The Changes to the Library Interface and Why They Make Me Sad

Moi

Firstly, to get it out of the way:

I understand that changes to the library interface are needed, and I accept the (apparently lag-based) reasoning for switching over to only displaying 15 results at a time. I'm not going to argue against that change, as I understand that fighting lag for the whole game is more important than making a tiny part of it more convenient. Please don't take this post as a rant about why you should revert all the changes to the library system, or why all of the changes are bad. Some of the changes are legitimate improvements, and just because I haven't gone into as much depth on them doesn't mean I don't like them.

With that out of the way, let's get to the problems:

Let's start with an example:

******************************[ Matching Titles ]******************************
Book Type Access Author Title
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
8 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus The History of the Elder Wars
14 SCH Public*** Akashic Ipsissimus A Celestine's Guide to the Supernal
18 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus Flaws of the Old Celestine Empire
19 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus Isune, Wings of Compassion
20 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus A Discourse on Merian Respiration
21 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus Celest and Its Guilds - Ideals and
22 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus A Fire Affinity
23 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus The Powers of Water
24 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus The Celestines
25 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus The Aquamancer's Connection to Lord
26 LIT Public* Akashic Ipsissimus Of Astrologers and Gorgogs
27 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus The Ethereal Plane
28 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus Kinds of Gods
29 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus A Comparison of the Celestines and
30 SCH Public* Akashic Ipsissimus The Positive Outcomes of Project Co
*******************************************************************************
*Published
**Prestige *[*]Prestige (In Review)
***Prestige Winner
To continue browsing, enter BROWSE PUBLISHER CELEST 31

This first page of results BROWSE PUBLISHER CELEST in Celest's library. A command I use once or twice a month to get a list of books Celest has published so that I can pick that round's prestige submissions.

The number you enter to get the next page should be less random
Currently, the number you enter to get the next page, ie. BROWSE PUBLISHER CELEST 31, is based on the catalogue number for a book. And those catalogue numbers are handed out in the order the book gets archived in a specific library. They don't go linearly and indeed, don't have any real pattern at all. Page two wants 31 to read it. Page three wants 436. Page four wants. 674. Page five is 972. That's ridiculous, and the game would be greatly improved if entering BROWSE PUBLISHER CELEST 50 gave you the 50th book published by Celest through the 65th book published by Celest instead.

Full titles for authors makes it hard to read author names
Notice how it says "Akashic Ipsissimus" for the author there? That's the first bit of the author's title. You can't even find out who the author is here by looking under the author listing. That should be fixed.

The author column takes up too much screen space
18 characters is 22% of the 80 characters wide that the library screen is long. The longest allowed character name is 12 characters long and the average name is less than half of that. I think that most people trying to find something in the library would rather have the extra 6 to 12 characters of book title than read character titles or avoid having author names truncated.

Full titles for authors makes searching by author difficult
This problem requires a different example:

******************************[ Matching Titles ]******************************
Book Type Access Author Title
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
339 SCH Public* The Righteous Gran The Adventurer's Guide to the Astra
435 LIT Public* The Righteous Gran Celestian Poetry, Volume 1
467 LIT Public* The Righteous Gran Celestian Poetry, Volume 2
578 SCH Public* The Righteous Gran The Constitution and Covenant of Pr
615 LIT Public* The Righteous Gran Bards of New Celest: Volume I
1208 SCH Public* The Righteous Prin Ministry of the Lodestar Athenaeum
1224 SCH Public* The Righteous Gran The Celestian Covenant, 151 CoE Edi
1239 LIT Public* Nyla, the Celestia Call to the Misty Waters
1406 LIT Public* The Righteous Gran Poetry for Estarra's Sphere
1661 SCH Public* The Righteous Gran Origins of the Angel War
2034 LIT Public* Postulant Lysanias Finding True Wisdom: A sermon on di
4580 LIT Public* The Righteous Prin Brilliance: Volume 1
4937 LIT Public* The Righteous Prin Song Competition 9th Estar 233 CE-
6358 LIT Public* Hope's Defender, A No road is too long, A story of com
7006 LIT Public* Professor Rachael A Haunted House
*******************************************************************************
*Published
**Prestige *[*]Prestige (In Review)
***Prestige Winner
To continue browsing, enter BROWSE AUTHOR CELEST 7007

That's the first page for BROWSE AUTHOR CELEST. Notice how you have four different people who are not the city of Celest listed as being Celest? That's because they have the word "Celest" somewhere in their title. You get a similar issue when a character's name is in someone else's title, ala Squire Peabody, Ward of Arthur. Gods help us if someone ever decides to make a character named "Ian"

Type and Access should not be separate columns
It would save eight whole characters of screen space if we switched from "SCH Public*" to a letter code like "SPP" as the listing. That's 10% more room for useful information! The first letter is either S or L for Scholarly or Literary. The second letter is P, S or R for Public, Secret or Restricted respectively. And the third letter is P, E, W or R for Published, contest Entry, contest Winner or contest Review.

Tacita

I have suggested elsewhere before but will reiterate that I think that BROWSE should list things from newest to oldest, not the other way round. It would save an awful lot of the MOREing that goes on.

Siam

Tacita said:

I have suggested elsewhere before but will reiterate that I think that BROWSE should list things from newest to oldest, not the other way round. It would save an awful lot of the MOREing that goes on.

THIS. PLEASE.

Moi

Yes please. I hadn't thought of that before, but it really would be a huge improvement.

Rialorm

The title thing is so absurd. Just a name will do for an author. Nobody cares what they title themselves at, it's just not relevant for books. All these are solid points though and seem easy enough to change. Please make this a thing

Kalnid

I really like the concept of letter codes in particular, haven't seen that before. What I would like to see is an additional search modifier specifically for prestige, BROWSE PRESTIGE <NONE|SUBMITTED|LOST|WON> or the like.

One particular note about the authors: I suspect that it's the same issue that tags have, which is that the field is stored as a single text string which is then tested against on searches. This makes the wrong author problem pop up, as well as breaking searching multiple subjects: LIT_MAG STORY will give a different set of results from STORY LIT_MAG. That's not such a crucial issue, though.

Portius

I agree with everything thus far, and would like to add that I miss being able to see the total number of books a person has written without counting them myself. I might be the only person who cares about this, though.

Solution for this is to add a new command, AUTHOR PROFILE <WHOEVER> that gives the number of books they've published, the number of prestige wins, and if possible the number of their books that are still contributing to the library score. These are some of the things I look at when I'm picking prestige submissions if I have a choice between multiple active authors, and this would make doing so easier.

Iorwen

Tacita said:

I have suggested elsewhere before but will reiterate that I think that BROWSE should list things from newest to oldest, not the other way round. It would save an awful lot of the MOREing that goes on.

Yes, please!