Progression Malaise

[space_monk]

Dear fellow Monks,

I joined this site several years ago, but mainly to absorb the wisdom of the monks and I did not contribute or vote much. As a result I remained humbly in the lower orders until about 6 or 7 months ago when I decided to put in some effort to contribute to the Prayers and Offerings, which resulted in my promotion to the exalted rank of Friar.

However, since then I seem to have lost my fiery desire to race to Sainthood, and therefore whilst I contribute occassionally, my progress to Hermit seems to have slowed.

Have you experienced the same loss of interest in your progress, and did you necessarily regard it as a bad thing? Should a Monk be competitive about wanting to be promoted?

I humbly await your thoughts on the issue.....

[choroba]

The desire to race to Sainthood is not the right desire. Strive for being better, cleverer, more skilled, for helping others, for promoting the community. The XP is just a number.

[jaredor]

The only competition is with yourself. I enjoy reading your comments, space_monk, and the threads you start generally attract quality answers that I learn from. So find some way to keep at it, please, including throttling back if you find yourself burning out. You can bump along for a while just reading content until you cast your quota of votes (I mainly do that) and still you are contributing to the site.

Maybe you should try to do something like write a tutorial? That could perhaps add a few fringes to your prayer rug that much faster.

I'm going to differ with choroba to a small extent: The XP system is indeed artifice, but it is intended to be fun and hence an inducement. When an inducement wanes, it will affect your participation. As a friar upon the path to enlightenment, perhaps you can reinvigorate yourself with something like meditative koans. Once you realize that desire for XPs is foolish, then hasten to catch up with your fellow fools. :-)

[Ratazong]

Hi space_monk

I think it is normal to have times where you are very active, and times where you want to meditate on your own. For me, it depends on the world outside (the more I am out, the less time I spend at my computer and in the monastery) as well as on the activity inside. (If there are new and interesting threads, I am thrilled ... however if there are lots of do-my-homework-for-me or I-want-to-parse-XML-with-a-regex-nodes, I get bored. And then I reduce my activity here.). And it depends on how much perl I'm currently using (the more I use it, the more questions I have, and the more often I visit the monastery).

I consider that being OK. The benefit of the monastery is that you can advance at any speed you want. The XP-game just encourages you to be active - to provide your wisdom by writing your own nodes or by giving feedback by voting. It is not the sole purpose of the monastery (see chorobas comment above on being just a number), however it is working very well to ensure lots of active monks. Monks who know that XP is just a number. But for some it is a higher number than for others (as some wise monk (moritz?) wrote to the chatterbox long ago).

Do you want advice? Any path you choose is fine. Eventually, it will bring you to sainthood (and hopefully not into the night).

So long, Rata

[hdb]

As a new joiner in the monastery, I cannot speak from long experience. I am still full of zeal and hope that other responsibilities in life will not take over soon. My breadwinning, alas, is not based on Perl.

However, the current addiction is strong and the experience system is a big incentive. The secular powers would call it gamification. How much more of a satisfaction it is to solve other people's problems when you also get a (hopefully positive) feedback not only from the sufferers that have insufficient understanding of Perl but also from the Elevated that can really judge the proficiency of your utterings.

It does not feel very monkish though and seems to show a lack of humility. I felt bad about writing that script that retrieves my level, xp, and cumulative reputation of writeups from the monastery. I will use the frequency of running it as a measure of my progress in the true dedication to the cause and hope to be down to two times a day quite soon. I will also abandon my project to post the output to facebook automatically.

In the meantime, continuing to read, learn and write I will enjoy.

[talexb]

The journey of learning is a life-long one. It's not a sprint.

Also, XP only has meaning if you let it have meaning. Don't strive for sainthood. Strive for better understanding of Perl. XP is for amusement purposes only.

[igelkott]

exalted rank of Friar

Friar is a good rank to have since now it's possible to help with the chores and possibly feel a bit more involved. Rank might be nice to show as a consultant or book-writer but otherwise seems just to be for personal amusement (my view anyway). Personally, I mostly like getting a few points now and then to read the silly quips -- oh yes, and helping people, that's it.

[hdb]

As I said earlier in this discussion I have develop some kind of addiction which has led me to write a script that retrieves my XP and cumulative reputation of my write ups. This script now runs hourly to record my history in the Monastery. It uses my name and password, otherwise it cannot see the reputation of my write ups.

Whether or not this is proper monkish behavior (probably not), I am wondering whether this will actually get me extra XP over time. Right now I log on anyway every day, so I guess not. But if I stay away for a few days, will my script create undeserved XP? In which case I should shut it down while being away?

[erix]

Your post made me laugh because I recognize the affliction :) It will probably get less acute over time.

I don't think it should be a problem if people automate some monastery access as long as there is no automatic voting. (I believe there is also some detection in place to get rid of those - not sure). But if the frequence is not too high, and as long as the aim is not solely to get XP, I would think such scripts are OK.

Having said that, if you're away for a few days it makes more sense to shut down any such processes; why load the server more than is necessary? (Hopefully not for those lousy 2 XP per day...)