How Best to Implement a Notify/Mail System?

[MeTekillot]

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>delirium

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>lord templar is gonna kill you don't log in until we can squad up!!!!

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[Delirium]

Whether it's a user-generated nickname or an autogenerated string, I'd rather the mudmail system be anonymous. I don't want to know who's playing who, at least until well after both of us are stored or dead. It isn't an either/or, you can have in-game messengers, sure, but that doesn't solve the issue that is creating the need for a messaging system that is both conveniently within the game and able to be supervised by staff. Most of the time I need to contact someone it is because I want to set up playtimes, inform them of breaks I'm taking from the game (aka, I am not dead, I am just not playing), or inform them (or be informed) of storage, so that they can continue their story without wondering forever whether I'm dead, alive but not playing, or have become part of the virtual backdrop and no longer a played PC.

It's immensely unfair to players who had heavily invested plots or storylines to be unable to resolve them due to this weird veil of secrecy around storages and absences from a game. It creates an artificial and unhealthy need to log in constantly to search for this person that may never be found. If they are playing dead and keeping barrier up (or using other less known methods), mudmail does not interfere with that. It's an OOC tool that can be answered or ignored at the player's convenience, but would vastly help in the situations where players DO need to communicate but have no means of getting in touch save through the game (which they may not be logged into) or through staff requests (who have stated that they do not wish to be used as intermediaries for these types of requests and such requests will be denied).

This is. A. Game. Get with the fact that most of your players are going to prioritize their real life time if they're playing this game in a healthy fashion, and they shouldn't be forced to stay logged in for 8-10 hour stretches to try and find someone (guilty of doing so in the past to try and find certain PCs, which only led to burnout and frustration). With the ability to coordinate playtimes (but NOT IC INFORMATION) we'd be logging in MORE frequently, rather than just not logging in at all due to frustration and burnout.

Better yet, since we'd be logging in to almost-guaranteed interaction, we'd more likely to be invested in sticking around and playing the game more because we're getting somewhere with our stories. We'd be less likely to just drift away because our PC's friends aren't contactable and we have no way of knowing that they just shifted to a different playtime that we could totally be around for if we knew. We'd be less likely to get frustrated with "okay is the person I literally trust with my life and live with dead or just not logging in" because we'd be alerted that they had to stop playing for a couple weeks due to RL.

Let us communicate these things, and stop forcing players to either be unable to communicate those things because they either don't want to reveal who they are, or they only want to selectively alert specific people but they don't know who those people are OOC (and don't WANT to know), etc etc.

The way things are now ENCOURAGES people to communicate through OOC channels and know exactly who they're playing with (i.e., discord, messenger) and puts those who would rather remain anonymous at a disadvantage. Trust me, there are solid reasons for wanting to remain anonymous. It's also rather unfair to players that staff can easily know these things with their mortal PCs, but non-staff cannot.

[MeTekillot]

Sure, make it pseudoanonymous. Better yet, let people change their username as they please, to facilitate characters changing or hiding their identities. They can disclose their pingmail name in rumor posts and in-character interaction via use of the OOC command.

[Malken]

Congrats! You've made this great idea so complicated by now that it's never going to happen.

[Delirium]

How is it complicated? Re-introduce mudmail (which already exists) but allow anonymity by letting players assign their own names or automatically generating a name, like the keyword system. Disallow usernames/mudmail names that are already in use. Keep any mudmail sent/received on pfile. Make the rules of usage clear. Yeah it'd be work upfront but it'd be valuable to the game and its aging & quite frankly dwindling playerbase, and it'd mean that staff doesn't have to be go-betweens for these sorts of things.

[stoicreader]

Psionicists should be able to browse messages hanging in the pending delivery ether.

Genius!

[Malken]

How is it complicated? Re-introduce mudmail (which already exists) but allow anonymity by letting players assign their own names or automatically generating a name, like the keyword system. Disallow usernames/mudmail names that are already in use. Keep any mudmail sent/received on pfile. Make the rules of usage clear. Yeah it'd be work upfront but it'd be valuable to the game and its aging & quite frankly dwindling playerbase, and it'd mean that staff doesn't have to be go-betweens for these sorts of things.

Yours isn't complicated. Others have a problem with leaving it at just that.

[Delirium]

What if the system is geared for leadership roles only? For them to get and send little pokes?

That completely removes the intended ability to facilitate communication between non-clanned PCs.

[Gentleboy]

What if the system is geared for leadership roles only? For them to get and send little pokes?

That completely removes the intended ability to facilitate communication between non-clanned PCs.

Non-clanned PCS who live in the wilderness should have a hard time contacting people in the city unless they ride there and hit up like.. a notify pc. That's just an opinion I just made, right now. What do you all think about that? Should PCs in the wilderness who want to be removed have to travel to Cities in order to message people there? And vice versa? Send a courier of type? Sometimes I wish we could all read. Letters would be so cool.

[Malken]

What if the system is geared for leadership roles only? For them to get and send little pokes?

That completely removes the intended ability to facilitate communication between non-clanned PCs.

Non-clanned PCS who live in the wilderness should have a hard time contacting people in the city unless they ride there and hit up like.. a notify pc. That's just an opinion I just made, right now. What do you all think about that? Should PCs in the wilderness who want to be removed have to travel to Cities in order to message people there? And vice versa? Send a courier of type? Sometimes I wish we could all read. Letters would be so cool.

Remote people can still way just as easily as anyone else. I thought the point of mudmail was to pretend that you could reach someone else but the problem is that they don't log when you do, not so much the distance between you two.

[Gentleboy]

What if the system is geared for leadership roles only? For them to get and send little pokes?

That completely removes the intended ability to facilitate communication between non-clanned PCs.

Non-clanned PCS who live in the wilderness should have a hard time contacting people in the city unless they ride there and hit up like.. a notify pc. That's just an opinion I just made, right now. What do you all think about that? Should PCs in the wilderness who want to be removed have to travel to Cities in order to message people there? And vice versa? Send a courier of type? Sometimes I wish we could all read. Letters would be so cool.

Remote people can still way just as easily as anyone else. I thought the point of mudmail was to pretend that you could reach someone else but the problem is that they don't log when you do, not so much the distance between you two.

True! True! I forgot about that. It's not just to meet in person.

[whengravityfails]

How is it complicated? Re-introduce mudmail (which already exists) but allow anonymity by letting players assign their own names or automatically generating a name, like the keyword system. Disallow usernames/mudmail names that are already in use. Keep any mudmail sent/received on pfile. Make the rules of usage clear. Yeah it'd be work upfront but it'd be valuable to the game and its aging & quite frankly dwindling playerbase, and it'd mean that staff doesn't have to be go-betweens for these sorts of things.

Of all of the proposed solutions this one seems to strike the right balance between OOC/IC needs and compromise.