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

[Damion Schubert]

From: Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com
> From: shren [mailto:shren at io.com] 

>>> It's a great argument, but I would suggest that some players
>>> would be likely to pick names that break whatever level of
>>> immersion the designers were attempting to achieve. In
>>> EverQuest, for example, the inns running out from Freeport were
>>> not named by the designers, and as a result seem to be
>>> universally known as "inn1", "inn2", and "inn3".

>> I'm curious...  is there anything that distinguishes the Inns
>> other than location?  Do they look different?  Have different
>> services?

> They look identical, but have slightly different vendors in
> them. Having said that no one would use the inns frequently enough
> to really remember which vendors were in which in.
 
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.

--d


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