Explorer's Ranking

Adrik

So, as a person that IS in the top 10 explorers... And after hearing lots of stupidity and heated debate around it.. I wanted to see everyone's opinion on Explorers.

Right now, certain rooms (House Halls, City HUBs, Divine Inner Temples, Underrealm, even Dragon Lairs) are counting for the purposes of Explorers. Heck, even seasonal things, or things only accessible if you were around at a certain time (The Alehouse, Old Thera, Great Hunt Caves) count for explorers, and are worth a TON of rooms.

Let's list problems that are raised by these rooms being part of explorers.

The Fellowship of Explorers is a mostly niche, and overall neutral organization. Why certain rooms count for Exploration, such as inner temples, or even house halls, is reason for speculation. Right now, the best way to get into the top 10, or even Worldwalker status is by breaking and entering into these places. I'm not even kidding. It's more-or-less required to get Worldwalker. Most organizations take Estate breakins seriously, so only through a massive lapse in security, or abusing some poor novice that doesnt understand security, or is too trusting (and therein gets absolutely decimated by their peers for allowing a breakin).. it raises a whole slew of issues.

1 ) Characters that want to be at the top of explorers are basically forced to be neutral, oath break, or break and enter into these areas.
2 ) In the case of Dragon lairs, they really are only allowed access to one, but by someone from another lair reviving you in their lair, you can explore their lair.
3 ) Why are these rooms even considered for Explorers. I imagine the Fellowship of Explorers to be a group of adventurers wanting to encourage everyone to see every little nook-and-cranny of the public world. These special areas should not be accounted for.  If exploring an area is gated behind a "Be a member of this organization to open this door / do X" then it should not count for Explorers. Stockrooms were done the exact same way, and exploring community rejoiced.  This will be no different, except that certain individuals at the top will weep at loads-of-gold dropped on bribes.

Here's a list of areas, in full, that should NOT count for Explorers. Tell me what you think below!

1 ) All House Halls, the Merchants get a free pass on their public area, but anything on the inside are now not counted for Explorers.

2 ) All temples for ALL divine that require you to say some fancy words, or push/pull/etc. to get in are now off the docket. Temple of the Dwarf Father is an example of something that is accessible by not being an enemy, and the correct race. Prospero's public temple is as well. Phaestus' Sapience temple, or Sartan's temple are examples that are not.

3 ) ANY Limited time / "Oh you can only get in during this specific season IRL" / "Well if you have an alehouse thing to teleport to the alehouse." sort of crap. It needs to all be set as rooms that do not count for explorers. It's a touch silly to expect players to always be around to explore these rooms. "Oh well you weren't around for Mayaween? Too bad. Wait until next year, chump". (Spooky Old Thera is a good example of this from the Reckoning)

4 ) Great Hunt Caves realistically should fall into #3, but due to the Bakios card. They do not. Remove Great Hunt Caves from explorers. It's dumb to depend on RNG to maybe get you into the caves. After the recent reset, about a month and a half ago? I'm down 2 caves, and still slowly trudging along.

5 ) Dragon Lairs. Yes, these probably should, but unless there is word said one-way-or-another on if this is a bug to be able to explore other dragon's lairs.. Probably just remove these from Explorers.

6 ) All city HUBS, things behind locked doors in city's that non-citizens can't access. Cyrene's Bathhouse, old housing in cities, regent's / city council chambers are all examples of this. The extra add-on would be for Hashani that have access to Balan'maal, and the Tsol'teth houses in Underrealm. These shouldn't count as well.

7 ) Class-only places. Grove of Isolation, Inferno, Nirvana, Time Crystal (Depthswalker). Keep Gare though, since everyone who gets dragon can get Gare rooms.

Don't get me wrong. Bribes and stuff can be neat for RP.. but this is just asinine at this point.

Thaisen

But...behind door number B....you could just not care as much about explorer rankings...

Antonius

It sounds like you want to remove everything that makes being highly ranked in the explorer rankings actually mean something. If the only rooms that count are easily accessible, why should anybody care about being highly ranked or care that somebody else is? There's no achievement there, and there isn't even the "Well, it takes a lot of time, even if it's not actually that difficult." aspect that comes with being highly ranked in experience.

Kog

Antonius said:

It sounds like you want to remove everything that makes being highly ranked in the explorer rankings actually mean something. If the only rooms that count are easily accessible, why should anybody care about being highly ranked or care that somebody else is? There's no achievement there, and there isn't even the "Well, it takes a lot of time, even if it's not actually that difficult." aspect that comes with being highly ranked in experience.

Maybe I'm alone here, but I don't currently care that someone is highly ranked. In fact, I kind of assume they're a pain in the ass by default, since they have to break into places to get ahead- so maybe that's 'caring' but not in a good way?

Argwin

Antonius said:

It sounds like you want to remove everything that makes being highly ranked in the explorer rankings actually mean something. If the only rooms that count are easily accessible, why should anybody care about being highly ranked or care that somebody else is? There's no achievement there, and there isn't even the "Well, it takes a lot of time, even if it's not actually that difficult." aspect that comes with being highly ranked in experience.

This isn't the 'breaking and entering' rankings though, it's explorer's rankings. It should be about finding new areas, new planes, and visiting all of the rooms, not about whether you can sneak into a House estate and run through the rooms before you're killed by House members.

Keorin

I completely agree regarding org-owned stuff in particular. There's plenty of rooms that are a challenge to get into besides org-owned ones.

The way I see it, there's only a few ways you're going to get into all those org-owned rooms. You either have to break in to everywhere (which isn't always even possible), faction hop a ton, or you stay so neutral that you can find people to let you in to everywhere. In practice, this seems like it just punishes people who heavily engage in factional conflict and who stick to a faction, and since breaking in is only feasible for serpent a lot of the time, you either need to have a certain class or be friends with the right people.

As someone who isn't a serpent, sticks to one faction (and not one of the factions with super talented infiltrators), and is increasingly enemied everywhere, I know that it's simply not feasible for me to seriously try explorers stuff. Which in turn makes it hard for me to care about the achievement overly much, since it hardly feels like -exploring- is the actual hard part.

Also, if we got rid of org-locked stuff for exploration, maybe we could automate some of sigil upkeep, because the need to be able to get into those rooms seems like one of the only reasons why we have people stuck doing the incredible load of tedium that is sigil upkeep. This alone is reason enough to lock these rooms off of exploration, if you ask me.

Cooper

Dragon lair rooms should be removed due to it being unintended to get into more than one.

Rooms that are 100% not accessible anymore should be removed (old Shallam, old god temples) - most already are, but it would be good to make sure.

Temples, house halls, etc should count unless those areas kick intruders out automatically.

Side note, why have I never thought about bribing people to let me into private areas?? Thanks for the tip.

Archaeon

What if instead of working on the aggregate amount of rooms in the game vs the amount you have personally explored, it worked like a bell curve?  .1% get the top rank, blah blah blah.  Keep the rooms that are hard to access in, and make it a reward for the people who break in/bribe/get access etc. 

Iocun

I strongly disagree. The nice thing about the explorer rankings is that they potentially reward a relatively highly diverse skillset, ranging from basic diligence/thoroughness (walking around), over questing (secret rooms in open areas), physical toughness (dangerous places like the UW, Underrealm, LHG etc.), diplomacy (getting entry into estates/temples), subterfuge (also getting entry into estates/temples), online presence and general alertness (being around for when things happen and jumping at opportunities when they present themselves), and the effective use of skills (and yes, potentially artefacts).

Many of those places that are called into question here can be gotten to in different ways. Being a member of an organisation, diplomacy, trespassing, up to bribery. I've explored some estates by just asking. I've explored others by working diplomatically (e.g. the old spirit walker estate). I've yet explored more others by jumping to opportunities as they presented themselves (e.g. being able to get into the Arcane Kindred estate when they were broken into so the city guard was allowed to enter it). 

Almost no other in-game goals reward the same width of approaches and offer such a diverse group of people a similar chance at getting a reasonably good ranking.

Every limitation you introduce, every type of room you make no longer count, reduces this and places a greater focus on one of the remaining options. When diplomacy/trespassing for entering estates no longer benefit explorers because estates no longer count, things like being an artied dragon and a good quester become comparatively more important, for instance. Rather than rewarding a set of differently skilled explorers, only one kind will still be rewarded. 

Arguments like "keeping Gare is fine as everyone can become a dragon" make no sense to me. Everyone can also join a specific house or order. But the way we play the game and choose to roleplay may stop us from doing so - just as much as they may stop us from being a dragon and that's fine.

And no, not all explorers rejoiced when stockroom and such were made to no longer count. I still see absolutely no reason why that should be the case. Sure, I always knew that there was no way I'd ever explore more than a couple of those, but to me, exploration has never been about having been everywhere, but simply constantly working at squeezing out one or two more rooms over a long period of time.

And don't think I'm arguing out of a selfish interest here. With the new estates post Renaissance and the other changes to explorer rankings that made many previously explored places no longer count, almost all of my previous progress towards house and temple exploration has been scrapped and I'll have to do it again. But that's a challenge I'm looking forward to.

tl;dr: the more different types of rooms count, the more any forms of "unfairness" will even out, all in all.

Thaisen

Iocun said:

I strongly disagree. The nice thing about the explorer rankings is that they potentially reward a relatively highly diverse skillset

Reward what?

Rackham

Something something 'RP consequences'. You want to get into a House hall, join that city, join that House, gain rank and access to it's House hall. Do that for every House. If your character is 'an explorer', then City ties should mean nothing to you, and that will be the journey and challenge of it. Or you can use subterfuge to find your way into them. Or bribe somebody if that's what you like to do. I agree that places that are specifically gated behind mechanically limited access (dragon lairs, seasonal places, hunt caves, etc) should be removed from those rankings, though I can see the reasoning behind letting them stand. Proficy has been mining forever, is it unfair that he's been doing it that long, and so is top miner? Same for exploring seasonal places, another notch in the belt. But obviously I'm on the fence there. So back to my main point, if you want to be top explorer, con your way into that Order hall, get into all the cities, etc.

Or maybe that's just a ranking that isn't your main focus and you should be happy being the rank that you are. I mean shit I only check it now and then to go 'huh, neat' and then move on with my day.

Keorin

Honestly, I'm for changing this just because it would potentially allow for house and city security to be radically simplified. Right now, a ton of incredibly tedious work goes into preventing break-ins, and the only reason we're required to do that work is so that people can take advantage of people failing to do it. Between everything that goes into this part of security work and how much it contributes to discouraging the use of certain spaces, I'm just not convinced that requiring this style of infiltration to be viable is, on balance, good for the game.

Iocun

Well, I think a lot of this break-in prevention could be simplified/relaxed a bit, if we're willing to roll with the fact that some break-ins are going to happen now and then and that this isn't the end of the world. Estates are already prism-proof and sigils need only to be checked every once in a while, so there's really only being followed in that still matters, which isn't all that hard to prevent by checking ent/group. Things like asking people to throw eyes overcomplicate the matter. Teach the most basic security measures, but don't make a big deal out of it when a break-in still happens.

Keorin

While break-ins are hardly that serious a matter, and I've personally pushed my house to be as not worried about them happening as possible, it's a pretty hard habit to get people out of and still tends to get people to just avoid using the places out of fear of causing break-ins. And while it's easy to say that throwing eyes overcomplicates things (and I've personally tried to keep people feeling like eyes aren't necessary if they don't have them for whatever reason), it's hard to avoid them completely when estate raids can take hours to clean up.

I'll also agree that sigil upkeep isn't really a problem in isolation. But it pretty quickly becomes one more tedious bureaucratic job that org leadership has to handle on top of all of the others. I'm sure that in part I'm just biased here because Cyrene has an overcomplicated way of handling it, but even setting that aside, in aggregate, across all cities and orgs, it ends up being a large amount of work that's only necessary so that people can fail at it and break-ins can occur.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying that no forms of infiltration should be possible. But I find the need to keep up sets of sigils in any secure area to be, over the long term, incredibly tedious.

Iocun

But well, if estate raids are the real problem here, making them no longer count for explorers wouldn't really help.

I do feel your pain though. During all my time in the Mojushai I've had to fight against over-the-top security measures and people actually dissuading house members from using the estate out of fear of break-ins. But it's the same as for things like theft prevention really. Rather than trying to understand the mechanics behind these things and only doing/teaching what's actually necessary, people tend to harbour irrationally exaggerated fears and come up with convoluted counter-measures. That's why we get people teaching theft prevention with multiple stacked containers and all sorts of snap reactions instead of just the two or three things that perfectly suffice to stop 99% of all theft attempts.

Adrik

Iocun said:

But well, if estate raids are the real problem here, making them no longer count for explorers wouldn't really help.

Can't tank in House Halls, or former house halls.

Iocun

You'll have to excuse me. I'm an old guy from a time when tanks weren't a thing!

Keorin

Not like that stops some people.

But to be clear, my problem is -not- with the aftermath of break-ins. It's that we've got an area of bureaucratic upkeep entirely made to prevent break-ins, which I think should really be reduced or eliminated. The only real reasons I can think why this system needs to exist is so that break-ins of secure areas (for raids or exploration) remain viable.

Skye

Honestly I think the real problem was allowing players to definitively quantify exploration by 'rooms entered' as a numerical/percentage. Of course the rankings has always been reliant on it but nothing so definitive as 'this magic book says I haven't gone to stand in that corner'.

That honestly just killed it for me, because it turned being immersed in an area that someone took the time to build into a mere numbers game.

Iocun

Oh, I very much agree with this too. It may sound hypocritical as I own a tome too, but I also think that this was a very bad addition when it comes to the "spirit of exploration".

Accipiter

I think that any faction only class areas shouldn't count and one dragon lair should count for all of them. Other than that, as long as stockrooms and anything that is supposed to be inaccessible aren't on the list it seems fine.

Farrah

Keorin said:

Honestly, I'm for changing this just because it would potentially allow for house and city security to be radically simplified. Right now, a ton of incredibly tedious work goes into preventing break-ins, and the only reason we're required to do that work is so that people can take advantage of people failing to do it. Between everything that goes into this part of security work and how much it contributes to discouraging the use of certain spaces, I'm just not convinced that requiring this style of infiltration to be viable is, on balance, good for the game.

You're assuming the only reason to allow break-ins is rankings, though. Maybe I am the minority, but I couldn't care less about a silly number and I still love breaking into places solely to see them. It's the lore/intel/etc that interests me. So I'd be pretty sad if they were made less accessible, irrespective of rankings.

I think your issues with break-ins and Adrik's issues with explorer rankings are all player created problems, though. Break-ins make the game more interesting and there shouldn't be an insane level of ooc stress over preventing them. Similarly, people shouldn't act crazy over rankings and metagame their way to the top just because of silly numbers. Just play the game!

I think there need to be more IC punishments and/or credibility docks when people try to pretend they aren't acting IC at all while making explorers' deals, though. If you let someone into your org's private territory against org law, you're probably committing treason IC and oocly telling them you needed explorers' ranking is not a legit defense. There's no reason people have to ignore RP and make ooc deals to explore though. It's just harder if you do it the right way, and that's fine...

Iocun

Yeah, I have to admit I've budged to such OOC requests once or twice (not as severely as allowing people into my org's places though) and it's always left me with a bad aftertaste. I promised myself not to do that anymore.

It's also quite telling that getting such requests is a fairly new thing, I feel, which would confirm the idea that exploration may have become too much of an OOC numbers game in recent years.

Caelan

If the God is dead, temple should be open.  Or at worst, destroyed and not count. Same for any area that no longer exists.

All the rest...  you said it yourself. It is a niche group. Part of that should be the challenge of difficult places.  

Cooper

It's honestly kind of annoying to hear that some people are going completely OOC to explore private areas, though I guess that shouldn't surprise me.

I'm also not completely innocent in talking to people bordering OOCly to ask about a specific room in an area. And completely guilty of asking others what % their tome says for areas to see if I missed something.

...also needed help finding a specific type of (redacted quest info) to get into the explorer hall in Thera. Fuck that quest! 

Iocun

Caelan said:

If the God is dead, temple should be open.  Or at worst, destroyed and not count. Same for any area that no longer exists.

All the rest...  you said it yourself. It is a niche group. Part of that should be the challenge of difficult places.  

There may be some outliers, but in the vast majority of cases, that's already the case.

Keorin

Farrah said:

You're assuming the only reason to allow break-ins is rankings, though. Maybe I am the minority, but I couldn't care less about a silly number and I still love breaking into places solely to see them. It's the lore/intel/etc that interests me. So I'd be pretty sad if they were made less accessible, irrespective of rankings.

I think your issues with break-ins and Adrik's issues with explorer rankings are all player created problems, though. Break-ins make the game more interesting and there shouldn't be an insane level of ooc stress over preventing them.

I think that if the only reason people broke into places was seeing places and getting lore, people would be a lot less concerned about break-ins. More often, it turns into an extended game of "chase the phased serpent", someone invites a handful of friends in, a raid starts somewhere you really don't want one, or someone gets the chance to steal/destroy things.

I think that on a very technical level, you're right that these issues are player-created. But game mechanics encourage or discourage certain behaviours from players, and carefully upkeeping your sigils (be it in your city, house estate, or sub home) is encouraged by the game by how annoying break-ins can be and how trivial they are to accomplish if you don't keep your sigils up. The result, for as long as I've played, is that a ton of separate orgs tend to be (overly) strict about security things. 

Silas

A raid in a House estate isn't a huge problem, though. You might lose some facets from a master crystal at worst (is this even still a thing?), since eye sigils in House stockrooms don't decay.

Also, as to the OP, no thank you. We have two active Worldwalkers at present, one of whom is a HL in a highly polarised faction, so this isn't a problem with the system. Asking for things to be made easier because people don't want to put in the work for the various in-game achievements is not something that should be encouraged.

Minifie

Lol people already faction hop for path of least resistance as well as beg/pay for carries, plus depending on the people others will happily help on an OOC level just because. Pull the other one if you think there is much left of achievement anymore.

Syrennia

Silas said:

We have two active Worldwalkers at present, one of whom is a HL in a highly polarised faction

Uh. There's 7 active ones.

I agree with (3), (4) and (7) though. Because those really shouldn't count towards it. The others are fine.

Minifie

A reset to temples would be nice, or just flat out removal of any temples after they get the insane god-protection levels. Some are literally locked out minus earrings with a person into the temple (Tested with Dad's temple to see the mechanical protections involved, unless it's just that one temple, if they all have that level of protection your choices are earrings with someone who will let you in, or faction/order hopping, or having the rooms before god protections put in place).

Anything that has to be as rigorously protected equivalent to stockrooms should also be on the list. There's more to the game than $/currency value, and breaking into a temple should feel pretty freaking amazing, not just sorted for 1:1 trades or being a franky-faction flipper.