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Personally, I have only ever caught mudsecks (upon which I leave in disgust and disappointment, all you freaky freaks). Never got anything really cool or political or espionagey - because these are done out of game.

I really think y'all ought to stop advertising how bad you are at espionage, because I'm starting to get really uncomfortable from the amount of secondhand embarassment I'm experiencing from it.

The scope of this thread has been all over the place over the past three pages. It started mostly on the original topic, veered for a bit onto whinging (ur fingers are typin' and ur complainin' about somethin'. That's whinging!) about the API changes, and now it's threatening to make another 90 degree turn into a conversation about metagaming, metaplots, and metapolitics. I'm getting severe whiplash here.

So, I'm not pro-buffing Phase at all (and in fact really agree with you overall, especially wrt the idea that this is a mechanical fix for a non-mechanical problem), and I already think spying is pisseasy to do; but this "we can't do x, y, z because people metagame" is a pretty significant indictment over the playerbase/player culture that's disguised as a throwaway line. Do I know that there are people are who disrespectful of OOC/IC boundaries? Yep. Dealt with a handful of extreme examples of that myself. But here's the thing: metagamers are going to metagame. We can maybe catch them in it and spread the word to others about what they do and hope that has some sort of measurable impact in how they're treated/how much impact their behavior has in the game. We could maybe name and shame, but I'm not even sure how well that works. One of my favorite versions of metagaming is the form where everyone plans everything OOC and then ends the meeting with "let's talk about this IC" and then they have the world's shortest IC discussion ever, like some sort of Anti Metagaming Ritual.

But at the end of the day, the people who don't feel bad metagaming, who think they can do it and get away with it because it's gotten them benefits all this time; some mechanical changes one way or another to things like Phase aren't going to deter those types of players OR encourage them. That said, if you think metagaming is widespread, accepted, or normalized enough that it's suddenly a thing that's going to have a major occurance uptick because of a couple balance changes, then, like, well. We should probably be talking about that (in a new thread), because that's a major problem for a game that's as RP-heavy as Aetolia is meant to be.

I don't personally think that political stuff is metagamed all that much, but maybe I just don't see it. The issue with spying on political stuff is that at a certain point people figured out how to keep from being spied upon. Doors, bell tattoo, eye sigils/perform truth, those are all things that are common knowledge.

It does happen, it's been a recurring thing in Shadow tether over the past...while? And I think it's one of those things "if you see one cockroach, there's dozens you don't see" deals. If you see metgaming at all, especially as an outsider, you're very unlikely to be seeing all of it. As far as specifics, I only have things that directly happened to me in DMs, and some screenshots I've seen of other stuff going on, but I can definitely say that the OOC rigging of politics and other IC events definitely is a thing that happens. As for whether it's widespread across the whole game? I can't speak to that. But I know it's happened on our side of the field.

You're not wrong, though, a lot of people also just...know how to not be spied on.

The thing is... once something works, more and more people start to do it. And more and more people are starting to do that random room checking.

I think this is my problem with the general argument that phase needs some sort of buff, and why it seems like it's maybe a lazy solution to the problems with spying. Spying, like any sort of PVP, in both real life and in game, is going to have a metagame to it. Like if you start getting caught being a spy, of course people are going to start taking more precautions, especially during important events/conversations. Personally, I think this is a challenge to find ways to adjust the approach to information gathering. Instead of going "I keep getting caught phased, and I want to not be", I think it's more helpful to consider other roads to walk down. I mean, eventually, like, Sryaen's gonna get tired of eye sigilling every time he wants to MUDsex. He's gonna get lazy about it six months from now, which is when the meta shifts back in the other direction.

My concern about having a tick that allows you to be warned that an eye sigil is coming is that (I think I said this above) it's literally one regex trigger away from making eye sigil competely useless, and making phase spying 100% successful. Something as brazen as listening in to a private conversation while phased in an enemy city should carry risk. It shouldn't be easy. And there's a lot more to spycraft than just tapping phones.

I just tested it and it cannot target someone in phase.

I'll have to dig through my logs and try to guess what was happening, then. What I do remember was walking in Scidve in phase and getting sneezes in time with each movement of mine. There is also no shortage of instances where I get eye-sigiled immediately on entering a room, with no obvious glyph or detection up. Angel watch, maybe?

I think that regardless of your guild or class, if you do something to wind up on someone's enemy list, that's really a product of your own actions.

Enemying someone is free, easy, and done to anyone who regularly shows up at Lessers. Sure, that's my own choice to participate, but the cost of that participation should not be a bell around my neck, even in phase.

I'm sort of confused here as to who's feeding y'all the information that we're basically handing out 4 bars of ilmenite to every novice who comes through the academy, because it's taken me MONTHS to even scrape together 2 pieces of that relic. And if enemying is a problem, I guess that's really on you to weigh the decision of whether or not it's more worth it to your RP to go to a lesser or not. Bracer already doesn't ping if you have your enemylist off, so I'm sort of on the fence about having it take a resource drain to upkeep because that's like.. literally the whole point of having the relic. It's not easy to gather and on the low end, it'll cost you 350-400cr minimum.