Someone said this in another thread; Aetolia already had someone on temporary loan from Imperian and needed someone permanent badly.

This makes me think of Matt playing chess with the extended IRE family.

"Lisaera to E4."

IRE has used mortal builders and you have access to the code on your local machine and quite a lot of heavily loged commands in game, but of course you cannot access the game server or just put your changes live just because. And you don't get to play with the most recent data (just imagine the abuse).

But being a mortal coder implies that you really need to have a strong difference betwen your coder self and your player self, as even if they try to avoid you knowing things so you can have fun there's aalways something that you overhead. But I know at least of a very very good RPer that was mortal coder in an IRE game.

They have had mortal coders, I know this with a very high degree of certainty, since I was one. Whether they still do or not, I don't know. I stopped because I left, not because they stopped having them at the time.

The idea of tweaking the code in favor of your character is really not realistic. Everything you do is easily noticed, and virtually everything you do is going to affect whole classes of people. Actually, most of the things I did that affected my mortal character were nerfs. I can't count the times I had to nerf myself; my first two projects were both self-nerfs.

Generally speaking you don't get to decide what you're working on. There were only two times I got permitted to do something at my own behest, and both of them benefitted whole groups of people across the game equally.

I suppose if you wanted to cheat, you could rifle through the code to dig out messages for triggers to put into your system. Then again, you could just go to the Combat Logs forum. When I was a mortal coder, I never had time to work on my system, so it's not like it mattered.

Separation of roles between coder and player isn't really that impossible to imagine. It's called "roleplaying".

Yes. I did get the wrong impression about coders having to give up their mortal characters, basically for the reasons already stated. It seems that mortal coders are accepted, though I'd wager that there are very few of them.

I'd never cheat the game, either. There is the obvious fear of getting caught, but there's also the idea that you're not making it more fun by cheating. You'd only be hurting the whole game by trying to tweak things in your favor (unless that happened to be your assigned project, of course!).

Thanks, Gwylifar. I still wish you were around in Lusternia, though.