On Skype and Arelith

[Mithreas]

One of the trends over the last five years has been towards people playing on Arelith while also on Skype, often in group calls.

Skype chats can be a good thing for building a sense of community, and for building friendships with people you met here on Arelith. That's all good stuff - indeed, Gio and I are far from the only married couple who met through the server.

However, as an admin, I see way too many incidents of people metagaming on Skype groups - agreeing as players how characters will work together to achieve some goal. This is particularly prevalent in faction conflicts.

I appreciate that other online worlds (like WOW) are set up for faction warfare and Skype co-ordination of groups is the mainline way things are done. The key difference is that those games are not role-playing games - they are avatar games, where players have their own avatar in the world. Arelith is not an avatar game, and we expect people to play their characters not themselves. Too many people are blurring this line.

Personally, I find it very hard to roleplay immersively while talking to people on an audio channel. Some of you may be able to make this work. But I am very keen to reduce the amount of OOC collusion going on - either by having the team be more aggressive with RPR drops where people are playing avatars rather than characters, or through XP penalties for people involved in this sort of metagaming (or a mix of the two).

Consider this a statement of intent, please.