Observations from a renoob

[burble]

I haven't played a mud since about 1995. Haven't even played a computer game in many years. So here are some of the problems/suggestions I wrote down while relearning Arm this summer:

Bleed descriptions: I can't see what it says to the room. If I am "bleeding all over the place" all I see is "you are in moderate condition". My first encounter with this was a character that said "Where the F* you going bleeding like that". But when I "Look me" I just got my condition. So I said "I don't see any blood" and continued on. Later I noticed how others were showing "x is bleeding heavily here" or something. For a new player that can be confusing.

Pick flower plant
put flower bag <- does not work
put sprig bag <- works
This is a minor irritation with many many plants and things. I'm sure it would be pure hades to go back and fix these but wow it is confusing at first until you realize it is a keyword problem and just keep trying.

Animals:
Some have their type in their description "A Tandu is blah blah here" vs. "A short green wooly thing grins here". The latter would send me scrambling to find the correct description on the Animal list from the Armageddon website. I don't know if this is by design or not but it sure is scary to see something new and not know if you should be running (happened with a raptor I believe - while I was looking it up I got attacked).

Commands that I don't think should be puzzles but maybe I'm wrong:
rent mount - took me a long time to figure that out (starting in Tuluk - Nak has these nice OOC boards). Figured it out through GDB searches.
Never could figure out how to get water in Luirs.

Cooking:
wow that sucks. I tried cooking all my kills and still it is so unreliable (after 13 days playing time) that if I wanted to feed 2 people I would buy 12 steaks just to get it done. It's kind of embarrassing since cooking and talking is such a good casual RP time. It is tempting just to go barbarian and forget about cooking.

Emoting:
These fancy emoting commands are great but scary to learn and try out (don't want to say/write something stupid). I just stuck with the basic emote types for safety. Perhaps some kind of "Mirror" command to try things out and see how they look? Mirror emote blah blah could show only you what the room would see (not the substituted one). I don't know - caught between not wanting to ruin the mood with a messed up emote and wanting to do more.

New Character Starting:
A store in the character starting uhm place whatever that is (before or between pointing at your start location). You are marked as a newbie by your clothes at least until you get to a shop. Makes you stand out in the crowd.

Maybe an optional (what did muds call it back then? Mud School?) few rooms in the starting area to practice some commands - like the fancy emotes or picking things or crafting or chopping trees, etc. It's been a long time but I remember some muds used to have an area you could go through to learn the basics.

Other Suggestions (create logs and run a monthly report - perhaps you do this already):
Could log all true newbies for their first few hours of play to spot any problem commands.
Keep a count of help access by word and room to find any problem rooms (maybe Luirs water room is just me but I tried lots of Help commands there and never figured it out - wonder if this room in Arm generates the most help commands?)

Well that's all I wrote down. Hope it is helpful.

[Pale Horse]

I can't say for anyone else, but I always like seeing these critiques from new(er) players.

For what it's worth, many of the things you've listed still trip up the so-called "veteran" players.  I'm going on 10 years, I think, playing Arm. and the pick plant commands still confuse me.  I still look up the occasional animal on the web site..and end up it's snack, when I find out it's one of those "find out IG" ones or simple just not listed due to it's IG rarity (having said that, I can remember running the first time I saw a goudra with one of my characters, IG).

The cooking skill has recently come under fire for it's seeming unrealistic (even for a fantasy game) difficulty, and the staff has been hard at work making it so that the times you fail a skill check and create "a charred lump of meat", you end up with something that instead of serving as a brick in the Scain wall, will provide some nourishment.  Keep at it..and realize that some guilds just won't get beyond "suck" level proficiency, unfortunately.  That's an issue being worked out for Arm.2, according to my understanding.

Screw fancy emotes.  Sure, they're fun every now and then and can really help you step up your own when you meet that fantastic PC with the really descriptive emotes that bring a scene to life, but no one, no one is always on the ball with the best they can churn out.  Some of the most life like PCs I've had the pleasure of role-playing with have used some of the simplest styles, but they sure were effective.

There's an idea floating around the Reborn forum for a "Mud School" idea, or at least a starting area a little bit removed from the main highways and byways of the game proper.  It's an impressive change, IMO, from the time when any sort of mention or hint at such a thing would have been shot down in flames before it was even half formed.  Shows how we've moved as a community into bending our "elitist" attitude to include some way to introduce newbies into our pride and joy, while keeping it's high standards intact.

[Lizzie]

1. Luirs waterselling thing is sort of a mini-quest. I don't know why it -should- be considered a "find out IC" thing since it's really just a matter of syntax. Major hint: it involves logical manipulation of the bucket.

2. Bleeding all over the place: agreed. There are times when "bleeding profusely" just means "dying of thirst and not bleeding at all." There are -also- times when "bleeding lightly" means "the spice just wore off." Same with stamina drain - you could be wearing your normal heavy plate armor, bringing you down to 100 stamina points. And you just slept, so now you have 100/100 and are fully rested. Then you get changed into your "prowling for magickers in the scrub" gear which boosts your stamina to 200. Um..woops? Now you're at 100/200 stamina, which shows to everyone else, that you are VERY tired. Even though you just woke up and are completely rested. So you have to buck the code and sleep again just to get it back to reflect that you're in tip-top shape. I'm just glad there's no echo for reduced stun. People would wonder how I can still stand up without passing out most of the time

3. Pick item plant put item bag: the issue I think is that the item you are picking -from- for some reason is retaining the default in the key list. The item in your inventory should always be the default. If it were me, I'd bug it. Until then, always type "key flower" to see which item you need to put in the bag.

4. Animal echoes: It looks like someone wanted people to have to -learn- the names of certain critters. Like maybe one set of imms worked on the original batch where everyone knew what everything was, and another set said "Hey ya know what? My character shouldn't know that this is a raptor just because I'm reading "A raptor is here." My character's never left the city and never saw one before. He wouldn't know a raptor from Rambo." So they went and turned all the ldescs into more descriptive ones to match the ldescs that people have. The difference between "a big scaley lizard" and "a big scaley yompar" is the same difference between "a big scaley elf" and a "big scaley rinthi elf." or a big scaley humanoid and a big scaley human tuluk citizen. Yompar is just a teeny tiny bit more information than most people would know, just by looking at a critter they're not familiar with.

On the other hand: once a *player* has learned that it's a yompar, the responsibility now falls squarely on the player's shoulders to rp whether or not his character knows what it is. So even if all they see is a big scaley lizard, the PLAYER knows that it's a yompar. And if a *player* has never seen a yompar before and doesn't know if they're tough critters or aggro or passive or easy kills or whatever else, then it doesn't matter that he can see "yompar" instead of "lizard."

On the OTHER other hand: some critters look similar from a distance but aren't the same thing. So it'd make sense that you can't tell exactly what it is.

My solution: something similar to the "greet" system some of the clunkier rp games. If your -character- has seen the thing before, it will recognize it as what it is. Even from a distance. So the first time you come across a yompar, if you don't interact with it to learn what it is (assess works if you don't want to fight it), then you'll keep seeing the big scaly lizard. As soon as you assess it or attack it, from that point on, you will -always- recognize yompars as being yompars. That's how they'll show up for you in the game. The big scaly yompar is here, boinking a durrit.

5. Cooking sucks. You'll get better. Unless you're just a lousy cook. In that case, meet someone who cooks better than you do. Not everyone can be good with the grill. Personally I feel rangers should be the -best- cooks, better than house servants or guild_merchants. Merchants and servants don't spend much time building campfires afterall. Since we're not dealing with electric stoves or gas ovens or microwaves, but rather, woodburning stoves and campfires, it just makes more sense to me that outdoorsy people would have a far superior talent for cooking than city-based people.

6. Renting mounts: I thought it was in the help file, no? If not, it should be. ALSO - something to note for all noobs: You cannot give sids to someone else, WHILE you are both in a stable that has coded stablehands. You -must- step 1 room away, or the stablehand will keep telling you that you don't have a ticket, or that they don't see your mount, or whatever. This is also true in tailor shops and anywhere else where an NPC delivers a ticket to you in exchange for something else. It's a code quirk.

7. As an aside to #6: another thing to note: any time an NPC merchant is in the same room as an NPC tattoo merchant, you will -not- be able to interact with the NPC merchant. The tattoo guy will always default. Even trying "list 2.merchant" won't work. Another code quirk.

8. New character starting - I think you can emote in the hall of kings. You just can't target the NPCs there. You can check your inventory, stats, skills, score, and talk. I think you can sit and rest too. If you can't emote in the hall of kings, I think that ability should be added to the room.

9. It's been a long-ass time but as far as I know, DIKU comes with a subroutine that keeps track of all attempts to access a help file. If a helpfile doesn't exist for what someone is trying to find, it notates it in the log. "So and so just typed help booger. This help file does not exist." Like that. It might be OLC that does it. I was never a coder but had IMM access to a few games in the past and definitely remember seeing those messages pop up whenever someone sent a non-existing "help" into the game.

[Archbaron]

Animals:
Some have their type in their description "A Tandu is blah blah here" vs. "A short green wooly thing grins here". The latter would send me scrambling to find the correct description on the Animal list from the Armageddon website. I don't know if this is by design or not but it sure is scary to see something new and not know if you should be running (happened with a raptor I believe - while I was looking it up I got attacked).

In my experience, looking at the animal and viewing the sdesc appended to their description has their name. What you see in the room is their custom ldesc like what some NPCs have in cities.

[jmordetsky]

Mirror for emoting is a great idea.

Lower Bucket is the syntax in Luirs to get the water. Basically buy your water, then "lower bucket" (I think if it's not that it's something close), then raise bucket to get the bucket back. You can then fill your skin from the bucket. (If that's a spoiler, well then doc me karma, because it's stupid).

[aruna]

Mirror for emoting is a great idea.

[Zoltan]

Lower Bucket is the syntax in Luirs to get the water. Basically buy your water, then "lower bucket" (I think if it's not that it's something close), then raise bucket to get the bucket back. You can then fill your skin from the bucket. (If that's a spoiler, well then doc me karma, because it's stupid).

I would have never, ever figured that out on my own. Thank you. I'm looking forward to 2.Arm where all the syntax will be more coherent.

[brytta.leofa]

8. New character starting - I think you can emote in the hall of kings. You just can't target the NPCs there. You can check your inventory, stats, skills, score, and talk.

You can indeed, but sometimes folks get grumpy about it.                                           

[Zhaira]

Didn't John create an emote tool once that allowed you to experiment with emote syntax? Where'd that go?

[HTX]

Didn't John create an emote tool once that allowed you to experiment with emote syntax? Where'd that go?

If I remember right... it died years ago. I'm pretty sure that I remember stumbling upon it when I was a complete noob (4+ years ago?) and was disappointed to find it was shut down.