[MUD-Dev] What's in the lack of a name?

[Rudy Fink]

Damion Schubert wrote:

> Players DO rename stuff in games - to something that is shorter to
> type.  "Mystic long swords" in Meridian became "Mystics" in the
> chat channels, and I've seen numerous locations translated to
> their initials in UO and EQ, which can lead the uninitiated user
> to believe he's just wandered into a world of alphabet soup.
 
> As for the idea of players naming stuff on the fly, a place that
> is named after an event involving a player or players will not
> have that name stick unless that place officially has the name
> attached.  Otherwise, different players will have a different
> frame of reference, and the players who weren't logged on might
> just be confused!
 
> One alternative would be a way to 'anchor' a name - for example,
> the player who won the battle could drop a signpost and name the
> hill (and that name would probably be abbreviated by other players
> in the future).
 
> But even that has a certain confusion factor if you have a sharded
> reality.

I wanted to post in agreement with an example of
acronym/abbreviations in EQ.

  http://www.eqdruids.com/reference/acronyms.htm

This list is fairly old, and I would venture from experience that a
real list would be something on the order of 4 to 5 times the
length, if not longer.  It would not be wholly untrue to say that
anything that can be functionally abbreviated will be.  Why waste
time typing something out if a compressed form will convey exactly
the same meaning.


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