Dicu heritage and single-letter socials

[Quo]

While the discussion is at 'removing' commands an old pet-peeve came to my mind.
There's a few  things, none of them seriously bugging me, which I'd love to see gone. Most probably relics from out-of-the-box Diku. All of them one-word socials/emotes with a coded line of text, some abbreviated to single letter instances.
Why should I mind them? We have the single best emote system in place (Praise!), and all these commands can be done (and are) much better using the emote command. The only thing these commands seem to be good for is for irritation and ooc-giggles when they come out different than intended.
When kill (or a mistyped 'l' for look) becomes kiss (or vice versa, I don't know which is taking precedence but remember a few GDB discussions) it's a very ooc command mixup that is better avoided.
Some might argue that these socials are helping those in transition from another mud, but I'd hold against that this might be true mostly for those few coming from a Diku base. For people from other code-bases, the resulting emote might come as surprise especially if their previous code-base didn't know  the single letter abbreviation for commands. "Wiggle" for example refers to wiggling an entirely different part of the body in an LP-mud based world. For all people in transition, I'd think it easier and  more consistent to transfer the "standard" social to an emoting syntax (or even an alias if they should truly wish so).

With a mud client, this is of course less of an issue, - one of its true advantages is to define aliases to catch those catches. Such as "alias k look" to avoid kissing Halaster by accident

Now  this is how  I feel about these standard socials. Maybe just not representative. So what are your ideas? Do you use them at all? Anyone even depending on them? I'm curious to read your opinion.
 Quo

PS: related thread:
'm'

[Raesanos]

My personal response would be "Yes, I use them on occation." I don't use them a lot as choice 1 suggests, but I don't not use them as choice 2 suggests.

I find them useful only in certain situations.  Say you're in combat and a partner yells an instruction to you. You may be in a tense situation, and want to let the person know you heard and understood them without investing time in a carefully crafted emote. In a case like that a good 'nod person' is quite handy.  Thats my personal opinion on the matter: they aren't a replacement for emotes, but they are useful at times.

[Agent_137]

I've never used them. I came from a mud that i played for 7 years, and there was no open emote system. EVERYTHING was a coded social.

So I hate them.


HATE them.



Do what you want with them. I won't be using them either way.

[Intrepid]

I would like to add a fifth option as my answer:

I prefer my own emotes, but I hate stock DIKU emotes because I
accidentally type them out force of habit.

[mansa]

When you're watching someone...socials 'echo' and emotes don't.  That's something to keep in mind (and, I"m sure it's just an oversight.  It's been mentioned on the GDB earlier)

I love socials.  I was saddened when they removed a whole wack of them, and cried when 'help abba' was removed.

[vitaminR]

I use them occassionaly.. Usually in between saying something with an emote attached to the say.

Something like

You say thoughtfully
'soundz liek a kewl idea, kid'
You nod

Though the kiss social is horrible. My five year H&S instincts kick in every time I'm about to fight something, and instead of "kill bastard" I always get the urge to "k bastard" . Hell, I kissed some desert beasts twice at the very least, thank god there was no one to see. wah.

kiss your ass goodbye, vestric? =\

[Savak]

The funny thing is, one of the first things Sanvean did when she first joined staff was get the vast majority of the stock socials removed.  At the time I think more staff got all screechy about it than anyone else, mostly because Halaster liked to 'smirk' a lot.  But all in all, it was Good.

Nowadays, there's only a few remaining socials that I know are still alive and kicking.  "Kiss" is somewhat intentional, as a preventative for kill/look typo's, although perhaps it could be handled better.  "Nod" is entirely generic and innocuous, and I really see no reason to remove it.  Pretty much the same for "wink."  Those aside, I'm basically in agreement with the general consensus that they're essentially useless at best, and misrepresentative giggle-factor at worst.

-Savak