[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[Vincent Archer]

According to Richard A. Bartle:
>       And some is repeating old mistakes.
>       Let's say you /bow in a graphical virtual world. It generates a bow
> animation and a message. What does the message say? Well it ought to say
> "You bow."; what it actually says is, in WoW's case, "You bow down
> graciously.". Uh? I didn't want to bow down graciously: if I wanted to bow
> down graciously I would have typed "/bow down graciously". I just wanted to
> bow. Or maybe I wanted to /bow sarcastically, or /bow awkwardly, or /bow
> down in a rather confused manner. Why can't I do any of those things? It
> would take someone half a day to implement it. Why do I have my character
> taken away from me and made to bow in a fashion I didn't want to bow? We
> learned this lesson years ago in textual worlds; why do we get it in
> graphical worlds? Did the designers deliberately ignore the precedent, or
> were they simply unaware of it?

EQ did implement that. In any emote, you can follow the emote with text.
In that case, it replaces the text with what you typed. If you /bow bows
awkardly, then everyone sees you performing the bowing animation, and
the message "Soandso bows awkardly" (typo included).