Streamlining basic social interactions?

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15 Dec 2013 18:43 #1 by BigScary
Streamlining basic social interactions? was created by BigScary
We've added the basic social feature set to Tohm. Please tell us what you think of our design choices! How can we make this part of our game even better?



Read more here: tohm.wikia.com/wiki/Basic_Social_Commands

Key points:
- Say and whisper, no tell.
- Freeform emote and targeted emotes.
- Basic grammar correction.
- We're considering add a yell command, please share your opinions?
- We may add eavesdropping and sending private messages far away, based on hero skills.
- How can we streamline all of this to make it easier and faster? We want to do everything we can to get players socializing.

All criticisms and suggestions are very much appreciated. Thank you!

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16 Dec 2013 10:47 #2 by Kinaed
Replied by Kinaed on topic Streamlining basic social interactions?
Generally speaking, I'd say the basic social interactions look good. It's also pretty similar to most MUDs... may I ask, which games have you played? You may want to consider logging in to a few different ones to see what they do for inspiration.

Re: Your List
- Say and whisper, no tell. <-- Depends on your genre, no tell is good for serious RP-oriented games.
- Freeform emote and targeted emotes. <-- good stuff, the only thing I'd add is that we decided to move away from 1st person emoting to 3rd person categorically, but for us it was because we are RPI and wanted running a character to be more like writing a story than a first-hand experience.
- Basic grammar correction. <-- Why, I'm curious? I'd think that'd interfere with people's choice of expression, ye reckon?
- We're considering add a yell command, please share your opinions? <-- Depends on the game's purpose, etc, but thumbs up in general.
- We may add eavesdropping and sending private messages far away, based on hero skills. <-- Another thumbs up.
- How can we streamline all of this to make it easier and faster? We want to do everything we can to get players socializing. <-- I'm not sure, I don't see anything wrong or inefficient with your setup. I'd make sure you document how to do things very well, though. I think you already are given the wiki links.

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16 Dec 2013 21:22 - 16 Dec 2013 21:23 #3 by BigScary
Replied by BigScary on topic Streamlining basic social interactions?
I'm most familiar with DragonRealms, Achaea, and Aardwolf.

- Say and whisper, no tell. <-- Depends on your genre, no tell is good for serious RP-oriented games.

We're going for RP oriented, I don't want players having the appearance of AFK to passerby because they elect to do all of their talking in /tell rather than meeting up for conversations. I've heard a lot of feedback in the direction of "put it back in! players need it for specific situations like planning a rendezvous". We'll probably land somewhere in the middle - a very limited /tell, plus in-game devices/skills for other private messaging which indicate something is happening to passerby.

- Freeform emote and targeted emotes. <-- good stuff, the only thing I'd add is that we decided to move away from 1st person emoting to 3rd person categorically, but for us it was because we are RPI and wanted running a character to be more like writing a story than a first-hand experience.

Yep, we're going for first-person. I saw some options for variations on both command line syntax and outcome presentation, but I think we'll stick to this because it feels easiest to learn for players without training/reading documentation.

- Basic grammar correction. <-- Why, I'm curious? I'd think that'd interfere with people's choice of expression, ye reckon?

Many of today's players are lazy. Just trying to protect the quality of text we're pushing at players. I have a correction - it's punctuation fixing, not grammar fixing. Also it's not expected to fix everything, just some simple cases. We might also auto-expand some common acronyms like BRB.

- We're considering add a yell command, please share your opinions? <-- Depends on the game's purpose, etc, but thumbs up in general.
- We may add eavesdropping and sending private messages far away, based on hero skills. <-- Another thumbs up.
- How can we streamline all of this to make it easier and faster? We want to do everything we can to get players socializing. <-- I'm not sure, I don't see anything wrong or inefficient with your setup. I'd make sure you document how to do things very well, though. I think you already are given the wiki links.

One example we're considering is supporting an apostrophe for basic SAY to save that typing. So the following would be equivalent:

>say hello
>'hello

Any other suggestions along those lines?
Last edit: 16 Dec 2013 21:23 by BigScary.

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18 Dec 2013 01:56 #4 by Kinaed
Replied by Kinaed on topic Streamlining basic social interactions?
TI has a list of symbols that save commands, like ", is emoting." or ".this is a say." We're ROM codebase, and I think that was codebase standard before The Inquisition by Tamara was built.

The stuff you're doing is awesome, but some is reinventing the wheel. Happy to pass you some specs, esp if you're RP oriented. For example, we have emote targeting and a few other features you might like:

,grins at /Big, hand on her ;dag and says, "Our game would parse this to show my hand on a dagger I'm wielding and send 'you' to BigScary whilst showing Big Scary's short description to the room, for example."

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20 Jan 2014 19:29 #5 by BigScary
Replied by BigScary on topic Streamlining basic social interactions?
Big thanks for the details! I'll likely build something more simple for now, and reserve that advanced syntax for advanced players (relegating it to a much later dev date).

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22 Jan 2014 05:13 - 22 Jan 2014 05:14 #6 by ForgottenMUD
Replied by ForgottenMUD on topic Streamlining basic social interactions?
I'm thinking about the OPPOSITE of grammatical correction. I'm annoyed that people use intelligence as a dump stat and just ignore it. What do you think about worsening the speech of characters with a low intelligence score? I don't like the restriction, because not all dumb people speak in the same way, but I've never seen anybody roleplay their low intelligence.

Here are some formulae that I thought about:

1) With the lowest intelligence score, characters can only use words of 1 syllable. If they type anything longer, it gets replaced with sounds such as "Grr" and "Grumph". Characters gain 1 syllable for each intelligence point (with no restriction at all when it reaches average).

or

2) For each point below average intelligence, they gain a speech defect (a filter on their text) which they can choose. I'm just not sure how well different filters would interact with each other.

ForgottenMUD - custom d20 codebase
sites.google.com/site/forgottenmud
Last edit: 22 Jan 2014 05:14 by ForgottenMUD.

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