Metagaming & Powergaming - In-depth Explanation

[Sombs]

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Metagaming & Powergaming

These two terms are often misunderstood, and for some incomprehensible reason these terms are currently not explained anymore in the current set of server rules. This lead to much confusion and frustration among especially newer players which got a very wrong impression of what the terms actually describe. There are some threads covering this matter, but they are deeply hidden in the depths of this very confusing forum. Not even the search function is reliable here. Because of that, here is an explanation of what these terms mean, why they are needed and how to avoid metagaming and powergaming.

Metagaming

Metagaming has nothing to do with meta-gameplay in the sense of "this is what most people use and do", like using the Arca Plasmor in Warframe as it is one of the best shotguns. On this roleplay server, the term stands for mixing the knowledge you as the player infront of the monitor have with those your fictional character in the roleplay environment has. Discovery Freelancer, just like many other roleplay servers and multiplayer games, dictates and demands a clear separation between what you know and what your characters are legitimately able to know. In-Roleplay-Knowledge is something a character is required to earn, and you as the owner of your character(s) are required to be able to provide transparency about it, when absolutely necessary.

There are, of course, plenty of things that are publicly known in-RP. The existence of the five houses and the NPC factions, of all systems with a trade lane network, of all big planets in known space - generally speaking "the obvious things". Then there are things that are up to you to decide whether your character is feasible to know, as for example the knowledge about the Edge Worlds and how they are connected, the knowledge about the existence of the Nomads, the Gammu AI and the Dyson Sphere, or the knowledge about unlawful bases that are in locations where the typical civilian Joe McAverage wouldn't fly around with his little civilian shuttle.

And then there are all the things your characters can't and/or are not supposed to know by default. The way the Nomads work, how to build ships of other factions, the exact location of hidden bases and systems, Valhalla One and similar structures, the crazy shit going on in Alaska, Thuringia, Frankfurt's Sektor 7, New York's Sector 21; generally everything that gives you the vibe of TOP SECRET.

Most importantly, however, this rule exists to prevent metagaming the knowledge of other players' characters and their secrets.

Your character cannot magically know that character X is infected, an intelligence agent or spy, hiding behind a secret identity, gay, a potato or anything else that isn't bloody obvious. Generally, your character can only know what they can register with their senses, just like you. Other than you, your character has no access to the Discovery forum and can just look into all kinds of faction threads or roleplay transmissions. This is sometimes very confusing, though, so let me give you a few rules of thumb that should make it easier to understand what your character can definitely see and hear:


- Your character can see everything that is within sensor range and appears on the sensor list on your HUD, the thing on the lower left of the ingame screen.

This includes player ships (and their cargo bays if you scanned them), technically also NPC ships, PoBs and NPC stations, planets, nebulae, asteroid fields, mine fields, stars, background nebulae, you get the idea.

When it comes to player ships, your character is able to see the IFF - that is what usually is infront of the target playership's name and tells you what NPC faction that playership is aligned to - and you see the full name of the ship, including the faction tag if it has one. There is one exclusion, which will be covered later.

When you scan a playership, your character is able to see everything that is listed there: Weapons, CDs, CMs, cloaking devices and cloak disruptors, ammunitions, shields and thrusters, armor, regens, cargo as well as the ID. IFFs can be misleading sometimes, which is why the ID is generally considered the actual IFF for the sake of clarification. If you see a player with a BAF IFF but a Freelancer ID, treat it like a Freelancer IFF. IFFs stick to whatever the player has the highest reputation to, so if a ship doesn't use the /droprep command after switching IDs, the IFF will remain what it was despite of the new ID.

Exclusion: The Wild. If you see a ship with a Wild ID, a Wild player faction tag (currently that would only be |Aoi, while D9| and Wilde. used to be a thing) or an "Unknown" IFF with Special Operative ID, chances are you are dealing with an infected character. There are certain limitations in the way the game tracks faction activity that make faction tags necessary, even for covert characters, which forces them to fly around with a faction tag that otherwise would reveal them obviously as infectees. While it is not exactly covered by the rules, consent is to treat these ships as unknown contacts with malfunctioning IFFs until your character can be sure they know what they are dealing with. How can they know? Well, scan the target ship. If it uses nomad equipment (nomad weapons, nomad shields, nomad ammunitions or nomad cloaking devices, etc), your character can assume they are dealing with a Wild - and it is up to you whether your character knows what a Wild is.

- Your character can hear everything that is in-roleplay written in the local and system chat, excluding death/kill messages and other console-based information.

Ingame, all communications are based on voice. Remember these little pilot avatars you know from NPCs when you talk with them from ship to ship? They don't exist in player-player communication ingame, simply because you don't know how the other person looks like. The text in the chat is what your character can hear. Obviously, this excludes automated messages from the game itself, like kill messages (except you can literally see what happened) or these automated tips that pop up every ten minutes. InRP written messages can be received local and system-wide (the blue will be significantly much brighter than the typical local chat color).

The scanner range of a ship determines the range of that ships local chat range. A ship with a cargo scanner has a way smaller chat range than a battleship with a battleship scanner. Make sure that, if you talk to someone with a smaller chat range that you actually are within their chat range as well, as otherwise the target player can't even see you but can read you talking to them, while they can talk but you won't be able to read it. If you are not sure: All scanners have at least 11k range, and you can target a player from 10k range in any case (except if the hitbox of the ship is large, then you might need to get a bit closer).

- Your character can pick up EM background signatures of cloaked ships within 3k radius distance, without being able to be certain who is the cloaker.

Cloaking devices, when active, render a ship fully invisible, both visually and on the scanner. The only indication your character can sense are EM background signatures. These EM signatures are ingame detectable by a special sound that is played whenever a cloaked ship's hitbox is within 3k range of your character's ship. That sound used to be a subtle wind sound but was replaced by Spazzy's horrible, horrible alerting beep sound. I highly recommend changing that sound, see here.

Important! Your character can pick up these EM signatures, yes, but they can't magically know what ship it actually is that is cloaked and in range. Your character might be able to deduce that, if they saw a ship cloaking right infront of them, that it is that said ship, but without having seen that ship in that scenario beforehand, your character can't magically know, even if you 100% know who it is because you looked it up in the player list. That'd be metagaming.

By the way, if there are multiple cloaked ships around you and within 3k range, the cloaking sound will get significantly louder, being played for each cloaked ship in range. If there are three cloaked ships in range, the sound will be three times as loud. This includes your own ship, if it is cloaked, as the game doesn't differ between your own ship and any other ship within 3k range in cloaked status.

- Your character can access communication transmissions on the forum if they are adressed to your character or the public.

You, as the player, can browse happily through the forum and read everything everyone else writes. Your character can't. Your character can receive transmissions in this subforum. They can only access these threads if they are specifically adressed to your character. Having your character know information from other comms that aren't directed at them is considered metagaming and it is the most frequent form of sanctioned metagaming. Your character does not know about these threads and posts except if they are specifically allowed to, which is usually either made clear in the comm title or in the comm's content.

However, there are public communiqués and news threads. while the "Communication Channel" subforum is usually about private conversations between specific characters, public transmissions are available in the two sub-subforums, namely "Official CNS Broadcasts" and "Sirius News and Commerce". The Colony News Service Broadcasts are pubilcly available and read-only, acting as a source of information apart from the ingame neuralnet infocards and rumors from station/planet NPCs. The Sirius News and Commerce (short SNAC) subforum is exclusively for public messages that often are also allowed to respond to, publicly.

Also considered public are the Bounty Offices including all four subforums unless specifically stated otherwise in the individual threads and posts. Same rule of thumb applies to the Player Owned Bases threads, which are often not kept inRP.

And then there are the subforums for official and unofficial factions. You'll need to check each thread specifically regarding what they allow to be publicly usable inRP.

- Your character can join roleplay stories if the story's host exclusively allows that.

Stories and Biographies is where people get creative in terms of forum roleplay. Stories are being told, characters are experiencing adventures they can't have ingame due to the game's limitations. This is the most sensible part of the forum and probably the most respected part. If your character is not actively part of a story, it doesn't know about it. This forum is more for the players behind the characters, to read and write immersive roleplay. The Watering Holes subforum is usually rather public except if stated otherwise in the specific threads, which means your character, if it makes sense in terms of roleplay, can enter these bars and interact with the people in it in form of textual roleplay in these threads. Of course your character can't magically know about all the things said in the past in these threads and can't listen to conversations in other rooms, etc.

In general, if you are not sure whether it is okay, just ask before you do anything. People usually help and answer questions, fully aware that Discovery can be a very complicated place.

- Your character cannot use the player list.

No matter whether we are talking about the ingame playerlist or the playerlist on the forums, these playerlists are utilities for the players, not for the characters. This means, any information you can see on the playerlist is not available to the character. And you shouldn't pretend it in any way to be like that. You can use the playerlist to find encounters or ooRPly contact other players, and that is all about it. Your character has no means of knowing that in system X are Y players of faction Z. Whenever you find these encounters, please pretend the encounter was induced randomly. Do not have your character say anything about long range tracking, NPC patrols or anything else told them about the location of the target ship when you find it. It's risky and in most cases cringy. Risky, as in, you the player does not know what exactly the target ships were doing. You don't know their exact route in systems, you don't know whether they were cloaked or not and you don't know whether they used a jump gate or a jump hole. You don't even know whether a ship in another system is docked at a station or in space. Do yourself a favor and just pretend the encounter is random. It is the best you can do.

The only exceptions are the Nomads, by the way, whether you like it or not. If you enter the nomad-controlled Omicrons (Iota, Major, Psi and Lost), they inRP feel the presence of human beings because of the latent psionic potential of humans. Imagine it like hearing a cricket somewhere in your house, without you knowing where the damn thing is. Keep in mind, though, that there are remote or AI-controlled ships without any human being onboard. Nomads can't communicate with them, nor can they detect them via telepathy. It's an advanced roleplay quirk, and the player faction leaders usually make you aware of that, if they are competent and don't just ignore the nomad lore because they don't like it.

By the way, the same issue counts for the Lane Hackers' Mactan Network Spyglass, inRP known as the USI. If you ever noticed the fact that the Lane Hackers faction account is online 24/7 on the forum and watches the playerlist, that is because of a script that is constantly gathering data about playerships ingame and where they go. The script checks for patterns of each ship and is able to predict where a ship will go based on observations where it went in the past. Like that it enables Lane Hacker players with access to the internal areas of the Mactan Network to effectively hunt down specific ships and pretend it was done via inRP observation. This is, however, highly controversial for the very same reasons I explained earlier. It is highly questionable whether this otherwise omnipotent scanner can track down every single ship, especially if it can't tell from the playerlist whether that ship is cloaked or whether it uses jump gates, holes or jump drives to move around. Imagine a ship is cloaked for full 15 minutes (or even longer in rare cases). That fully suffices to move through Liberty without using jump gates or trade lanes, meaning the ship wouldn't be visually seen for the duration of the transit and it wouldn't get tracked by TLAGSNET either. Meaning even Mactan's Spyglass Network couldn't detect it. The script, however, can, because player list. Keep that in mind if you make use of that script.

What about TLAGSNET, though? Technically it registers any ship using trade lanes and jump gates within a house, if a police character is logged and has it activated. If you are said police character, sure, it's legit inRP knowledge. Use it with moderation, though. TLAGSNET-only evidence does not suffice to impose roleplay consequences on a smuggler. You will need to locate the smuggler and scan it and get solid proof of the smuggler being a smuggler. Technically TLAGSNET itself can provide the proof without a standard shipscan, but that would be too overpowered und kill literally any smuggling activity. TLAGSNET can also be abused to scan ships that aren't even registered on the net by altering the scan ID. That way people managed to successfully scan ships that weren't even in their house at the time of the scan. Just like the player list, use TLAGSNET to locate people, and refer to it as TRADE LANE AND GATE SCAN NETWORK inRP to provide the location. If you do so, say the scan picked up irregular cargo scan values that need to be checked. Or just pretend the encounter was randomly induced. Keep in mind, TLAGSNET registers cloaked ship using gate and lanes as well.

- You might want to sort-of keep track of what your character knows.

Over the years, the knowledge your character gathered can be overwhelmingly much, and it is always a good idea to make notes about it somewhere in any form. Many people write diary roleplay threads, journals or Captain's Logs. Many people have lots of screenshots of important things saved, either on PC or on websites like Imgur or Sta.sh, or the horrible abominations that are imageshack and photobucket with their watermarks for non-premium members. Sometimes it is good to keep track of everything, and it is often quite fun and rewarding to see how much stuff your character learned over time. To provide an example: Link - of course this is all optional and you are not required to put that much effort into things. As long as you don't break any rules, specifically not the metagaming one, you're fine.

If you ever don't remember whether your character knows a specific information: Just say they don't. If you can forget about things, your character can as well. Better be safe than sorry.

Powergaming

The term "Powergaming" is also often misleading. It does not describe the act of rushing efforts for the sake of "powering" to a certain result. Powergaming actually describes the act of taking control of assets that are not your very own. Avoiding powergaming is simple most of the time, if you keep in mind what you own.


- You own your character.

My most popular characters are Ezrael Vertiga, Sombra Hookier, Leon Islay, Sherry Aguilar and Noel Bäker. I am the owner and creator, and I am the only person that can decide what actively happens to them. They won't get injured without my approval. They won't die without my approval. They can't get caught and imprisoned without my approval. Noboty other than me has a say about them. And I have no say about anything regarding other people's characters. I cannot kill, injure, kidnap, imprison, drug, force-to-do, relocate or alter other people's characters in any way.

This, by extension, counts for NPC assets as well. I cannot say my character killed the population of New Berlin, destroyed an NPC space station, caused a supernova in Omicron Delta or was elected to become Liberty's president. The only power you have is over your very own character and other fictive assets, within reasonable measurements. You can, technically, make up a fictional, not ingame existing space station and have your character blow it up. Your character could technically cause a supernova in a system nobody knows that doesn't exist in the game. As long as it is not the property of another player or part of the ingame environment and related NPC assets, you can do anything you want, within reasonable limits.

Nobody can infect your character without approval. Vice versa, you can't infect without approval.

- You own your ships.

It is entirely up to you and you alone whether the ship you used in combat, that got destroyed ingame by a hostile, got destroyed inRP as well. If you say it didn't, it didn't. If people write in their message dumps that your ship got destroyed, they are wrong. And maybe even dumb. The ingame kill messages usually use a very specific term for a ship that got destroyed: It was put out of action. Keep that in mind when you write your next message dump. You don't destroy stuff, you merely put it out of action, disable it, whatever fits. Because otherwise, how do you explain to yourself that people didn't die and that ships can be back within an hour or a day? It is a compromise between roleplay and gameplay, surely, but imagine the most realistic space combat you can imagine. Giant ships of the length of more than a kilometer don't explode entirely and without any debris. They are not Star Wars Deathstars. In the most realistic settings, giant ships would merely get damaged and disabled. Imagine it being like that (although don't try to impose real life physics in Freelancer, as that would be way different from anything you see in Sci-Fi).

Nobody can take away your ships. Nobody can enter them without your approval. Nobody can track them with a tracking device on the hull if you don't approve that. What happens to your ships is your business. What happens in them as well.

- You do not own NPC assets.

You have a player faction? Good for you. But even if you are an official player faction that doesn't mean you control NPC assets. You roleplay them, roleplay their administration. Within limits. What you don't do is have a full say about these NPC assets. You have as much say as the developers allow you to have, which is, by all means, not full say. You have plans that include NPC assets? Good for you, but you better consult the devs about your plans being within reasonable limits. Want to visually upgrade a station via roleplay? Go for it. Don't claim the fruits of other people's work, though. That's poor taste. Few things are possible here and there, but nothing without approval of the individual owners. If people allow you to administrate an NPC station, good for you, but keep your limits in mind. You administrate, which means you can answer to comms and do very little about the NPC asset itself. All you do is represent a player faction that tries to represent a part of the NPC faction, even if the player faction pretends to be the full NPC faction owner. This is, sadly, often misunderstood, even by veteran players.

- You can impose limited roleplay consequences on other characters.

This counts mostly for factions. You can affect other people's characters in a more passive way. The best example are these Faction Rights. While I personally despise them for the way people use them to mess with people more often out of spite than for the sake of immersive roleplay repercussions, they are the prime example of what can be done to affect a character. For example, we have Faction Right 5, the FR5, which can force a change of reputation on single playerships or entire tagged factions. These consequences need to be based on solid evidence that make every involved person and the staff deciding on it aware of what happened and that the result is legit and makes sense.

Something on smaller scale are Bounties, which can be forced onto literally any character for no reason. Keep in mind, while the regulations regarding bounty hunting are hilariously stupidly simple and literally encourage to use it as a means of revenge as you can allow pretty much anyone with Bounty Hunting ID lines to claim the bounty anywhere at any circumstances in any ship for any amount of repetitions, they don't allow metagaming. That means your character needs to know that character X exists by having interacted with character X at least once. That means you can't have a random unknown character create a cheap bounty with X repetitions on any publicly known character out there.

- Your character remembers.

If your character sees a character that has been hostile towards your character in the past, and yes, that can also include transport captains, you can of course show that. Do not break your ID lines, though. If necessary, you can SRP a SpecOps ID with individual ID lines that allow you to engage a certain faction as a result of roleplay consequences. FR5 also includes that.

[Durandal]

Dropped a notice in the mod chat suggesting this ought be pinned.

- J

I did it. -Markam

[Lythrilux]

I feel like parts of this range from not being entirely true to being the author's own personal viewpoint. Really all this guide needs is to be supplanted by the definitions of MG and PG from Google with a handful of simple, straightforward examples cited with sanctions.

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[Durandal]

I feel like parts of this range from not being entirely true to being the author's own personal viewpoint. Really all this guide needs is to be supplanted by the definitions of MG and PG from Google with a handful of simple, straightforward examples cited with sanctions.

I'm curious as to what parts you think ought be called into question? The only sketchy bit I saw was "treat a BAF IFF'd Freelancer ID'd character as if he had Freelancer IFF", which is, I find, a situational thing.

I've also been here for over a decade and its still a decent rule of thumb for newbies.

[Lythrilux]

I feel like parts of this range from not being entirely true to being the author's own personal viewpoint. Really all this guide needs is to be supplanted by the definitions of MG and PG from Google with a handful of simple, straightforward examples cited with sanctions.

I'm curious as to what parts you think ought be called into question? The only sketchy bit I saw was "treat a BAF IFF'd Freelancer ID'd character as if he had Freelancer IFF", which is, I find, a situational thing.

I've also been here for over a decade and its still a decent rule of thumb for newbies.

Well notably, by the author's admission, there are items in the guide that aren't even defined in the rules (and aren't necessarily treated as common knowledge by players either). All too often we've had newbies being completely misled by wrong information that's presented as facts (i.e the era where newbies were told that K'Hara forcing visions and telepathy on you was accepted and you had to roll with it).

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[Chuba]

fix chan to can

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[Karlotta]

If you want this to actually be useful to anyone, and more than a display of your in depth knowledge of this and other game aspects, you will want to make it as short as possible, and less riddled with personal anecdotes and opinions.

Also, parts like the ones about Wild ID and cloaks, where you ask people to pretend they don't know survival-deciding things that the game is telling them straight to their face at that very moment, aren't very realistic or useful approaches.

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User was banned for: https://discoverygc.com/forums/showthrea...tid=200950
Time left: (Permanent)

[JonasHudson]

Hasn't it been stated its OK to use the chat list as a long range scanner? If as a player untility you can use it to see who's online, and where, and generate an encounter, it actually makes more sense to be able to rp it was exactly that, a general detection without an exact location, within a general area, currently by system.

I think its better if people can be realistic about why they found someone, and people can easily make do knowing that when they are online they are that base level of detectable. It seems only fair.

But having said that I'd be ok to see it regulated, and say a pilot could only see so far inrp, like 2-3 systems, so people in Bretonia arent inrp tracking nomads way out in the omicrons. People use bots all over now and its giving people more knowledge about activity from afar, and its being used and played. So I wonder why not just acknowledge some long range detection. Ironically, I like the idea of making it an earnable capability. Perhaps like having a base gives you the ability to play the knowledge of players in that system, and surrounding systems. So if you wanted REAL long range tracking, it could be done with some work. Again, perfectly happy to simply see it regulated than the old way of acting like the chat list isn't there or isn't being used to observe each other.

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Leeds Resistance Forces | Tales of a Renegade |The Freelancer

<<<TAU ENTERPRISES>>>

[Sombs]

In the end it is up to you whether you can come up with a reasonable story. But to me it always seemed rather like tryharding. As mentioned in the OP, the issue with playerlisting is the fact that you don't know whether the ship is docked, in traffic area or somewhere offplane where you wouldn't find it anyway, and you don't know whether the ship is cloaked and you don't know whether the ship moved from A to B via gate, hole or jump drive. Of course there are some possibilities of eliminating certain options, but I simply wouldn't go down that rabbit hole.

I have witnessed these scenarios often enough, and the latest wasn't too long ago. It was the day when Gallia spontaneously visited Omicron Rho. They gave the Core a very short response time, only very few hours, and then Gallia's research fleet was in Rho. Of course some people read the comm from Gallia to Core and were curious. I was one of these people, so I logged my Whale and sat down at Freeport 8 in Sigma-15. I was assuming that Gallia would take the shortest route to move to Rho, which I assumed to be Picardy-Zurich-Cologne-Stuttgart-Berlin-Frankfurt-S15-Rho. It would have been the safest normal route, given Gallia is friends with Rheinland and actually sent stuff for the construction of gates to Rheinland, to Frankfurt. Then I realized that Gallia didn't contact Rheinland. So I expected them to actually jump to Rho, remembering Core gave Gallia jump drive coordinates during the Vaultcracking. So I remained at Freeport 8 and watched the playerlist, since nothing else was happening apart from Velvet Whales passing by. Turns out my second assumption was correct and they jumped. I remained at Freeport 8 still, because my Whale had no Rho visa. So I couldn't have randomly moved through Rho just to surprisingly see Gallia there.

So far so good. A BDM shared transport moved to S15 and found my Whale at the freeport. And it interrogated my Whale there, claiming there have been reports about ships having passed by not long ago. So I told them about the Velvet transports. The BDM however continued and repeatedly asked whether there had been any other ships passing by, which gave me the very distinct feeling that the player behind the ship was refering to the gallic ships in Rho, not knowing they jumped there instead of using the casual route. So while the player didn't specifically make it look like he was after the information about the gallic ships, it gave the very strong feeling that was the case. And I personally dislike that kind of situation, where someone falsely claims there have been rumors/reports abourt something the player behind these claims can't 100% be sure about. It would have looked way less cheesy if it would have been a random encounter that wasn't pushing for information about the gallic fleet. It wouldn't have looked that cheesy if those claims wouldn't have been made up, because they were simply wrong - or at least felt wrong, given the BDM player only hinted what he was about.

This is why I put emphasis on people not making up vague things like long range scans or reports from NPC stations or NPC patrols. The player simply does not know what happens when they are not present themselves. It makes it look metagamey. The idea of using the playerlist should be to find encounters and not to metagame.

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[Durandal]

Hasn't it been stated its OK to use the chat list as a long range scanner? If as a player untility you can use it to see who's online, and where, and generate an encounter, it actually makes more sense to be able to rp it was exactly that, a general detection without an exact location, within a general area, currently by system.

Back when I used to lead the HF, I roleplayed the existence of a watered down LH Spyglass network throughout Liberty which, I'd like to think, made sense due to the history between the two factions. The furthest I'd ever take it was "yeah, so apparently there are some big ships in this system" and that'd simply be our impetus to fly out there and have a look. I personally felt that it made things feel a bit less artificial.

From an OORP standpoint, Sombra is still saying its perfectly fine to use it that way, which it is, just not roleplay that your character knew anyone was there.