New Achivements and Title - idea

[Leonardo]

Earn your TITLE idea.
 
I never liked the way the TITLE feature is handled in 4D and most muds. I always wished to see a clean and nice who list which rarely happened and I was the happiest man in the world when the NOBAT command hit the code so I can clean the WHO list and never see again those annoying, colourful and sometimes stupid titles. What I propose here is a new way to handle the TITLE command and add a bit of spice to the mud.
 
First of all adding an achievement feature, where people can compete in fulfilling the achievements requirement for a reward.
 
Typing the command title would look like this:
100000H 10686M 12359V (100) 6,083,053,756TNL> title
01-:   mythical Centaur of old Greece.
02-:   Wrath of the 4 Lands.
03-:   Dragon Slayer.
04-:   Knight of the Month Champion.
05-:   expert Fisherman.
 
100000H 10686M 12359V (100) 6,083,053,756TNL> title 02
You are now: Molly, wrath of the 4 Lands.
 
You have earned these 5 titles, the #1 is your Race default, a class default could be added too.
#2 title you earn it by completing all the quests in the Egypt zones
#3 title you earn it by killing the Green Dragon in less than 3minutes since you engage the fight without dieing.
#4 title you earn by winning a KOTM.
#5 title you earn by winning a fishing contest.
*These are just examples, the titles are up to the builders creativity to write and have them assigned through special requirements that could be checking the player Quest Flags or if he has a special object or many objects, etc.. etc..
  
The will be a room in recall area called: The Achievements Room
Just by walking there you’ll get a message saying if you earned any achievements, also in the room will be a detailed list of the Achievements and how to obtain them. The achievements reward will not be specified so you gotta do the achievement to find out what’s there for you, you can always ask other players that already completed the achievement for info anyway. Most achievements will give you a special TITLE you can use and probably a reward.
 
To summarize we get 2 new interesting features:
Achievements
TITLE lock – achievement based use of title.

 
 

[Molly]

This is an idea that I almost unreservedly like - titles that are based on real achievements, no just the player's bloated ego.

Most of the titles would be based on quests or groups of quests that the players had completed, using the already existing questflags.
For instance 'Mythical Hero of ancient Greece' could need completing a number of quests in Greece and the Aegean Islands, 'Wrath of the four Lands' could include all the main quests in Upper and Lower Egypt, Kush and Punt etc..
Or maybe Punt and the Islands should have their own title, those are some of the decisions we need to make.

If anyone manages to achieve all available titles, there should be a special title for that too.

Generally the choice of what title to use and the wording of the title would be left to the Builders of the zones involved. Feel free to suggest more titles (requirement and wording) on this thread.

Since obviously some titles would be a lot harder than others to achieve, the status of each title would vary considerably, and some of them would have high bragging value.
New players could start with the easier ones, and work their way up in the bragging value.
A player could only use one title at a time, but could switch between them as often as they wanted.

The Achievement room would be placed in the Hall of Fame, explaining what achievement you need to fulfil to earn each title, and with a script to start the feature on whoever walks in.

Some reservations:
I don't think the Dragon Slayer requirement is realistic, we'd had to settle for anyone who killed the Greenie - i.e. has the flag to wear the scaled legs.

The KOTM and Fisherman title would have to be set manually, based on a name list, which is a bit of a pain, unless there is a simple way to put some kind of flag on the winners for the future. I like the idea of including achievements like this in the title list too however. Perhaps we should add a title option for Boba Winners and Gojira Slayers as well, but we have to restrict the total number of titles to something reasonable.

The default titles, when you haven't earned any, would be very simple and set by the player's Class or race, for instance Molly the thief, Molly the faun, or Molly the Great Master. Not all players are going to like this obviously.

But as a bonus, we wouldn't have to endure sights at recall like 'Muffet thinks Iron Maiden is the best band ever is standing here'.
(No offence intended to Iron Maiden, it's just an example).

[Kvetch]

I guess my own real reservation to this would be the fact that you'll have so many people running around that look the same - because of the titles.  Before you get any acheivements the list would look like this:

Molly is a thief
Kvetch is a ranger
Hesara is a thief
Horus is a gypsy

(which, btw: all of this is found in the who list before the names)

And when one person gets an acheivement
Molly is a thief
Kvetch is a ranger
Hesara wrath of the 4 lands
Horus is a gypsy

Still not much difference.  If the achievements are going to be semi-difficult to get (ie: you have to complete ALL the quests in egypt) then the who list is going to look extremely bland.

Also, this would only benefit those that can quest well, of which I am not one - unless you can think of a way to have titles for those hack -n- slashers out there.

[Leonardo]

I guess my own real reservation to this would be the fact that you'll have so many people running around that look the same - because of the titles.  Before you get any acheivements the list would look like this:

Molly is a thief
Kvetch is a ranger
Hesara is a thief
Horus is a gypsy

(which, btw: all of this is found in the who list before the names)

And when one person gets an acheivement
Molly is a thief
Kvetch is a ranger
Hesara wrath of the 4 lands
Horus is a gypsy

Still not much difference.  If the achievements are going to be semi-difficult to get (ie: you have to complete ALL the quests in egypt) then the who list is going to look extremely bland.

Also, this would only benefit those that can quest well, of which I am not one - unless you can think of a way to have titles for those hack -n- slashers out there.

Of course there will be Guidelines for the TITLES; Kvetch is a ranger. Is not something I'd call a nice Title. After the change every player name will have a comma after the name and you have to make a title keeping that comma in consideration. Kvetch, is a ranger. Also you have to keep in consideration the LOOK view of the player i.e. Kvetch, is a ranger is standing here. Doesn't look very nice and neither does look English. Kvetch, the wild Ranger is standing here. Looks more appropriate.

Not all the achievements will be difficult to get, there will be achievements even for Newbie zones. i.e. Kvetch, king of the Mudschool. :-P

Also you are a builder with 2 or more zones on the profile, so think out some achievements for your zone.

I hope Achievements will make people leave recall to achieve some, stimulating people like you to go quest. Also most of our playerbase has already completed many of the mud quests, so just by joining The Achievement Room they'll already be getting some of the achievements as complete because the flags are there on their pfiles.

Also that won't be a problem for you because Imms can still set their title manually to whatever they want, being staff it's expected they have the common sense to manually set titles that comply to the titles guidelines.

[Leonardo]

The DG_Script command could be something like this:

if %actor.is_pc%
      %addtitle(wrath of the four Lands)% %actor% *Notice I added no punctuation since it's code handled depending on the situation where the title will be displayed.
end

On who list will look:
[4 47 Cen Thi PK RP M]  Lionheart, wrath of the four Lands. (Sicilians) (HERO) (Fearless) *Notice the code added DOT at the end of the TITLE on who list.

On look:
Lionheart, wrath of the four Lands is standing here. *Notice the DOT is not present after the title END to let the sentence complete using the position of the player adding a DOT at the end of that.

When builders assign a title by script they must not dot end their title since the code will do that automatically depending on the occasion the title is displayed.

The titles will be added one after another making a list, the number will be in chronological ie. 01 Reserved for race, 02 reserved for Class, 03 first title you earned, 03 second title you earned, 09 last title you earned. The list can go up to 99 using page breaks.

Players may set their titles typing: title number_of_desired_titlte_to_display

[Kvetch]

I'm going to use one of Molly's old standby when it requires a lot of work... do you realize how much work it's going to be to go in and get all of the questflags for the zones and then build titles based off completeing some/all of those quests?  BTW: seeing as she likes this idea, I'm going to reiterate something I've asked for before where I got an answer close to what I just gave.  If we're going to go into the quests to get these flags for titles... can't we finally come up with a questlog/questflag/questroom that lets people figure out what quests they've done and possibly how far into a quest they are?  I mean, we may as well kill two birds with one stone... right?

[Leonardo]

I'm going to use one of Molly's old standby when it requires a lot of work... do you realize how much work it's going to be to go in and get all of the questflags for the zones and then build titles based off completeing some/all of those quests?  BTW: seeing as she likes this idea, I'm going to reiterate something I've asked for before where I got an answer close to what I just gave.  If we're going to go into the quests to get these flags for titles... can't we finally come up with a questlog/questflag/questroom that lets people figure out what quests they've done and possibly how far into a quest they are?  I mean, we may as well kill two birds with one stone... right?

To do something like that, you need first of all set a STANDARD for FLAGS remoted to players. i.e. if your zone name is The NightDragon Realms you're allowed to remote flags that start with: TNDR_quest1, TNDR_canwearitem, TNDR_whatever. If a Builder takes consideration of this and assign flags using a zone-name criteria, I can easily come up with a script that does what you're asking for. Probably even a zone completness level bar.

The NightDragon Realms [########>----------] (50%)
The Valley Of The Kings [##>----------------] (10%)

It'll be a single small script with a command that shows these thing, and then trig files for every zone with variables the builder has to fill with his zone quest flags, the script tracks these files checks the flags on the player and shows the zone name and the completness bar.

It's a nice idea Kvetch, I'd like a feature like this. I can build the script if you're willing to make a list of all your zone Quest Flags even if they don't have a zone name criteria. All I need a room vnum and 2 trigger vnums in Recall Area zone or a new zone with a room that links to recall area.

For future building use your zone name acronym in front of every flag you make, that way you just do a simple 'tsearch TNDR' and get a list of all the flags in your zone.

[Kvetch]

Umm.. yeah, if we from this day forward do that, it'd be easy to do.  But what about the older zones?  There's so many that's why it becomes a problem because no-one ever had to make their flags make any connection to their zones.  Let me list some examples from vstating players:

 reflection1:                     1
 repellent:                     1
 mulmoki:                     1
 aarelius:                     1
 mirror_1:                     1
 bellehelp:                     1
 levernum:                     7
 mariel:                     1
 bigtail:                     1
 mirro_2:                     1
 thetis:                     1
 done_birds_tasks:                     1

Personally, I don't know what ANY of those flags go to - zone or what not.

[Leonardo]

Umm.. yeah, if we from this day forward do that, it'd be easy to do.  But what about the older zones?  There's so many that's why it becomes a problem because no-one ever had to make their flags make any connection to their zones.  Let me list some examples from vstating players:

 reflection1:                     1
 repellent:                     1
 mulmoki:                     1
 aarelius:                     1
 mirror_1:                     1
 bellehelp:                     1
 levernum:                     7
 mariel:                     1
 bigtail:                     1
 mirro_2:                     1
 thetis:                     1
 done_birds_tasks:                     1

Personally, I don't know what ANY of those flags go to - zone or what not.

That's bad building, if you use a zone flag criteria, it would have been very easy to identify from where the flags come from.
You can still do that though using this strategy:
tsearch body reflection1
you'll get an output with all the triggers that contain string 'reflection1'
once you see the trigger vnum, usually the zone has the same vnum.
i.e. if reflection1 word is contained in trigger 4560, most probably the zone is 45.

[kitolani]

Hrm. I don't know if I like the idea. It seems that we're planning on putting code in the place of good old fashion imagination. Coming from someone that has probably had some pretty obnoxious titles, I can see where you'd want to have some sort of regulation. However, it could quite possibly be a simple matter of an imm typing 'tell (player) Change your title, blowhard.' It's your right to regulate titles, so if you want to code a bunch of stuff to fix the problem, g'head. I do like the idea of having a list of achievments, but feel pretty badly for the poor sap that has to code all that stuff in.

[Molly]

Well, I for one still like the idea.

Mainly because it would provide players with an opportunity to brag about something that they really achieved in the Mud, and not just how grand they are in their own imagination. And since the titles also would be based on real quest flags, the achievement would be confirmed.

I must confess that initially I was also temped by the opportunity to get rid of some of the more silly titles that players set on themselves. Mainly the ones that have a bad syntax, which make them look silly when looked on. It seems many players only care about the wholist when they set their title, and don't realise that the title also shows in their long desc.

For instance a title like 'Molly is really tired of silly titles' might look OK in the WHO-list.
But 'Molly is really tired of silly titles is standing here.' looks just stupid in the room.

I am less worried by the 'obnoxious' titles. If players want to make themselves look like jerks, that's their problem. Just don't expect the staff to clean those up, because we have better things to do with our time. Most of us probably use the nobat flag to avoid them too.

Anyhow, back to the Achievement idea, which I still like. But who am I to put a curb on people's imagination?

So how about we do it this way: - (provided of course that Horus can code it, but since he says he can code anything, that shouldn't be a problem).

1. The Achivement titles, based on Quest flags, would still be available in the Achivement room, and would have a specific colour to separate them from 'ordinary' titles.

2. Players would still be able to set their own titles freely, but would be blocked from using any Achievement title that they don't have the flags for - they would in fact be blocked from even using the Achievement colour.

3. There would be less Achievement titles than in the original suggestion, because we don't have the same need to provide diversity. On the other hand, the titles provided would all carry some real weight. Perhaps a choice between around 10 titles, all demanding a considerable effort to earn.

Would you like that better? It should satisfy both directions - the ones who want creativity and variation, and the ones who want a way to flaunt their real achievements.

And I guess I'd have to live with the 'silly' titles. After all, we do have a flag to turn them off.

[kitolani]

Quoting Molly:
"I must confess that initially I was also temped by the opportunity to get rid of some of the more silly titles that players set on themselves. Mainly the ones that have a bad syntax, which make them look silly when looked on. It seems many players only care about the wholist when they set their title, and don't realise that the title also shows in their long desc."

Yes. That bothers me as well, and making it poof would be great for my OCD.
*looks for a smirk smiley to no avail*
If you need help brainstorming different titles for achievements, I'd be glad to lend a hand.

[Molly]

Quoting Molly:

If you need help brainstorming different titles for achievements, I'd be glad to lend a hand.

Definitely.
And if someone else has ideas, please feel free to contribute, I might even pay some tokens for the best suggestions.
Also, if anyone thinks we should add more Achivements, feel free to suggest.

Some of the Achievement on my preliminary list just involve killing tough mobs, but most of them are from traditional Questing, and pretty tough quests at that. These titles should really need some effort, in order to get bragging value.

Here is a list of what I primarily had in mind as requirement for some different titles:

PREHISTORIC:
1. Terror of the Three Territories: Complete the Isis Quest, Seti's tomb and a main quest in Hatshepsut's temple (three Egypt zones)
2. Island Trader: Complete the three main quests on the Aegean Islands (the Mystery of Lebinthos, the abducted bride on Samos and the Rebels on Tenedos)
3. Ancient Hero:  (completing 5 different Quests on the Greek Mainland and Crete, including 10 of the Deeds of Heracles)
4. Helper of the Dead: (completing the main Hades Quest also needs completing the Thetis and Odyssey Quests first)

MEDIEVAL
1. Bravo for Hire: Complete at least three of the quests in Fenizia. (I might also include the Bravo Quests, which would make it even harder)
2. Helper of the Innocent: (Rescue Prince Josua in Hayholt City, the Virgin from the Temple of the Damned, + 'The wounded Unicorn' and 'Protection of the Angels' from Enchanted Lands)
3. Dragon Slayer (Kill the Greenie, the toughest Dragon on Dragon Island and the Dragon Queen in The Dragon Caves)

OLD WEST
I would have liked to have one title for Outlaw types and another for Lawmen types. Possibly also a third for those who mainly sympathise with the Indians, but I am not sure if we have enough quests that set flags here - (we probably need to work a bit on that first).

For now I can only think of the following quests in Old West:
   
1. Have Gun will Travel: Chief Arapahoola's Snake Elixir + the two main Llano Estacado Quests
2. Cowboy for hire: (Kill Farmer Joe's prize bull and help 'The Lovers of the Range')
3. Golddigger: (rescue the trapped miner in the Goldmine + the Goldmine Quests in the Sutter Fort)

FUTURE
1. Planet Earth Ambassador: Complete the Diplomat Quest in the Alpha centauri system (basically this also means completing all the bigger quests on the Alpha Planets)
2. Space Cadet: The Best of the Best Quest (Application for the Roger Young Space Cadets, which basically needs full knowledge of all Future zones)
3. Jolly Swagman (The Rainbow Serpent, The Three Sisters, and the Mardi Gras quest, possibly also Crocodile Dundee)
4. Monster Slayer (Kill the Gojira, the Voltron and the Sarlacc)

NEWBIE ZONES
1. Academy Graduate: (Finish the Quest Academy)
2. Promising Newcomer: (Finish all the newbie quests that set flags, probably one in each Dimension, + one in the Newbie Arena)

OTHER POSSIBLE ACHIEVEMENTS
1. KOTY Winner
2. Fisherman of the Year
3. Boba Award Winner