[MUD-Dev2] Importance of emoting (Was: A rant againstVanguardreviews and rants)

[Richard A. Bartle]

On 03 April 2007, John Buehler wrote:
>>         Sure it is. It works for speech, why not emotes?
>Because emotes are visual and speech is not.  Typed speech is a crutch
until
>we can get voice working properly.
	Yes, right...
	Let me know how you like playing when everything that is currently
typed comes through your earphones. If you thought /general chat was bad,
wait until you get the automated spam inviting you to buy gold or
level-up services, or people playing music, or people trying to sneak
in subliminal messages. Voice is great when it's just you and your
guildies, most of whom are listening and not saying anything. Make it
freeform, though, and pretty well any open channel will become unusable.
You can't even filter it out, because you don't know who said what
without some kind of a tag, and even if you do know who said it, that
tag has somehow to be clickable-on to add it to your /ignore list.
	Anyway, coming back to your original argument, this may all be
a crutch until we get voice working properly, but we don't yet have
voice working property therefore it's a valid thing to put in a
virtual world.

>If we go back to the "/bow" emote, I assume players would expect
>an animation.
	They would, and they may be disappointed not to get one. However,
which is worse, their being disappointed for not getting one or their
being disappointed for not getting one AND not getting even a textual
recognition of their actions?
	Just yesterday, someone in my WoW guild complained that they
couldn't /gasp in guild chat.

>The assumption that the player base wants better support of emotes is the
>very point of contention here.  /train and /chicken are toys.  Current
>players like toys.  The fact that they are triggered the same way as an
>emote is not supportive of emotes in any way.
	I disagree. If you give people more toys, they have more to play
with and they can play different games.

>Is /faint animated?  If not, perhaps it is because it is an emote and not a
>toy.
	It's not animated. /bow and /curtsey are animated, though (in WoW).
Does that make them toys?
	Take a look at the list of 186 emotes at
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/emotes.html . Hardly any of those
are animated. Some of them replicate actual commands (/taunt, for example),
which is rather confusing.
	My gripe with them is that they add unwanted context (if I /threaten
someone, I want it to say "You threaten <target>", not "You threaten
<target> with the wrath of doom").

>Richard, I'm gonna let this one go because we just plain disagree.  Feel
>free to reply and finish out this thread with a summary.  I'd say that I'm
>done with it.  I hope that players who would like a strong emote system get
>it.
	Summary: your primary argument against emotes is that it costs money to
animate them; I counter with the observation that you don't have to animate
them; you respond that players will be disappointed if they're not animated;
I reply that they're more disappointed by not having them at all than by
having them and their not being animated.

		Richard