So you're the one I keep running into whom I can never keep happy with "the way I talk". Seriously dude, I have grouped with you with 5 characters of mine, and 5 or more of yours, and no matter how hard I try to talk in a way that you find IC acceptable, you're never satisfied. I'm getting to the point that I just want to make a super pk character and spam kill every one of your chars who I find doing that.

There are perfectly legitimate IC reasons for knowing what item A does, and where item B is found; ESPECIALLY when the character in question is a studious type character (i.e. mage, arcane thief, explorer type char, bard, any random gnome/svirf with racial lore 100% etc...). Thief can linger in the shadows listening in on conversations of more experienced players. Mages are very studious people who do lots of reading about a wide variety of things. How else do you think they gain all this arcane knowledge? And Bards are SUPPOSED to be knowledgeable about many things, hence the 100% lore. Speaking of which, what exactly do you think the LORE skill represents? I refer you to Alduk in the Inn, who's description indicates that he's very well traveled and knows just about any item out there. Lore means you know about many things. It's not identify which magically discerns the properties of an item. It's KNOWLEDGE. Any Herald regardless of anything else, has ample IC reasons to know this or that. People go through there all the time. PCs are not the only characters in the game, and the NPCs aren't just wooden posts standing around. They're CHARACTERS too, who have knowledge of their own, experiences of their own, talk, and share stories. Because this is a coded computer game, they can't be programmed to act exactly like a PC, but it's understood that they have all those qualities and those things are going on whether you see them or not. Therefore, anyone who spends ANY amount of time at the Inn has a justifiable IC reason to know just about anything in the game.

If they know, let them know it! I'm not saying this condones the spread of certain information OOC. That's an entirely different subject. I'm just saying, if you have a veteran player who knows items, areas, and NPCs, don't expect him to "forget" everything he's learned over the 10 years or so that he's played the game, and act like he's a complete newb, bumbling around and getting killed on everything in the game cause he doesn't know if it's too big to handle. Likewise, don't expect him to blindly stumble his way to Aran'gird, and "accidentally" figure out how to get through the gate, then intentionally die to the guard because his character isn't supposed to know how to get by them safely, etc..., just so THAT character has learned from experience.

There is nothing wrong with knowing that a flickering gem rejects those who walk a balanced path, therefore, the person holding the gem clearly is not balanced. Then said person groups with an elf, who clearly cannot group with a darkheart. Therefore, said person clearly is not dark. Put them both together, and, what do you know?!? That person must walk in the light too! Oh, but that's just TOO MUCH knowledge for a low level character to have! Nevermind that the character with that knowledge might have "found" that gem himself, tried to use it, and found that it rejected him.

Seriously dude, don't expect that everyone else should roleplay exactly the same way you do. I've even grouped/interacted with mortal chars of Imms (some of whom have been remarked about as being exceptional roleplayers) and listened to their characters do the exact same things you complain about so much. I even had one mortal character of an Imm who became a cabal leader talk to me about tactically discerning information about a person I was hunting by paying attention to the gear they were wearing. By your standards, even tells should be considered OOC because people just can't talk to each other from across the world! Instead of picking on every little detail that doesn't quite jive with your view of roleplay, you should try to see how this person might actually have a justifiable reason to know such-and-such information. I even remember talking to one of your characters about Aran'gird one time, and you bitched at me and actually went semi-oocish telling me that I had no reason to know that (we were like, mid-30s or something). The really annoying part was, with that character, I actually HAD been to Aran'gird. A hero gave me the item needed to get in safely, and offered to take me there. But in your zeal to call out something you thought was OOC, you actually bitched about my character's perfectly justifiable IC experience.

To put it plain and simple, "You have NO WAY to determine if person x has a justifiable IC reason to know information Y. AT ALL." And when you start going off on one of your rants about it IN THE GAME, it not only sets off a HUGE red flag that says, "THIS IS PRO!!!!!" it also looks hugely OOC to everyone around. When you refused to group with me and another lowbie in FoN just a week or so ago because of my comment about the flickering gem, the other dude was like, "What the hell?!? Did you rape his sister or something?" (That's an exact quote, by the way.) Ironically, the most OOC thing and the worst roleplay about that entire interaction was YOU. Especially after you tried to justify your reaction with the comment, "I don't like it when someone starts talking like they're reading off some other-worldly list in their mind." Now that may not be an EXCACT, WORD-FOR-WORD quote, but the part "other worldly list in their mind" IS.

Now then, on to punctuation... In real life, when you talk, you don't HEAR capital letters. If I'm standing next to you, and I tell you about my friend Jill, you're not going to know whether I capitalized her name or not. Similarly, if I make a statement, that's a complete sentence, but only ONE sentence, you don't HEAR the period at the end. The words stopped coming, so therefore, you know there's a period. You don't see it, hear it, touch, taste it, or smell it in anyway. Therefore, why in the world would your CHARACTER know that it was missing, enough to complain about someone "not talking right?" Now granted, there are times when you can "hear" punctuation in someone's audible speech. For instance, if you read this sentence aloud, you can hear where I've put the commas because they represent a light pause that separates the two prepositional phrases from each other and rest of the sentence. But if I were standing next to you, and spoke that sentence aloud and didn't pause between the prepositional phrases, you wouldn't suddenly start wigging out that I was "not talking right" unless you had some kind of emotional or social disorder like autism or something.

In short, by acting the way you do IN GAME, you're actually being a much worse roleplayer than the very people you condemn.

EDIT: I know that others take issue about the punctuation/capitalization thing, including Iunna and Kasty (if I'm not recalling incorrectly). This could be why none of my characters have ever had a positive interaction with Iunna, even when she was still a mortal. She's certainly entitled to her view, as are you. But at least Iunna doesn't wig out and go semi-ooc on me because of it. She just generally ends up being cold and distant. As for Kasty, as far as I know, I've never had much if any interaction with him since he Immed, though I did have quite a bit during his mortal days and we didn't seem to have any issues then.

So, here you go, Jhyrb. Here's my biggest pet peeve about other people's roleplay--when some bonehead can't get outside of his miniscule box and expects everyone else to roleplay by his extremely narrow, one-dimensional rules of roleplay, and then gets pissy about it afterwards.

END RANT

p.s. If this post seems a bit heated, it's because that's been building up for a very long time, and finally I know who to direct it to, since I can't do it in the game.

Klaak

Great spirits have always met violent opposition from mediocre minds.
-Einstein