Poll

What do you think of the use of spying, spy characters, and other such things?

Spying is always bad.
Spying is only bad if it is done via OOC channels. (i.e. getting a friend to join the game so he can spy for you, or passing messages via OOG methods, etc.)
Spying is only bad if people specifically create a character to spy on a realm, or move a second character to that realm to spy on them.
Spying is fine, if existing characters have good IC reasons for it.
All is fair in love and war!

Author Topic: Spying: Good or bad for the game?  (Read 18052 times)

De-Legro

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Re: Spying: Good or bad for the game?
« Reply #30: April 12, 2011, 02:03:55 PM »
I do not think it is ooc, but I think this is exactly the kind of spying that ruins the game. If your guy moves to realm X, there will be no way for people in power of realm X to discover he is a spy, and can play on all tables attempting to gain trust without any meaningful risk. As soon as people in power suspect there is a spy somewhere, this freezes all promotions, councils get tuned down, no info goes outside the few in power. If the spy is excluded or not, well, that depends on his skill and it's a nice mechanics. But a lot of non-spies will suffer the consequences.

Let's face it: spying is just incredibly easy. Justifying it with a "I am part of a spy network" makes it amazingly cheap to perform, and all the game suffers the consequences. If you at least have good ic background reasons it can be tolerated and it adds fun as I wrote in this topic before, but someone joining a realm with the particular purpose of spying -be it because of ic or ooc reasons- makes just too hard for people in power to trust everyone.

Nothing against you de-Legro, but that's just my point of view.

You can't have it both ways. All spies are just as easy to detect. You have the same chance of working out it is a disenfranchised member of the realm as you do the professional spy. Both will result in non-spies suffering the consequences.
Previously of the De-Legro Family
Now of representation unknown.