I wanna see advisor-points!..

[zorbels]

The problem was that people were griefing players in order to get more advisor points in less time.  I haven't heard of any instances of this since the advisor points became invisible, so I think it's an improvement.  Our GM friends should be able to tell us more though.

I completely agree as per my first post .....

I think it is great there are no advisor points to see anymore. People have seemed to lose interest as to who has the most points and seem to want to really help on the help channel now and don't just answer to be the top advisor.

As for Gm's and information, I think it would be nice to be able to request information about your character and have it given, but at the same time that might be a little hard on the Gm's if they are busy and cannot at that time respond. Then you will have people filling up the forums with complaints about how the Gm ignored them, or how it took so long to get the info. That could become a problem as I am sure many others I haven't thought of might occur.

[Osmo]

My most common question is "How Do I get out of the Death Realm?"

Which happens to be my favorite simply because trying to explain it via chat is almost impossible anyway.

You aren't supposed to answer that question.  It's like giving a quest solution.

Please read all the words.  You know, not just part of a quote.  Lets try again with the sections highlighted cause they were overlooked the first time.

Not to use a cop out, but I find the best answer to most advisor question is role play it out.

My most common question is "How Do I get out of the Death Realm?"

Which happens to be my favorite simply because trying to explain it via chat is almost impossible anyway.

But I don't advise as much as I used too because I got annoyed at trying to race the other advisors to help someone.  It really sucks typing out a great answer to a question only to not be able to send it cause another advisor gives some short half ***d response.

But sometimes the best answer is a short one.  Still irritating though.

So there still is competition to get to help.  Just not as much as before.

I'd like to know my points, only for curiosity.  But it isn't that important to me.

* Osmo claps

 

I was still racing to get in to help people today.  Guess being an advisor is whomever has the better connection, much like duels.  Faster typing seems to help.  I probably won't try again for a while either.

[neko kyouran]

When I was in PS quite more than I currently get in now, after a question was asked I always did a /advise [players name]  And then I went back and wrote out the answer to the question.  That seemed to announce to the other advisors that is was going to answer so they didn't have to worry about racing.  Course, when I get in game, there seems to be maybe 1 to 2 other advisors on anyway, so I never really saw the problems people are stating here.  I never really advised much anyway.  Mostly just listened to the others.  I learned quite alot about the game that way actually.  I only advised if no one else wanted to answer or there was no one else on that could answer.

Anyway, I haven't advised in some time since I haven't been in game for some time, is it not possible to do what I described above? Were people abusing that feature or something?  Guess I'm out of the loop a tad.

[Syilph]

As for Gm's and information, I think it would be nice to be able to request information about your character and have it given, but at the same time that might be a little hard on the Gm's if they are busy and cannot at that time respond. Then you will have people filling up the forums with complaints about how the Gm ignored them, or how it took so long to get the info. That could become a problem as I am sure many others I haven't thought of might occur.

I agree with you Zorbels.
Only developpers have acces to the complete database and bugging them for such matters I think it wouldn't be nice. And yes, we have quite alot to do without having to process every request for player statistics. The advisor points were removed from player access for a reason and that reason is to prevent advising for points. So the situation is like this: If you can't see them in your stats pannel what point would that be to be able to get them from GMs? The advisor points shouldn't be seen by players and that's it. If the developpers wanted players to know theyre advisor points they would have let them as they were before not remove them from stats so they can give people the possibility to ask once in awhile a GM about them.
So my point of view about the whole AP thing is:
They were removed. They are gone. You can't see them and if you can't see them you can't ask a GM to see them for you.
Besides checking your points as a measure of how many people you've helped is useless. What's the difference if you helped 100 or 500 people? You helped many. And that's all that matters. Wanna feel good about yourself and say "Wow! I helped 500 people so far!"? Advise for the pleasure of helping and you'll feel good about yourself after each advising session. Advising because you want to and because you enjoy it is more rewarding than competing for silly advisor points. You will not get a statue in Plaza if you have 5000 advisor points and certainly nobody will look at the Laanx page and envy you because you have so many .

[Janner]

 OK my last few word on this , why do developers do there thing , why do scientists do there thing.??

 It is the desire to know, we all have it it called curiosity = need to know with out it mankind would have died off years ago.

[neko kyouran]

Ah yes, the need/want to know.

In that case, consider the devs as your general and you the army pawn.  It's need to know information, and you don't need to know.

[zanzibar]

OK my last few word on this , why do developers do there thing , why do scientists do there thing.??

 It is the desire to know, we all have it it called curiosity = need to know with out it mankind would have died off years ago.

Hmm.  Yes, why split atoms when you can just rack up Advisor Points then count how many you have?

[Janner]

OK my last few word on this , why do developers do there thing , why do scientists do there thing.??

 It is the desire to know, we all have it it called curiosity = need to know with out it mankind would have died off years ago.

Hmm.  Yes, why split atoms when you can just rack up Advisor Points then count how many you have?

 In plan simple English please don't understand what you are saying.

[zanzibar]

OK my last few word on this , why do developers do there thing , why do scientists do there thing.??

 It is the desire to know, we all have it it called curiosity = need to know with out it mankind would have died off years ago.

Hmm.  Yes, why split atoms when you can just rack up Advisor Points then count how many you have?

 In plan simple English please don't understand what you are saying.

I'm saying that I don't think that Advisor Points are very significant, so I think it's silly to compare your A.P. total to what scientists do and pursue.

[Janner]

Slightly of topic but fell relevant. I have had a petition in for over 24 hours and to my surprise not been dealt with yet, on advice channel there was a hight ranking GM clamming advice sessions, don't know about you but if as we are being told they don't count and GMs are very bizzy, were does he get the time to do this and  more importantly WHY.

[Karyuu]

I don't see how this relates to the topic at all, but GMs sometimes deal with issues without claiming the petition as they work - or sometimes they discuss it between the team, etc. A lot of the time we keep the petition unclaimed so that all GMs are aware of a situation, since claiming makes a petition visible only to the GM who did the claim. Both Hadfael and I saw your petition, but I couldn't devote enough time to start the info hunt that your petition requires, and answering quick questions I could handle. I was multitasking a lot.

You can always poke a GM and ask about your petition state.

"WHY" did I answer advice requests? Because I like helping out, and I had enough time to. Why do you do it?

*edit*

You're no longer in-game, so we can't quite help out - unless you send a PM with further details on the situation :} Please make a petition with as much detail as you can, so we can spend more time helping and less time hunting info.

[DaveG]

Ok, I hadn't read any of this thread 'till now... I'm very confused at how in the world the jump to legality was made.  Simply put, the only peice of "personal data" we have is the email address you used to create the account, and we don't even use that for anything.  Everything else is ours; you own nothing.  Even if you were paying for this game, it'd still be our server, and still be our data.  We can track you and spy on your account in any way we see fit.

My origional intent was to just axe the AP system altogether, howerver we decided that we might be able to use it for internal tracking.  (though, honestly, I don't think we'll use it much)  From your perspective the system is just gone; we don't want you competing over this like a bunch of 2 year olds.  People who play games just to get a few numbers on screen get bigger hate it, and we don't really care.

Please, for the love of crap, help people to be nice and not to get points.  Don't obsess over some score that is unlikely to even ever affect you.

[zanzibar]

I'm surprised you didn't lock the thread.

[neko kyouran]

I don't really love crap, in fact its one of the most displeasuring bodily functions there is, well at least to me anyway.  Anywhoo,  I get what you're saying about the AP, but then also, there is the whole penalty of AP thanks to the misuse of the duel/trade requests.  If they mean nothing to the player as you want, then perhaps the penalties should be changed.  Afterall, they wouldn't be taken away from a person as the consequence of doing something bad if they didn't mean anything. Seems to me, that if you're going to take something away from a person to teach them right from wrong, you would take something away that would mean something to them.  Or maybe just hiding the fact that the AP got subtracted from the player may work.  Remove them from the players view all together.

[DaveG]

I'm surprised you didn't lock the thread.

Didn't really feel the need to.  It's not a flamewar here, or really any ranting.  From my point of view it's mostly confusion and whining.  If it get's any worse, yeah, one of us will lock.

Advisor points don't, and never did, do anything.  I might understand complaining if you could use them to buy other useless stuff, but you can't.  The spam penalty on AP is still there, it's just silent now.  People with signifigantly negative AP might get rejected for GMship, but frankly that's all we'd ever care to use them for.

neko kyouran:  You hit the nail on the head with this:  "Remove them from the players view all together."  Honestly, the better approach would've been to tell you that we removed the system altogether (which we pretty much did) and not tell you that we're still keeping a tally of things.