Ease of Use Requests

Moi

What this is:
-A thread for suggesting changes to be made later in the Overhaul. That is to say: not changes that need to be made immediately, or changes to afflictions, or critiques of how the overhaul in general is being conducted. There's other threads for that.
-An attempt to make game mechanics easier new players to use. Lots of Lusternian mechanics are difficult or unpleasant to use without aliases/triggers/scripting to substitute more a user friendly interface or to automate some aspect of the game.
-A compilation of the above ideas. For the sake of the Admins not having to go through the entire thread, I'll be editing the suggestions into the OP as they come and sorting them by mechanic/class.

What this is not:
-An effort to "dumb down" combat. The objective is to remove technical/scripting/conceptual hurdles for new players getting into the game, not reducing the skill required.
-A way to improve your skills and ruin your enemies! For the sake of avoiding bias, please try to avoid suggesting things that significantly alter game balance.
-An envoy report. There's no reason to use the envoy format or to pester the admins for a "special report". I'm certainly not doing it with this thread and you shouldn't either.
-A bug report. If something is bugged, use the BUG command. This is for features that work as intended, but which could be made to work better.

Things that I would prefer not be discussed:
-The following obnoxious envoyisms: "Misfeature", "The Plan", "The Vision", "Nerf", "Buff".
-The following highly flammable topics: accusations that X guild was ruined by a special/envoy report, envoy reports in general, statues, totems, Angkrag and who has more/less active gods/orders/leaders/combatants.
-Arguments along the lines of "Your system can/should do that for you." or "You can write an easy alias/trigger/script for that." New players probably don't have a system and most players do not personally know how to code. The idea here is to suggest changes that minimize the amount of client side coding required to play Lusternia.
-Speculation into how easy/hard a feature would be to code. Players are notoriously bad at guessing this, so leave the question of whether a feature is worth coding to the game's actual coders!

Without further preamble:

General Requests:
-A prompt option for current moves left before "hasty" messages start.
-Combine the CURIO and CURIOS commands, or put a reference to the other at the bottom of each.
-Add a LAST modifier for library commands, which starts you at the bottom of the list rather than the top.
-Allow DISCERN in discernment to also display everything CONTEMPLATE does.

Mapper/Autowalking Requests:
-A command which returns the current room number (as used in MAP and PATH WALK <room>) of the player but not the visual map. Map does this for most rooms, but it does not display for all mapped rooms and not all rooms are mapped.
-Optional addition to the above: Also area name (as seen on MAP LIST ie. tutotophet, zvoltz_temple, ethglom) and XYZ map coordinates.
-Optional addition to the above: A map config option to display the above command (in either version) on movement instead of/in addition to the visual map.
-Change Scry, Scent, Window, Astrogaze, Bond Look, etc. to report the room numbers of unique rooms as well as their names. The ability to pursue a target this way is vital to Lusternian combat and should not be an ability exclusive to people with access to a system's proprietary map database.
-Optionally: Report the room number even for non-unique rooms (ie, seas, elemental planes, etc.). The Map of Mystery artifact already includes this feature for mapped rooms; it's simply a question of if it should remain artifact exclusive or not.

Bard Specific Requests:
-Replace song duration with mana/ego drain. Instead of scaling duration up with skill, scale drain down. Currently, bards NEED an automatic refrain trigger to be any good at being a bard. That's silly. Refrain repeats the current stanza, but does nothing special to drain.
-At a prompt config listing the player's current stanza as either 1-9 (for stanzas 1-9) 0 (for no song) or s for sustained.
-Change MajorSixth to work more like Teleport, such that the bard does PLAY MAJORSIXTH RAZINES instead of PLAY MAJORSIXTH 29640. Guild milestones can be targeted using GUILD or by the name of the guild, personal milestones using PERSONAL and bonus compass milestones using COMPASS.

Daganev

when you type CURIOS show that CURIO has it's own list of commands and visa versa.

Rialorm

Library commands: Addition of a LAST command which lets you easily go to the end of a list. For example BROWSE ALL LAST takes you to the last 15 books, BROWSE SCHOLARLY LAST to the last 15 scholarly works. Right now I have to kind of guess which means multiple attempts unless I write down the numbers.

Enyalida

Iytha said:

Mapper/Autowalking Requests:
-A command which returns the current room number (as used in MAP and PATH WALK <room>) of the player but not the visual map. Map does this for most rooms, but it does not display for all mapped rooms and not all rooms are mapped.
-Optional addition to the above: Also area name (as seen on MAP LIST ie. tutotophet, zvoltz_temple, ethglom) and XYZ map coordinates.
-Optional addition to the above: A map config option to display the above command (in either version) on movement instead of/in addition to the visual map.
-Change Scry, Scent, Window, Astrogaze, Bond Look, etc. to report the room numbers of unique rooms as well as their names. The ability to pursue a target this way is vital to Lusternian combat and should not be an ability exclusive to people with access to a system's proprietary map database.
-Optionally: Report the room number even for non-unique rooms (ie, seas, elemental planes, etc.). The Map of Mystery artifact already includes this feature for mapped rooms; it's simply a question of if it should remain artifact exclusive or not.

Bard Specific Requests:
-Replace song duration with mana/ego drain. Instead of scaling duration up with skill, scale drain down. Currently, bards NEED an automatic refrain trigger to be any good at being a bard. That's silly. Refrain repeats the current stanza, but does nothing special to drain.
-At a prompt config listing the player's current stanza as either 1-9 (for stanzas 1-9) 0 (for no song) or s for sustained.
-Change MajorSixth to work more like Teleport, such that the bard does PLAY MAJORSIXTH RAZINES instead of PLAY MAJORSIXTH 29640. Guild milestones can be targeted using GUILD or by the name of the guild, personal milestones using PERSONAL and bonus compass milestones using COMPASS.

All of your mapping changes would be meaningless/useless to a new player without a system, or even an experienced player without a system. They only become useful if you're using mapping/tracking/walking scripts, so I don't get what you're going for there at all. Landmarking can replace all of that, with expansions allowing limited WALK TO <person> based on org membership/ally status/friendship slots in the manner of Achaea.

i played bard without an automatic refrain trigger, I felt that it was a bad idea to have anything automated like that, it has a good chance to screw you over if you aren't careful (Especially when the song is short). Your reasoning there isn't sound, but I don't really see the problem with a drain instead of a timer, except that it's a bard nerf. I personally never felt even the slightest desire for the bard artifact: song length at trans was more than long enough that a longer timer had no notable  impact in the long or short run. 

Ssaliss

Enyalida said:

Iytha said:

Mapper/Autowalking Requests:
-A command which returns the current room number (as used in MAP and PATH WALK <room>) of the player but not the visual map. Map does this for most rooms, but it does not display for all mapped rooms and not all rooms are mapped.
-Optional addition to the above: Also area name (as seen on MAP LIST ie. tutotophet, zvoltz_temple, ethglom) and XYZ map coordinates.
-Optional addition to the above: A map config option to display the above command (in either version) on movement instead of/in addition to the visual map.
-Change Scry, Scent, Window, Astrogaze, Bond Look, etc. to report the room numbers of unique rooms as well as their names. The ability to pursue a target this way is vital to Lusternian combat and should not be an ability exclusive to people with access to a system's proprietary map database.
-Optionally: Report the room number even for non-unique rooms (ie, seas, elemental planes, etc.). The Map of Mystery artifact already includes this feature for mapped rooms; it's simply a question of if it should remain artifact exclusive or not.

Bard Specific Requests:
-Replace song duration with mana/ego drain. Instead of scaling duration up with skill, scale drain down. Currently, bards NEED an automatic refrain trigger to be any good at being a bard. That's silly. Refrain repeats the current stanza, but does nothing special to drain.
-At a prompt config listing the player's current stanza as either 1-9 (for stanzas 1-9) 0 (for no song) or s for sustained.
-Change MajorSixth to work more like Teleport, such that the bard does PLAY MAJORSIXTH RAZINES instead of PLAY MAJORSIXTH 29640. Guild milestones can be targeted using GUILD or by the name of the guild, personal milestones using PERSONAL and bonus compass milestones using COMPASS.

All of your mapping changes would be meaningless/useless to a new player without a system, or even an experienced player without a system. They only become useful if you're using mapping/tracking/walking scripts, so I don't get what you're going for there at all. Landmarking can replace all of that, with expansions allowing limited WALK TO <person> based on org membership/ally status/friendship slots in the manner of Achaea.

I'm not sure how it'd be useless, considering you can use PATH WALK <vnum> to get to the number indicated by the scry, removing the need for a mapping/walking script.

Tarkenton

Have amount of timewarp and temporary insanity show up when you discern someone.  For being a nearly trans skill, not being able to see those two things is silly.

Llandros

Loving ideas for making bard songs more newbie friendly. Bards are a pretty straight forward archetype and are otherwise pretty newbie friendly. Refrain is required to use targeted abilities in most situations though so it does have a purpose. I think some kind of your song is winding down notice at 30 seconds, 20 second and 10 seconds would be good. Or maybe a server side auto refrain that you could configure somehow.

Newbs aren't going to have a lot of regen so a constant drain for them could be rough. Especially since they would have low skill levels where the drain would be highest.

There is also an artifact that lengthens song time so that would be to be change/refunded. 

Maybe giving bards the ability to hum/strum/dance (interpretative, modern, emo, headbang, drunken or fish wiggle) their songs without needing to refrain would be helpful. You could limit it to low and mid stanzas, no targeted abilities and it drops when you lose masochism. Could be like some sort of musical training wheels. 

:-??

Shuyin

Tarkenton said:

Have amount of timewarp and temporary insanity show up when you discern someone.  For being a nearly trans skill, not being able to see those two things is silly.

Contemplate?

Moi

Ssaliss said:

Enyalida said:

Iytha said:

All of your mapping changes would be meaningless/useless to a new player without a system, or even an experienced player without a system. They only become useful if you're using mapping/tracking/walking scripts, so I don't get what you're going for there at all. Landmarking can replace all of that, with expansions allowing limited WALK TO <person> based on org membership/ally status/friendship slots in the manner of Achaea.

I'm not sure how it'd be useless, considering you can use PATH WALK <vnum> to get to the number indicated by the scry, removing the need for a mapping/walking script.

This. To take an example from my own new player days, the idea is that a new ebonguard could do SCENT, get a room number and then do PATH WALK <vnum> to go to the location of a person they scented. It's less useful with scrying (path walk doesn't work at long distances), but that's one of the reasons why I was wanting to include the area name as well.

Synkarin

I don't mind room numbers being included with anything but scent. I don't think scent should have room numbers, especially with rooms with the same name. Scent's already the most powerful scrying ability there is, the fact that it doesn't cost balance and can scent everyone in an area is a huge advantage and giving the room number would make those that already use mappers/autowalkers an even greater advantage. 

I understand the point, but you still have to consider the effect on people who do use advanced scripting etc.

Also, ego/mana drain to maintain song seems gross, I'm content with my auto-refrainer, it hasn't killed me yet.

Moi

The idea for the ego/mana drain was that it would come out to the same ego/mana usage now, just automatic and spread out across the song duration. Or even just a refrain sized ego/mana expenditure every time the song would normally end, without a balance being spent on it. Think less Metawake and more Dramatics Performance Mode.

E: As for scent, people with autowalkers can already do that. Lots of people make room name to room number databases and match scent results to autowalk directions. The ability to do it is already out there - all this would do is level the playing field so that everyone with scent can do it, not just everyone with scent and a good system.

Ssaliss

Iytha said:

The idea for the ego/mana drain was that it would come out to the same ego/mana usage now, just automatic and spread out across the song duration. Or even just a refrain sized ego/mana expenditure every time the song would normally end, without a balance being spent on it. Think less Metawake and more Dramatics Performance Mode.

E: As for scent, people with autowalkers can already do that. Lots of people make room name to room number databases and match scent results to autowalk directions. The ability to do it is already out there - all this would do is level the playing field so that everyone with scent can do it, not just everyone with scent and a good system.

I can definitely see the case for not having this be usable when there are duplicate room names though. I guess the big question is how costly that will be in terms of development and runtime... It wouldn't exactly be a trivial thing to check every other room in the world (or even area) to see if any of them have a duplicate name.

Tarkenton

Shuyin said:

Tarkenton said:

Have amount of timewarp and temporary insanity show up when you discern someone.  For being a nearly trans skill, not being able to see those two things is silly.

Contemplate?

You can, but then I have to discern or assess to also check health.

Honestly, I'd love if discern could be the all in one enemy status checker. Configurable to show one or more of health, mana, ego, wounds, time warp, temporary insanity and power. In fact, might just pop this over to "simple" ideas

Llandros

Enyalida said:

Iytha said:

i played bard without an automatic refrain trigger, I felt that it was a bad idea to have anything automated like that, it has a good chance to screw you over if you aren't careful (Especially when the song is short). Your reasoning there isn't sound, but I don't really see the problem with a drain instead of a timer, except that it's a bard nerf. I personally never felt even the slightest desire for the bard artifact: song length at trans was more than long enough that a longer timer had no notable  impact in the long or short run. 

I don't mean this to sound rude but this isn't about you. This isn't about any of us. That someone who has been playing for years can roll a bard and get by just fine doesn't mean anything.

I spend about 5 to 10 minutes explaining how songs work to true newbs, with the 3 stanzas, powers, passives, passive tics, allies and enemies lists, changing out powers on the fly, targeted powers, deafness, bashing set up, pvp set up and they are all totally stoked.... until I mention they have to refrain every few minutes while they are actively concentrating on other things or their cool new song will die and they have to spend several minutes putting it back up.

The html client doesn't have timers and there is nothing to create a trigger off of for so much as an alert. So they either get to go buy a system or go without. Usually they just don't use their songs and then stop coming around. I know that some of them would have never stayed around regardless and some might create an alt for something else but there is no way that this helps any.

The current situation is newbie unfriendly.

Moi

There's lots of ways it could be implemented that don't involve a comparison of the room name against the full room name database. Check the room name vs a list of "scry unfriendly" room names. Check the room number against a list of scry unfriendly room numbers. Check the area to see if the room is in a scry unfriendly area. But, again: The administration knows whether any given implementation of a feature is going to be runtime intensive or not and can decide not to bother it if it isn't feasible. There's no real reason for us to speculate about code requirements - the developers are already going to figure it out for themselves.

Synkarin

Iytha said:

E: As for scent, people with autowalkers can already do that. Lots of people make room name to room number databases and match scent results to autowalk directions. The ability to do it is already out there - all this would do is level the playing field so that everyone with scent can do it, not just everyone with scent and a good system.

You didn't read what I actually said. 

Scent's one weakness is rooms that have a common name. You can't scent track to someone in one of those rooms, and changing that would create the situation where you can, thus making scent even more powerful. Yes, people already track to unique room names, but it doesn't need the added advantage of giving shared room names being differentiated. So no, people with autowalkers cannot already do that, and I don't think we should remove that one weakness. 

Ssaliss

What I was aiming for isn't to speculate about whether or not it's too difficult, but rather to discuss what you'd rather have: All rooms have vnums or no rooms have vnums. For a minute, let's assume you can't have "only non-duplicate rooms show vnums".

Moi

What I said:

Iytha said:

-Change Scry, Scent, Window, Astrogaze, Bond Look, etc. to report the room numbers of unique rooms as well as their names. The ability to pursue a target this way is vital to Lusternian combat and should not be an ability exclusive to people with access to a system's proprietary map database.
-Optionally: Report the room number even for non-unique rooms (ie, seas, elemental planes, etc.). The Map of Mystery artifact already includes this feature for mapped rooms; it's simply a question of if it should remain artifact exclusive or not.

What you said:

Synkarin said:

I don't mind room numbers being included with anything but scent. I don't think scent should have room numbers, especially with rooms with the same name.

Note the bolded sections. I suggested "Allow scent to display room numbers for unique rooms." That is, ones with a room name not shared with other rooms. And to, optionally, if it is thought to be balanced, display the numbers for non-unique rooms (those that DO have names in common with other rooms) as well. I get that you think it would be unbalanced to allow scent to track across rooms with common names. That's why I included scent (and other scrying abilities) giving room numbers in those rooms as an optional, "only if doing so could be balanced", suggestion. That said, honestly thank you for voicing that opinion. That's one vote for "no, it would not be balanced" so far.

@Ssaliss: This isn't a dichotomy, those are not the only two options and I don't think framing the discussion like that is particularly useful. That said, my preferences are currently, from best to worst:
1. Display room numbers only for rooms with distinct room names. Determine the distinctiveness of a room based on individual room names in some runtime cheap way.
2. Display room numbers for all rooms, except those in the following areas: Elemental Planes, Illwater, Inner Sea, Sea of Despair, Undersea, Iceburn, Crystal Meadows.
3. Display all room numbers everywhere.
4. Display no room numbers anywhere.

Saesh

Some of these are great ideas! However, none of them realy fall within the framework of the overhaul in that the overhaul is strictly about PK mechanics. Many of them would make great envoy reports though.

The only two that really caught my eye as non starters the scry reporting room numbers and removing refrain.

I have some personal reservations about making auto trackers, many of which already exceed the allowed limits of the "afk/automation" rules in my opinion, more available to the masses. That being said, given the current state of things, I don't see it causing any particular issues. However, I don't know how possible it is to do this for all the rooms except for those that are duplicates, as imagine that will involve a substantial amount of work to find and flag each room that is a duplicate. Ieptix would have better insight into this, but I suspect it is unrealistic to expect this to come to fruition.

 

I don't see any issues with refrain, but I do see issues with passives that do not time out and have only a marginal upkeep cost. This would be akin to making demesne effects never time out. I think we need to be realistic in that true newbies that are not capable of making a simple echo timer probably don't need their songs up perpetually to function.

Ieptix

Saesh said:

I don't know how possible it is to do this for all the rooms except for those that are duplicates

This is actually one of those things that'd be fairly straightforward to do, but isn't going to happen. Consider, for example, the ability to retitle manse rooms allowing potential to duplicate relevant room names, thus obscuring locations.

Enyalida

Llandros said:

I don't mean this to sound rude but this isn't about you. This isn't about any of us. That someone who has been playing for years can roll a bard and get by just fine doesn't mean anything.

I spend about 5 to 10 minutes explaining how songs work to true newbs, with the 3 stanzas, powers, passives, passive tics, allies and enemies lists, changing out powers on the fly, targeted powers, deafness, bashing set up, pvp set up and they are all totally stoked.... until I mention they have to refrain every few minutes while they are actively concentrating on other things or their cool new song will die and they have to spend several minutes putting it back up.

The html client doesn't have timers and there is nothing to create a trigger off of for so much as an alert. So they either get to go buy a system or go without. Usually they just don't use their songs and then stop coming around. I know that some of them would have never stayed around regardless and some might create an alt for something else but there is no way that this helps any.

The current situation is newbie unfriendly.

To be more clear, my first character was a bard, years and years ago, and I didn't ever (as a newbie) have much trouble with that aspect. I just periodically checked my song status and refrained as necessary.

An automatic "You feel your song is going to soon come to a natural end, if you do not refrain." message a short time before the song ends would be sufficient for the purpose, imo.  I agree with @Saesh about the perpetual songs thing, it just doesn't make much sense.

Instead of appending OOC information (the vnums) to more locations, why not just work on developing a more robust Landmarking system, like I mentioned? The ability to set personal landmarks and WALK TO select people (like Secretaries of your guild, Ambassador Aides when a novice, etc.) would neatly solve those problems. In addition, the area name could be added onto certain common scrying abilities, so that the novice could more easily get to the general area of someone. For very common scries (like the scry enchantment), perhaps only the area of the room would be displayed?

Daganev

When using Stratagems it would be nice if it told you how many items were left in your list such as:

You execute your stratagem. There are 5 more actions in your que.

Rivius

In my que now?

Daganev

Rivius said:

In my que now?

Yeah, how many actions are left before you will do nothing on regaining balance/eq.

Lavinya

It was a play on your typo - que is spanish for 'what', queue is what you were referring to

(I got your joke @Rivius!)

Daganev

Lavinya said:

It was a play on your typo - que is spanish for 'what', queue is what you were referring to

(I got your joke @Rivius!)

D'oh!

Jaxeus

I'm still clueless on combat and I've pretty much given up but these would have helped.

* Expand the artisinal & bardic competitions to include guides and general info on the game. When I first started playing I got a lot of incorrect information on many topics, it would have been great to have a source that was vetted as correct. Also, it was often the case that I just didn't know I should be doing something because it wasn't written down anywhere.

* Offer an NPC dummy to face in the arena. Masochism has its limits and the population is too small to expect others to be on hand when a newbie wants to try out their shiny new abilities.

* Expand the scope of the newbie channel or offer another basin wide source for answers IG.