Player info and immersion

I would like to revisit this. Hours played and secret tag. I strongly suggest removing both of these from players view. Still give the training bonus for quantity of secrets, and have secrets tag show up in their scorecard.
This is something that hurts nothing by removing, and greatly helps immersion.

We said we would not have gameplay discussions behind closed doors because it censors the views of others who are not emissaries. This caused a huge blowback, so we ceased that. So I will not respond to that here. However, it seems fine to inform you of how the game works. you can toggle the secrets tag with "showsecrets". We did it this way so that people have a choice of whether to display it. People generally prefer making their own choices, instead of being told how to play.

I completely agree. I feel more strongly about the secrets tag than hours played. This string of text really narrows down who is possibly playing who and that goes against the philosophy of judging a character and not the player behind it. The hours played has made it incredibly easy to pick out several Ozaru characters without interacting with them.

Edit: posted before I saw Dav's reply. @Xenyar start this thread in the public forum and I'll c/p my reply there.

Those two things have nothing to do with actual gameplay...a little phrase at the bottom of a description is not gameplay.

And I know we can toggle it.

Seems like it removes fun from the game, and alienates the playerbase. AR will not be AR without "unlocked many secrets of the world", that is like taking away turkey from christmas. Maybe we could find a way to make new characters have to actually do them but keep the training bonus as an account perk.

As for something actually impactful. What about removing consortium ability to read backgrounds since Heralds can obviously spot the Legion's applicants? If you are worried about information ruining the mystique then that is much bigger immersion-break than anything else I can think of. I don't doubt every serious RP Legion applicant has a problem with it. An argument against that, is that the consortium are used to having that on demand and it will feel very odd that we pull the rug without discussing it with them, but its much more appropriate to have applicant backgrounds reviewed by the cabals they applied for. You are supposed to meet characters to discover what they are about.

Would a happy medium be to have display of account-tied secrets disabled by default and people have to opt-in intentionally to show it? Like having to turn on overdraft or colors_all.

I don't think it solves the root of the problem which is losing the learning bonus when it's off. I think vast majority of players would opt to turn it on to gain the bonus of their secrets progress they've likely built over years of playing.

thats a personal choice.

Yes, it is my personal choice to display my secrets progress I've been accumulating for over a decade thereby telling everyone I'm one of three or four possible players. It just seems a little ridiculous I have to make that choice to begin with.

Idk why, but I was under the impression that the bonus from the quests was negligible. Something I may have read a while ago.

What problems are left if I remove "Bob is a master explorer"? A few butthurt heralds? Consider that on offer

If I follow you're suggesting getting rid of "master explorer" and just making "experienced explorer" the top? Sounds good to me.

I don't think we should be making any decisions in here. The public input is warranted. However I do think there's value in having some initial discussion among players with more experience before bringing it up to the wider world.

Good talk.

Sorry, I didn't express my idea properly. The message is off by default but the learning bonus is always on, regardless of if you toggle the message on.

Ah yes, the vegan option. How about we move this discussion out of the HoE discussion forums?

Xenyar, care to do the honor?

It's now moved

If you treat my characters based on knowing its me differently thats a you problem. I go into every character treating every other character like I have met them for the first time. No matter what that character may have done to me in a previous character.

I think the goal of this post is to make it harder to figure out who is whom. I've said before that I appreciated when we took account info away from everyone but the implementors because it makes it more fun to find out who someone is and how they're going to play their race/class to be interesting.

But everyone has their tells, and as this game gets smaller, those tells get louder. This request would allow those people who have every secret for the training reward to remove one of those tells.

Is it wrong to treat a character differently because you know who is behind it? Absolutely! Not only is it wrong, but its technically against the multi-play rules. But let's be honest, we're all humans and imperfect. We were even all rolled up before the floating +1 stat bonus, so we're even more gimp.

Personally, I am in favor of letting the account's secret score go into the learning bonus, but displaying the tag line based on the actual character's experiences and discoveries. That way we don't get "Master Explorers" who are still fishing in the academy.

@Ozaru I did not say I treat your characters differently, nor do I. I was making a point that you uniquely rack up many hours in a short time so it sticks out. I would rather not be able to see that, which is the point of this thread.

I didn't say you would, all I am saying why does it matter. If you all mentally go into this game without preconceived notions and ideas and play the game without personal bias then it really truly doesn't fucking matter.

I don't give two shits who plays who. I also don't want information that can give away who the player is. Mystique...immersion... things that can help preserve those two things, is a GREAT thing. And neither of these things effect gameplay...at all.

I'm curious what people consider the added benefit of secrets tag and hours played. How do you use this information?

I can actually identify many characters from some individuals by their secrets tags. It practically gets to the point sometimes when I see somebody who has X secrets unlocked via whois and I suddenly have a very strong hunch, which in the vast majority of cases turns out to be accurate down the road, that this is player S. (S initial idea for an unknown person taken from Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber series). Then I'm like, "Oh, it's player S again." and that influences how I react to them.

Dav has made a point to me in private that I tend to be very observant and detail-oriented... It works against me sometimes, and I would like to be fair to the other players by treating their character as a living, breathing example of the life in the game. That said, I've had my failings. I remember outing one of Ozaru's characters at one point when I lost my nerve on the log boards and said his active character reminded me of a previous character of his, and I knew right after I posted it that it was the wrong move. That's not fair to him, and wouldn't be fair to anyone else.

In short, I think the secrets tags should be removed.

The fix to that, if you don't want to break your immersion is perhaps doing type whois or status on someone. I don't, I figure a few people put by their behaviors persisting across characters or pk skill/speed.

Huge supporter of making the learning bonus account based and visibility character based.

A simple solution to this one is if a new character loaded in (at random) half your account secrets instead of giving you all of them. So that way the best anyone can be at level 1 is still beneath 'unlocked many secrets of the world' (that requires greater than 50% completed) and it would be impossible to know whether that character had their nerfed secrets or if they had just ran around doing a bunch at level 1. The "travelled quite a lot" tier before unlocked many secrets is a wide ranger, so this would create huge uncertainty despite being on the cusp of 50% completed (that could be somebody who had done 100% of the secrets on a prior char, and it could be somebody who had done 60% of the secrets on a prior char, and i tcould be somebody who had done 30% of all secrets recently, which is honestly not hard). we can make sure the randomizer always credits any noob secrets that would tip the hat too easily. This plus grey out things you've found and need to re-do, and I'd be happy with it for me. It could be hidden for the first ten hours of play if people are really going to go try look at new characters just to try guessing. Also I think doing some secrets is good for character investment and it has probably been long overdue that we did not keep loading them in at level 1 to result in low investment (power-trained, boosts surge etc)

If you do that, I won't be able to rage delete and train up the exact same character over and over because I don't remember where the secrets are.

I think this should be self-regulated. If you don't want to know who plays who, don't type "Whois".

There is additional information about characters, depending on your cabal, returned by the "whois" command. You can also see secrets progress by looking at a character.

I know it always has been, but does it need to continue to be so? I can understand certain things make sense to be shown with looks, examines, etc...but not sure why something labeled as secrets is advertised loud and proud as well as being a kind of character identifier.

So me good ideas being floated. Keep the discussion going and in a few days I'll post a poll with the suggestions that have been made.

Give the people what they want, Dav. Remove the stuff that can break immersion. It's has nothing to do with gameplay, realize that yet?

Ceridwel has already said he will post a poll after some further discussions from *everybody*, so lets wait and see the outcome. It is important to be aware of why we are all discussing this (i.e. the goal is to improve the game), and on that same token, lets keep the discussion respectful and focused on whats best for the MUD.

In my opinion, there's no reason to show "˜travelled a lot' "˜unlocked many mysteries' "˜master explorer' or whatever the other ones are. Keeping the secrets internal is better I think, and you can track your own. Keep the learning bonus but just don't show the status to others?

Create a room, Hall of Explorers, have a bulletin board there showing the top explorers of the realm (only 36+ active chars) and have a mob Ethaac or someone who was similarly always actively trying to find secrets to sell you some explorer supplies and rations for gimmick.

Stip the string from whois.

No more problem.

How does that solve the issue? Is every character bound to the account going to be on that board when they're created?

Personally, I never could tell by that string, but I never really paid attention to who's who. Although there are some dead giveaways by in-game behavior. That's the kind of idiosyncrasy that's incredibly difficult to cover up. Behavior has always been more of a clue to that kind of thing than some string in the whois command.

Here's what I've collected from this thread and is what I'll be using to post the poll.

First off, a constant across everyone's feedback is no one wants the learning bonus being applied to all characters tied to an account to change. So having this change will not be included in any of the poll choices. In other words, whatever ends up being changed with how/if your number of secrets found is shown in whois your account-tied learning bonus will not change. Another constant is that people should be able to check their own secrets-found text at any time, so we'll make that happen one way or another. Possibly in score or in your WHOIS yourself.


Choice 1: Account-based secrets-found text is removed from your WHOIS completely. There is no way to toggle it on. Only you can see your secrets-found text, in your score.

Choice 2: Account-based secrets-found text is disabled in WHOIS by default. If you want to, you can turn it on via SHOWSECRETS command.

Choice 3: Account-based secrets-found text disabled by default. For each new character you create and verify to your account, the secrets-found text viewable by other players is generated based on that new character finding secrets. Essentially this means you'll need to find secrets over and over again for each of your characters for the text to display.

Choice 4: Similar to #3 but instead of nuking ALL of your secrets per character your account-based secrets will be randomly nuked by 50%. So for each new character you create your secret-text shown to other players will be at 50% and you will need to find the other 50% on that character to work towards master explorer or whatever the text is now for having found all the secrets.

Choice 5: NO CHANGE. Leave Account-based secrets-found text enabled on each of your characters. If someone doesn't want to see your text then they shouldn't WHOIS your character.


Hall of Explorers: This is a neat idea but I'm not including it in the poll of choices. I think we can treat this separately and implement some variation of it regardless of what we land on with the secret text.

Let me know if I missed any choices. If not I'll post the poll in a day or two to give folks time to respond to this reply.

I think it is important to set reasonable expectations here, I cannot see me coding the hardest possible option here when all the options are effective and it looks like entire weekends of time versus 5 min.. also, we have to consider how hard this is to actually do. take option 3 there, is it nice, sure , but its completely unworkable, you cannot have AOE spells hitting the database to check how many secrets that account completed for 50 different mobs. its fucked up.. the alternative is to migrate pfiles to a new format and that makes a burdensome system even heavier to carry. guh. Same with #4, nice idea but it'll be very frustrating to code.

new choice 4. decouple training rate from secrets - boost everyones training rate to the master explorer amount instead. then we can do new things for secrets, including "all of the above" (because thats what makes the others really problematic)

e.g. have the magewares store check how many secrets completed and adjust prices, e.g. the companion cube could require a player is a master explorer (150 secrets) instead of 100k relics, the lectern could require unlocked many secrets (75 completed), move the training boost to magewares and have unlock amount equal to whatever the level is.

New choice #4 is my favorite idea introduced thus far. I like that it addresses somewhat of an unnecessary "tax break" for vets. Yes, granting access to certain things based on secrets progress is still an advantage but I don't think it'd be comparable to the learning bonus.

Poll coming today.

Poll at https://abandonedrealms.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=104241