How does

Tired but Alert work?



When Simutronics finally decided to outlaw AFK scripting back in late 1997, they introduced a change to the way Overall State of Mind worked, under the guise of a "scripting preventative measure". While the change did make long-term AFK scripting a little more difficult, its real purpose was to keep people who played (without AFK scripting) for many hours a day from advancing too fast.

First of all, what is Overall State of Mind? A character's mindstate affects one thing: the penalty you have to learning skills. All characters start with a Clear mindstate. This represents no penalty at all. You may have noticed that when you keep learning skills which are near "mind lock" your mindstate became Fluid or even Murky. At Fluid you receive no penalty, it is just a warning stage. But you will receive an increasing penalty as your mindstate deteriorates to murky, very murky, thick, very thick, dense, very dense, stagant, frozen, or very frozen.

The change that was introduced with the outlawing of AFK scripting was to introduce a measure of how "tired" your character is. All characters start with no message of how tired they are. As you get progressively more tired, you will be "Tired but Alert", "Tired and Sleepy" or maybe even "Tired and Feeling like the Waking Dead". Tired but Alert (hereafter called TBA) is alot like Fluid, it is a warning stage, and you receive no penalty (until you begin to get near Tired and Sleepy).

So how do you become Tired but Alert? Only the GMs know for sure, and they only give vague hints. But it is not based on time in the game, but rather on the experience gaining actions you perform. From what I can gather, the game looks at how often you repeat actions, and learning the same skill for a long period of time will make you TBA. The game also looks at what percentage of the time you are learning a particular skill (almost direct quote from a GM), which is why teaching or listening to classes will make you TBA faster than anything in the game, since you are constantly learning the skill. The game may also look at how high your skill learning rates are, since you seem to get TBA much faster when learning skills which are on "wall ranks".

Ok, so how do you get rid of Tired but Alert? The answer is to stop gaining experience. Also, you will clear your mindstate much faster by remaining in the game and not doing anything than you will by logging out. The best way to get rid of TBA is to hide, put the Wizard in rest mode, and leave the computer running while you go do something else. Just remember to rest somewhere remote and out of the way, if you are passively gaining perception from people hiding and stalking, you won't clear TBA as fast (and will also be considered AFK scripting).

Each level of 'Tiredness' is a very large range. One of the most common complaints I hear is from people who say they rested until TBA went away, then went out and learned skills again and TBA came back within 5 minutes. This is because they were barely within the Clear range, and were very close to the TBA range. Imagine each range as a number between 0% and 100%. If you get TBA, then rest until you're at 95% of the clear range, you will become TBA very quickly. But if you rest until you're at 0% of the clear range, it will take a long time before becoming TBA.

Remember how I said that Tired but Alert was just a warning stage with no penalty? This is what GMs have constantly said, but it is not entirely true. Once you get in the upper range of TBA (say maybe 95% or higher), you will get murky much much easier than normal. It will also take much much longer to get back to fluid than normal. So it is still true to say that TBA in itself never includes a penalty to learning, but under some circumstances it does cause you to incur a penalty to learning more easily.

Whether or not Tired but Alert is a major problem for you probably depends on how often you play DragonRealms and how much time you spend trying to train your character's skills. Here are some tips for avoiding TBA which you may or may not find useful:

  1. Avoid teaching or listening to classes.
  2. Use the Alternate Experience System to train boring skills at a decent rate without the constant repetition.
  3. Instead of logging out when you decide to quit playing, go somewhere remote and set up a script which rests for a couple hours, then quits.
Thank you, come again.

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