This has been bugging me personaly for a long time yet and i'd like to hear what the RPers on my server have to say about it. I've seen a thread of thought running through people's minds that the Setting of AO is seperate from any sort of System concerns with characters. An example would be to disregard levels, skill points, twinking, raid bots, and the like.
Now the way I see it, many of the game system elements fit in very well with the setting elements. Even something obscure as looking as skill points could be seen in a different light. Since you have this little computer fused to your brain that allows you to enhance your own abilities, why wouldn't that same technology be used to get an empirical understanding of ability and skill? So we could say that at some point people figured out how much knowledge exactly constitutes one standardized level of skill. Now this would also explain the buff culture on AO, since if you have standardized levels of ability and programs that can alter it, you would also have people looking to use that technology to enhance their ability.
I think a sort of mind set that would try and integrate system and setting as a part of roleplay could go a long way to makeing roleplay in AO more main stream and less strange. People already seem to have fallen into the antagonism culture associated with OT and the Clans (You suck! No YOU suck!), why not look at every day game happenings as part of roleplay?
Any thoughts on this issue?