Antidotes: Overcoming Obstacles

 cheat  /CHēt/

[ no obj. ] act dishonestly or unfairly in order to gain an advantage [ with obj. ] deceive or trick

play the game |plāiNG T͟Hə gām|
 * Behave in a fair or honorable way; abide by the rules or conventions: getting things done.'’

Cheating
How does HabitRPG prevent cheating?

In future, mechanisms may be implemented to prevent cheating in the proposed "Enterprise Edition" once it is released.

However, at the moment HabitRPG is a self-monitored game that heavily relies on the integrity of the player.

In order to play the game successfully and thus reap the benefits of HabitRPG, the player is required to accomplish their self-assigned goals such as forming good habits and completing tasks. HabitRPG works under the premise that the player receives no advantage by cheating as doing so would only sabotage their goals. This is why there are no measures to prevent a player from repeatedly clicking a habit to receive pets or potions or to level up their character when they are about to die.

The following tips address the most common scenarios in which players feel tempted to cheat and how they can overcome them:

Character is Near Death
When a player has many bad habits or has not completed a lot of their dailies for some period of time, the health of their character drops to a point where it will die if no action is taken. Many players become attached to their character's armor and do not wish to lose this, but feel they are unable to complete enough tasks to level up or do not have enough gold to buy a healing potion to save their character.

Hence, they might feel tempted to cheat by clicking unattempted habits or tasks as being completed in order to level up and save their character.



Remedies
This method of cheating is usually negated by the player performing enough tasks to either earn gold to buy a healing potion or to level up the player's character.

A player achieves this more easily by: If this is still not quite enough to earn a healing potion, selling a few drops earned by previously performed tasks is preferable to checking-off an incomplete task.
 * Completing dailies or to do tasks that can be finished before the day ends, particularly dark red dailies which provide the most experience points.
 * Thinking of, adding, and completing tasks that might have been forgotten on their to do list.
 * Completing good habits that can be accomplished within a few hours.
 * Avoiding bad habits.

Alternatively, it may be possible to evade death by healing with healer skills. While healers have a self-heal spell, they also have a party heal. Beware, these spells heal a relatively small amount of health and one skill use may not provide enough health to prevent death.

Dealing with Character Death
However, if these methods fail the player should let their character die in order to learn the value of loss. When gold, levels or items a lost, especially ones that the player is particularly fond of, the player gains more motivation to make sure the death does not occur again by planning and preparing for the following day's activities. (See: Death and dying)

Greying Out Red Dailies Which Are Due
Players normally attempt this method of cheating when they have neglected their dailies to the point that they cause more damage than the player can heal via levelling up or healing potions. Hence the player might decided to pretend these dailies do not exist by un-assigning them from all days of the week, and hence not receiving any damage from them.

Remedies
When a player begins to feel tempted to grey out their dailies, it is usually a sign that they need to reassess their daily task list (see: Establishing Your Goals).

There are a few options that players can utilise if they have numerous neglected daily tasks:
 * If their task list is mostly shades of orange, red and dark red, a player can use Fortify to reset all their dailies to yellow (note that this has a gem cost).
 * A player can join a challenge that centers around completing all their tasks for a little motivation via competition.
 * Players can rename their red tasks to something more achievable but relevant to the original task (e.g. A daily named "1hr exercise" might be renamed to "30mins exercise")
 * Talk to a party or guild member about the daily. Accountability is a huge reason as to why parties and, to a certain extent, guilds exist. Players are usualy more likely to keep up a habit if other people are counting on them to do their respective daily.

Procrastination
Procrastination is something many HabitRPG players experience. It occurs when a player consistently pushes their tasks to complete at a later date, causing them to build up, resulting in a very long to do list that seems impossible to reduce. This overwhelms the player and may cause them to give up or restart the whole game.

Remedies

 * Improve the work environment. People procrastinate more often when their work environment is uncomfortable, cluttered, loud, too bright, etc. Usually, something as simple as raising a desk chair or dimming the monitor can make a huge difference in the player's productivity.
 * Utilise Tags to focus on fewer tasks each day and ensuring that those tasks are done. This gives the illusion of a shorter and more achievable to do list, making it less likely for the player to procrastinate on these items due to work overload.
 * Create deadlines and implement it with tags. Humans have an uncanny ability to believe there is more than 24 hours in a day. Creating deadlines requires a reality check to realize how much time is actually available to complete the tasks. The most effective deadlines have a time and a date (e.g. I will finish _____ by Friday, 6:00 PM.)
 * Prioritise tasks from easiest to hardest and work on the tasks that are easy/fun first before looking at any of the other tasks. Even if the hardest tasks are not completed, the completion of at least one or two tasks is better than none.
 * Choose the most important to-do tasks and make it a Daily habit. Losing health can serve as an impetus to push the player to work. Once completed, delete the daily habit and check off the to-do.
 * Break down a major or difficult task into multiple parts. This makes the task more manageable and less intimidating to complete. It also results in earning more gold coins. Some ideas are splitting the task into time intervals or splitting the task into separate parts (e.g. Splitting a 5000 word paper into 5 sets of 1000 words.)
 * Work for only two minutes. The hardest part of overcoming procrastination is starting the work. After two minutes of working, a player will be able to assess how they feel and whether they believe they can continue working. If they do not believe they can continue, then they can take a break until they feel comfortable before repeating the two minute process.
 * Take regular breaks after periods of working to prevent burn out and improve focus. (See: Pomodoro Technique to learn how to work effectively in intervals.)
 * Once working, make sure to avoid anything distracting. A player can use the HabitRPG Chrome extension to prevent themselves from going on distracting websites. Cell phones and tablets should be turned off or put on silent. If the internet is not required for the task, turn it off. To make this process more pleasant, a player could create a separate habit titled "Successfully removed all distractions."