Hell, you could argue that a group using an isurvive map while playing is meta.

    Ignore what I said above, I think we need clarification lol

  • Really? Is that not allowed?

    It will be very silly to try to don't allow that, I don't think anyone can report you because you send a message to your friend 10 minutes before connect to the server. I was just explaining what is the concept of metagamming in a straight way to understand it.


    Once you are in the server I believe the expectation is you aren't going to use external resources like 3rd party comms. Hell, you could argue that a group using an isurvive map while playing is meta.

    Yes, that's what I mean. But is not reasonable. I guess we are talking about limits of meta that will give you a total immersion ingame and just using tools that the game provide through the gameplay itself.

  • What is allowed versus what is the socially acceptable norm are two very different things, unfortunately the norm is to use discord on the server (despite it being against the rules) this means that something needs to be done to fix this meta crisis, My suggestion is that radios spawn on fresh spawn players and very commonly, that way we can encourage radio use despite its bugs its still a way of avoiding meta.

  • What is allowed versus what is the socially acceptable norm are two very different things, unfortunately the norm is to use discord on the server (despite it being against the rules) this means that something needs to be done to fix this meta crisis, My suggestion is that radios spawn on fresh spawn players and very commonly, that way we can encourage radio use despite its bugs its still a way of avoiding meta.

    That is helping, but the idea is not to have things so easily. Maybe just spawning more radios around will be enough (and that they work correctly)

  • This may be a bit off-topic but I agree something needs to be done about the use of third party voip and enforcing that rule. It is obvious that people is going to break that rule sooner or later, when there is no mean to communicate ingame (radios are not working as they should).

  • What do you mean?

    Like there could be a "Radio" discord or teamspeak server, that emulates what the radio does in game; it has different channels for each frequency like 87.8 channel you can discord chat to anyone in that same channel but it is strictly no meta in character talk, treated exactly how a radio is used, And you would have to use one of the frequency channels you can't just make your own or go into one that others can't tune into; Essentially creating a discord version of the in game radio but also making it so you don't actually have to have the item in game.