Shattered Kingdoms

I've moved this to a new thread, to get away from grep and make a constructive proposal.

Here's an idea for Paragon.

Why not just have Paragon be completely anonymous, therefore not showing up on the Who list, and simply let it be understood either by rule or by taste not to tell people when you have paragon, or to send them non-anonymous messages?

What do we gain from letting people know who has this OOC title? So we can feel good when we look on the Who list and think about how, finally, people can't tell if we're polymorphed by typing 'who'? What, exactly, is the point of sending someone an OOC tell along with an enlight anyway? "Hey, good RP, keep it up." Well, no [REDACTED] they think you have good RP, or they wouldn't have enlightened you to begin with, would they have? Is that really worth breaking the fourth wall over?

I'm tired of tip-toeing around which Paragons (many of whom are good roleplayers, in my opinion, no matter what grep says) I can and can't enlighten, just to avoid perceived favoritism.

I'd rather not know who was Paragon, and I'd rather not have anyone know I was paragon. I just want people to not RP differently around me, and I want to not have to consider potential 'favoritism perception' when I enlighten other known PARs, and just be able to distribute enlights anonymously.

This could be made easier if you could enlight people who weren't online, and have them receive the 'You have received Enlightenment from the Gods!' message when they log in.

Grep, please troll this thread.

Everyone else, discuss.

Offline enlights would be awesome, as would the timer resetting at midnight instead of 24 hours later.

Anony-PAR would be pretty cool, but I think it would largely prove useless because there would be players who run around telling people.

I'll add that any part of this could work in conjunction with expiring rewards, as well.

I think all of those are sound ideas. With these changes, people who achieve PAR, in my opinion at least, would have even less reason to run around flaunting it. All they would do is risk irritating other PARs, who might view it as poor roleplay if they're actually flaunting it in the game by any means.

Or it could just be strictly illegal to tell people that you're PAR. Some people might wind up figuring out who some people are, and this wouldn't be a big, social problem, but it would put a convenient filter against brown-nosers and favoritism.

In the meantime:

I am PAR. I am going to enlight Alefi, another PAR. I like his roleplay. He's probably enlightened me, before. If so, I must assume he therefore also likes my roleplay. Strangely, if someone likes your roleplay, they're likely to roleplay with you, causing you to then have an opportunity to like their roleplay, making you likely to roleplay with them.

This creates the dangerous situation of a recurison- two people, who like each other's roleplay, roleplaying with each other, in the context of- get this- a "ROLE PLAYING GAME."

This inevitably leads to two people, who like each other's roleplay, rewarding eachother, possibly once, possibly even twice, during the same month, with experience points we don't need. (being both GM) Furthermore, this shares the ability to give other people trivial experience points that will barely amount to half a level in their entire life, unless they reward each other a blatantly over-the-top amount. Even worse, by doing this, I have minorly increased the probably of someone getting a pretty flag on the who list, who has, themselves, probably minorly increased my own ability of getting a pretty flag on the who list.

Sue me.

I think two of the main reasons that PAR is visible is so that A) it's nice to have a constant reminder that good role-play is rewarded, and B) so that PARs don't stick to just giving each other enlights on accident. One might consider that last option silly, but otherwise you probably would end up the same PARs every month, which could discourage others from aiming for PAR.

I think that perhaps an "auto-anonymous" type feature with PAR would be nice to allow people the ability to turn their public PAR flag on and off: But I think that should only be done if being enlightened while PAR didn't give you points toward keeping PAR that month.

Perhaps another auto feature which optionally disabled PAR from being shown for others in the who list would be nice too: I don't know if that's really worth the effort, though.


As for the OP's disdain towards sending OOC messages accompanying PARs, I can understand that: I sometimes send OOC messages when I enlighten, but usually I don't. That said, when you enlighten someone whom your character is at odds with, an OOC message saying "hey, even though my character really -does- want to rip your character's guts out, that isn't stemming from an OOC issue, and I really do enjoy your role-play," is sometimes nice to ensure the difference between OOC and IC.

Plus, there's often a lot of RP events in any point of time for a character. It's sometimes nice to know exactly why you got enlightened. Some people are just so impressed that they feel the need to offer their own personal message of kudos, and given that PAR enlights are an OOC command recognized in-game, that isn't too much of a stretch. Different strokes for different folks, sometimes.

Do people really run around declaring they are PAR that often? I don't think anyone has ever done this to me...

I second, third, millionth? the idea of the PAR reward resetting at midnight, I hardly have the same hours day to day or week to week and there are some people I've only ever seen around once or twice, but had such a good time with them that I want to reward them.

I actually agree at lot with Edoras' B) statement and this is why: When I see another PAR flag, I generally assume that that person has good RP, when I RP with them, this is taken into account, but it is more so to see if there RP remains consistently good, if it is, then I reward them. Everyone has off days too and I take that into consideration as well. But I do tend to use it as a bit of a standard.

Anyways...in short. Reset at midnight please!

Okay Anjin:

Having paragon three times should automatically let you be an RP imm.

Available after the next reboot!

OMG! LOVE IT!!!!! <3 Thank you!

So completely awesome.

Think someone needs a cigarette now.