[MUD-Dev] On grouping, thoughts

[cruise]

Freeman, Jeff wrote:

> 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).

I think the point is it strengthens /between/ game social
ties...when I meet a really good player on CoH, for example, it
might be useful to know that they play WoW too, so I can hook up
with them there. Or when the next-big-thing is released, find all
the people you used to play with on last-years-big-thing.

> 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.

CoH's inclusion of a global chat system across servers and
characters seems to be an excellent implementation of this. It's
still in testing, but initial plays are very positive - you can see
which character each player is currently logged on with, level,
map/mission and the server they're on.

And of course global ignore means that no matter how many alts the
various obnoxious players create, they'll never be able to bother
you again...

--
[ cruise / casual-tempest.net / transference.org ]
   "quantam sufficit"
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