header image
 

[OOC] Blog Banter, edition 5

Welcome to the fifth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions
about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here.

This month’s topic comes to us from Mynxee of Life in Low Sec. She asks “Alts and Metagaming: Is playing two accounts who are logged in at the same time and work together (hauler/miner, explorer/combat associate, trade alts in trade hubs) a form of metagaming that is ‘ruining the game’”?

More articles at the bottom of this post!

–

The definition of metagaming: “Metagaming is a broad term usually used to define any strategy, action or method used in a game which transcends a prescribed ruleset, uses external factors to affect the game, or goes beyond the supposed limits or environment set by the game.” (Source: Wikipedia)

I do use an alt character, referred to in my blog as “Bob”. He has skills that Ombey doesn’t- he does industry stuff, mainly inventing, some mining and POS meddling. He keeps me in touch with the other facets of Eve that I wouldn’t experience if I was just playing Ombey.

In an in-game sense, it isn’t outside the realms of possibility that capsuleers would have friends  who do favours or jobs for them. Even poorer capsuleers would/ could still work for other capsuleers, sure. Everyone needs ISK.

The most commonly used jobs for alts are:

  • Combat alt
  • Trade alt
  • Scout alt
  • Spy alt

All of the above can be explained easily within game terms, and I don’t see how it can be considered metagaming in any way. The spy alt is slightly different only in terms of morality- some players of Eve get a bit twitchy about the use of spy alts, indeed we had a long discussion about spy alts in our corp forum recently. It was interesting to read people’s opinions on it, especially as U’K is an RP alliance primarily. However, the majority of us concluded that it was entirely explainable in an in-game style, and doesn’t go outside of the game.

In a broad sense, you could argue that one player controlling two or more characters is metagaming, as you are living two or more ‘lives’ in-game. The counter-argument is that CCP give us three character slots per account and don’t stop us from having more than one account. So if you are within game mechanics, is it metagaming? I feel the answer has to be “no”.

–

Other participants:

~ by Ombey on February 26, 2009.

5 Responses to “[OOC] Blog Banter, edition 5”

  1. It’s metagaming in the simplest sense, however, it’s not detrimental to the game and that’s the real issue. Metagaming in a LARP does ruin it for the game itself, but when we have in game mechanics for multiple characters, it’s just not the case.

    Good post mate!!!

    Ga'len said this on February 26th, 2009 at 1809 UTC

  2. The only way I can see people having alts as metagaming is if you take into account multiple accounts allowing you to bypass the skill training limit of alts on one account.

    That said, CCP allows (and encourages) it and if they were separate people in the real world they would all be training independently anyway so in my mind any such association is quite a bit of a stretch.

    Following the technical definition of meta-gaming the answer would be Yes simply because they all share space in one game (I charge cheap rental fees) and therefore it’s impossible for any one of the characters to not know what the others are doing since I haven’t trained multiple personality disorder above level 0 yet.

    I do have 3 accounts with specialized purposes for each. My main is PvP, account 2 is industry/carebear, and account 3 is Hauling/Capitals. I also have cyno alts on each account.

    Tandin said this on February 26th, 2009 at 2002 UTC

  3. ugh. I meant “share space in one brain”

    Tandin said this on February 26th, 2009 at 2003 UTC

  4. I’ve said it in reply to another post on this subject, but I don’t think it’s so easy to explain trade (or building) alts in game. Spy alts, combat alts and scout alts can all be “forgiven” in that it’s reasonable that a character that was not an alt but a main might reasonably serve the same role. This is the not the case for a trade alt that turns all of its profit over to another character

    Ray said this on February 27th, 2009 at 1154 UTC

  5. Good post, Ombey. I tend to think of my alts as business associates, so it would make some kind of sense for ISK generated from their activities to be deposited into the Bank of Mynxee if she was their angel investor to start with.

    Mynxee said this on February 28th, 2009 at 2147 UTC

Leave a Reply