[MUD-Dev] On grouping, thoughts

[Freeman, Jeff]

John Buehler wtote:

> Thanks for the link.  I included "licensing issues"=20
> specifically for this reason.  If Yahoo were included into a=20
> game through licensing instead of reverse engineering, I=20 would
> think that Yahoo (or another chat system) might=20 actually
> embrace the move.  Surely Yahoo would like to have=20 the
> additional visibility.

I got the impression that Yahoo's issue with XFire wasn't due to the
inclusion of tha Yahoo messenger service, but rather they're
claiming XFire infringes on their patent regardless what specific
chat services it supports. It's the "You can see which games your
buddies are playing"-thing. But I don't know anything about patent
law, and I don't think I want to. heh.

Backing up on the topic a bit, I don't think this sort of external
game-to-game communication is necessarily the sort of thing that
will help strengthen in-game social ties anyway (since its by
definition, an chat system external to any specific game).

It does point out that players want to (and do) speak to each other
as players, player-to-player, while MUDs continue to (try to) impose
a character-to-character dialog. Someone previously mentioned the
frequency of player popping into guildchat and asking "Hey, is
so-n-so on?". Not looking for the *character* named so-n-so, but
rather the player.

Seems like we ought to do something along the lines of displaying
"Character Name (playername)" over the avatar's heads, and using
player names (rather than character names) for friends lists and
/tell's. Most of the time we talk to other players - extreme
roleplayers excepted - we want to talk to the player as a player
OOC, and *not* character to character.
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