Sdescs over the Way -- A Suggestion and Discussion

[Qzzrbl]

Also, things like faking your own death and trying to evade bounty hunters and the like are all but impossible. Especially when you can just "look <bounty head's name here>" to identify someone.

[Lakota]

Venomz has offered the best idea.

[Boggis]

Venomz has offered the best idea.

[Delstro]

Qzzrbl has offered the best idea for playability and enjoyement.
Venomz has offered the best idea for playability.


I'd go with either or, I would prefer Qzzrbl's idea for enjoyment reasons, but I would settle for Venomz.

[Gimfalisette]

Either all y'all are working under some vastly different definition of "playability" than I am, or you really just haven't thought through all the consequences of such a change yet.

[The7DeadlyVenomz]

No offense, but perhaps you could explain your statement a bit better? Because beyond not being certain you were reaching the right mind (which frankly I don't see as a real problem), I'm not so sure what could possibly be considered as bad about my suggested concept. The recipient of a PSI would still see the short description of the sender. All my idea does is force the other person to contact you in order for you to know who they are. And if you are a psionic, the current message is what you will see.

Here is a full example.

>contact Bob
You contact someone's mind.

>psi Hi.
You send a telepathic message to someone's mind.
   "Hi."

You feel a foreign presence contact your mind.

The lanky, grey-eyed man sends you a telepathic message:
   "Hi."

>psi Bye.
You send a telepathic message to someone's mind.
   "Bye."

>Cease
You withdraw from someone's mind.

Certainly, I fail to understand how that could really hurt playability.

[Gimfalisette]

You didn't specify previously that they would see your sdesc when you Way them, so I assumed you meant the conversation would be totally blind. Now that you've elaborated, it might potentially be workable.

[Qzzrbl]

I know my idea might hurt playability a little if someone has a tendency to avoid interaction with other players, or those who play way off-peak.... But it opens up so many other doors for interesting plots and scenes.

[Gimfalisette]

Actually, I amend: Since your elaboration, and thinking of a couple more issues it would fix beyond raider-sdesc-sniffing, I think I'm in favor.

[musashi]

My only problem with that is that I just feel like the "someone's mind" thing sounds a little too vauge and silly.
I would rather have the person's current sdesc (based on whatever they may or may not be wearing, like a hood) be sent back to you.

Like other people have said, the justification could be something like: other people can find your mind, but you have some control over the image you send back to them based on your current image.

Maybe later on down the line something could be added so that the mindbenders of the world could control the way their psionic description looks without a need to fetter it to their actual sdesc, but eh, that's just icing on the cake.

[Lakota]

It used to be like that:

Contact someone wearing a hood and it remained hidden to you over the way.

[Morgenes]

A formal post will be put on the Weekly Update & Staff Announcements when this goes live.

A code change is being tested that will make it so that you can only use someone's name, keywords and REAL short description when contacting them from any room other than your current room.  Keywords granted from temporary short descriptions (such as from hoods/masks/face-wraps, whatever) will not be usable.

Note that this does not change the way contact works if you are in the same room with someone.  You will be able to use hooded/figure etc... to contact them if they're in the same room. 

We (we being the staff of Armageddon) feel this brings the code into line with our vision of how contact targeting should work and at what level it can be used to determine who someone really is.

[Fathi]

Here's to you, Mrs. Robinson.

I hope this works out and I hope it goes live.

[NoteworthyFellow]

A formal post will be put on the Weekly Update & Staff Announcements when this goes live.

A code change is being tested that will make it so that you can only use someone's name, keywords and REAL short description when contacting them from any room other than your current room.  Keywords granted from temporary short descriptions (such as from hoods/masks/face-wraps, whatever) will not be usable.

Note that this does not change the way contact works if you are in the same room with someone.  You will be able to use hooded/figure etc... to contact them if they're in the same room. 

We (we being the staff of Armageddon) feel this brings the code into line with our vision of how contact targeting should work and at what level it can be used to determine who someone really is.

I like this post.  A lot.

[musashi]

Yay!

[Lizzie]

Picky question about using the "real" sdesc...

let's say it's a guy who has a twisted body and green hair. But his player mistakenly forgot a comma..

the twisted green-haired man

implying that it's his hair that's twisted, instead of

the twisted, green-haired man

indicating that -he- is twisted, and not his hair.

Will the lack of comma matter when using an sdesc while trying to use the way to contact someone? Is it punctuation-mark-sensitive? What about the hyphen? I know that sometimes, green-haired will work, but other times, green works, haired works, but green-haired doesn't work. Will the code ignore all punctuation marks and consider only the order and combination of words instead? That would be ideal. Cause there are lots of tall dark men, and several tall, dark men, and the players mean exactly the same thing.

[Nyr]

When you contact someone or target them, it goes solely on keywords, not sdesc, iirc.

Example:

Amos the tall, green-eyed man.

His keywords (that he set up when he created his character, or did his last desc change) are tall green eyed man.

You would type

Code Select Expand

contact tall green Amos
to get Amos.

Alternatively, you could type

Code Select Expand

contact green tall amos
or

Code Select Expand

contact amos green tall
or

Code Select Expand

contact amos tall green

 

[Lizzie]

Right. I should've simplified my question - in your example Nyr, will the -new- implementation allow for people to type "green-eyed" and get a positive result if the guy's sdesc is green-eyed? Not green and eyed, but green-eyed, with the hyphen. If I type "contact green-eyed amos" to find Amos, the green-eyed man, will I actually find him? Or will that hyphen error out my attempt even though it's part of his sdesc, which Morgenes says will be one of the things we can try to contact someone from now on? It has errored in the past. That's why I'm asking.

[Morgenes]

Will the lack of comma matter when using an sdesc while trying to use the way to contact someone? Is it punctuation-mark-sensitive? What about the hyphen? I know that sometimes, green-haired will work, but other times, green works, haired works, but green-haired doesn't work. Will the code ignore all punctuation marks and consider only the order and combination of words instead? That would be ideal. Cause there are lots of tall dark men, and several tall, dark men, and the players mean exactly the same thing.

This portion of the code did not change.  Punctuation marks in the sdesc are ignored, although you should still be able to refer to the 'green-haired' man.  If you have issues with this, please send me a log and I will investigate.

Edited to add:

Here's an example from in-game:

Code Select Expand

> contact half-giant
You suffer from use of the Way.
You contact the towering, golden-haired half-giant with the Way.

>cease
You dissolve the psychic link.

> contact towering half-giant
You suffer from use of the Way.
You contact the towering, golden-haired half-giant with the Way.

>cease
You dissolve the psychic link.

> contact the towering, golden-haired half-giant
You suffer from use of the Way.
You contact the towering, golden-haired half-giant with the Way.

>cease
You dissolve the psychic link.


I will throw in there that combining a name with sdesc can provide unpredictable results (as in Nyr's examples above, including 'amos' along with keywords).  This is because all the keywords have to match at least ONE of the name, keywords or sdesc.  If you use names, you cannot use punctuation, as names are only stored on keywords, and punctuation isn't in the keywords.

I know that's not real clear, let's try a tangible example, if our half-giant above is named 'Amos':

Code Select Expand

> contact half-giant amos
You suffer from use of the Way.
You contact the towering, golden-haired half-giant with the Way.

>cease
You dissolve the psychic link.

> contact towering, half-giant amos
You suffer from use of the Way.
You are unable to reach their mind. {the comma isn't in their keywords, so no match}


It also depends on the keywords on the character.  Most new characters will have their sdesc in their keywords with hyphens.  It's possible there are older characters and NPCs that have 'green haired' in their keywords instead of 'green-haired'.  In that case, 'green-haired amos' will NOT work.

Sorry this isn't consistent and can be confusing.  The best way to get someone is to use exact sdesc with punctuation, or using a unique name.

[Desertman]

Well, its a step in the right direction.

[Qzzrbl]

Well, its a step in the right direction.

Yeh.

[KIA]

Let the crime waves begin!

[Shiroi Tsuki]

Punctuation can be used in contact?      I never knew this before, so I guess it won't change much about the way I try to contact people.