Player Created Restrings

[Once]

This is specific to the conversation happening in the "Immortals" thread in Suggestions. Players (and imms) please make your votes. Please note that even if we get a majority of ayes, if there are strong arguments against it that hold water with the staff we may still opt not to implement this but I thought it was worth taking a vote.


-Once

[Riley]

If you haven't guessed by now I'm a strong advocate to anything that will help promote Role-Playing, and character uniqueness.  And also relieving the imms of monotonous work, when they have better things that they could be doing to make the mud better.

[Kvetch]

Just posted about this in the other thread, but basically, sure, if it can be written to a file to be checked on like the typo and bug file.  I don't want to go months down the line, fine something that definately shouldn't be being used at recall, and be told "but so and so has something just like it and has used it.. why do I always get the shaft?"  or "but I've had it for months and no-one's said anything about it..."  I"m all for letting players make as many things as they can/want and I'll even volunteer to be the bad cop on it.  *hehe*  Provided of course I can get into the page that has all those neat little files.

[Tor]

Kvetch as the bad cop... Still sounds okay.

[Prometheus]

Not sure about this so I'm ambivalent right now.

Prometheus

[Molly]

Two things:
First:
We've discussed allowing restrings on all types of objects several times before, (including artifacts and objects that aren't allowed to be perzed).
For some reasons, a handful of players and imms were so vehemently against this in the past, that we dropped the idea.

Personally I never had anything against it, and I never understood the motives of those that opposed it. But if I remember right, they thought that it would downgrade the 'real' perzes, and make them worth so little that nobody would want to pay the price for them. Which sounds like a really petty argument to me. Why would that matter to anyone? Making perzes is a pain in the ass anyhow, and I long ago hoisted that dreary task over to other unfortunate imms...

And as Kvetch already pointed out somewhere - perzes can be restored, because they are individual objects. Restrings go poof forever when you lose them. That's really what you pay tokens for, not the changed desc.
However, if any of those that were so much against it in the past are still active here, now is the time to speak up and explain WHY you were against it.
Or in other words; Speak now or forever be silent.

Second:
Allowing anyone to restring, even through a 'machine' is yet another matter, for my usual reasons; the overall quality of the game and the potentially ill-shaped stuff that might ensue.
However, I talked to Xeriuth about this last night, and he suggested that we'd only allow any of the categories Helper, RoleplayLeader or Hero to use the machine. And also to have the option to actually disallow someone who abuses the machine by creating stuff that contains obscenities or 'personal attacks', i.e. using the name of another player or imm in an appropriate way.

But perhaps Kvetch's solution of having a log of the restrings is even better. Then anyone could use it, until they abuse it and lose their privilege.

In conclusion: I'm not against this, I just want some checks against misguided creativity.

And why the hell is this discussion on two different threads?

[Once]

And why the hell is this discussion on two different threads?

Two reasons:

1) So we could take a vote as the original post wasn't a poll.

and

2) So we wouldn't distract so much from Jaros's original, well thought out post on eliminating the need for immortals in so many systems.


Even if this is not a system that we should allow players access to, there's probably several other things (such as marriage) that we could save imm time by opening up to the players, and create interesting and unique gameplay opportunities. I'd like us to think on that, but I also saw a bit of a "holy war" brewing here with regards to restrings .

[Jaros]

Thanks Once.

I might post this in both threads, but I'd just like to re-iterate that in general, PEOPLE REALLY LIKE CUSTOMIZING THINGS.

Why do people perz things?

Why do people build unnecessarily large houses?

Why do people invest months, sometimes years into building huge and complex zones?

Because people like expressing themselves and leaving a mark on the world, even if it's just the 4D world.  That's also why people care about the Hall of Fame statues.

The easier we can make it for people to create things the more popular this game will be.  It already has an advantage in that it's text-based, so basically if you can read and write you already have the skills to make anything you want.

I'm not saying we should compromise all our beautifully built zones, but we can do other things.

[Calypso]

After reading Horus's exhausting post about how player induced changes can truly affect the mud negatively, I would like to know if this idea would end up creating the same problems he spoke of concerning  social shops. Barring that, the idea sounds really cool! I would love to be able to restring my own equipment and not have to wait on an imm. Everyone is busy and restrings kind of fall on the bottom of priority lists, if it makes the list at all; understandably. Would be nice to be able to do it on my own time table.

Though I don't think it worth slowing the mud down or causing a ton of bugs.

Waiting on response before voting.

[Once]

Unlikely. The #1 rule in programming is to sanitize your user inputs. Players should never be allowed to create file structure problems as anything that they can do that would cause them should be limited in the string handling code. This is pretty much standard for web work, and should be pretty standard for desktop too.

Just to give you an idea, if outputs weren't sanitized on these forums I could do something like this:

http://xkcd.com/327/

[Calypso]

~snicker~

[Kvetch]

I'm sorry, Loria, you had restrings that I didn't do?  Sometimes you have to pester me.  Also note this though, if you need something by Y day, don't give it to me the day before or - horros - hours before because I do have a full time job.  Or maybe your name just has to be Riley to make me jump through hoops to get restrings done that fast.  Or Kitolani...  Now that my phone is set up to receive mail from my 4DCati account, emailing that account should work as well as noting me on the mud.

[Calypso]

I'm sorry, Loria, you had restrings that I didn't do?  Sometimes you have to pester me.  Also note this though, if you need something by Y day, don't give it to me the day before or - horros - hours before because I do have a full time job.  Or maybe your name just has to be Riley to make me jump through hoops to get restrings done that fast.  Or Kitolani...  Now that my phone is set up to receive mail from my 4DCati account, emailing that account should work as well as noting me on the mud.

No not at all. You did great. Thank you!

[Xeriuth]

So it's the 18th, what's the verdict?

[Molly]

I'm still ambivalent, but if you can guarantee that it doesn't affect other aspects of the code negatively, I'll reluctantly concede.

I still think that some jerk will abuse it sooner or later, because historically that always happens, whenever we let player creativity loose. Personally I'm not all that fussy about bad language, but I know other imms that are. And playing Mud Police is the task I like less than anything else.

If this is all about relieveing imms of some boring work, fine - but if it results in the Staff having to monitor stuff to ensure that overly sensitive players don't get offended, it doesn't really relieve us of work, it just creates another and more annoying aspect of it. I know that Kvetch volunteered to be the 'bad cop' here, but she might not stay with us forever, or she might not realise what she volunteered for, and tire of the task eventually. And in the end I'm the one that everyone comes whining to.

So put in some checks against the most obvious words, and also a system that can easily ban whoever abuses the machine from further access to it, or I might change my ambivalent vote to a no.