06 Aug, 2013, plamzi wrote in the 41st comment:
Votes: 0
Hades_Kane said:
We have an account system, so I'm not lumping them ALL into that. I just don't think that account systems are very useful for banning or punishing -players-, because anything you setup short of something like credit card verification is trivial to get around.


Since adding a compulsory user account system, I really like having the option / leverage of disabling a user account together with its characters. It's a hefty punishment for people who invested a lot of time into development, but it doesn't prevent the player from starting out with a clean slate and redeeming themselves if they so desire. I think that's a perfect balance, since I can't really think of a scenario in which I would want to reliably deny service to an individual forever.

I haven't even coded this yet, but I will when/if I ever need it.

Hades_Kane said:
I just don't think there is any real tangible benefit for collecting player's email addresses, and as a player, I'm initially suspicious of any game that wants to. If I want to be kept up to date with things in your game, I'll log into your game and check the notes, I'll visit your forum or I'll like your Facebook page or follow it on Twitter. There are plenty of ways to reach out and connect with your players without having to collect their email addresses, and statistics show that people check their social media more than their emails anyhow. Having the -option- to supply your email for signing up for a newsletter or for password retrieval is nice, but I don't see the point in forcing it. I believe in giving the players the option and choice in what information they want to share or how they are informed of whatever is going on in the game. And considering that I've always been the type of player that won't bother with a game that requires email verification (there's too many other good, free games to bother with one that wants me to jump through hoops), I see things from that side.


As a player/user, I prefer systems that ask for personal information only when offering useful services in return. As a dev, I want to make sure that I offer enough value so that everyone would want to share at least one method of being reached while offline (preferably, in a personalized manner, with information that effectively prods them to return to the game). As a dev, I believe the "real tangible benefit for collecting player's email addresses" is so obvious nowadays that it needs no argumentation. The same goes for getting your players to subscribe to an FB group or follow your game on Twitter, etc. If you are not thinking of ways to reach your offline player base, then you're falling far, far behind the curve.

Hades_Kane said:
When I'm handing you my email address, and possibly the keys to my online and/or real world identity, I don't know who you are, I don't know nor have any real way to control what you do with my email address or how often you will send me things. I have no way of being sure that if I quit your game, you will purge my email address from your systems.


If you look at it as a transaction, which is what it is, things get much simpler. If you consider what I offer you to be of equal or greater value than my having your email address, you are more likely to supply it. The greater the value, the more the email seems like a minor detail. If I'm selling something you really want, and you have reasonable faith that I can deliver it, my guess is you wouldn't even blink.

Maybe you are someone who requires extraordinary guarantees and who doesn't want to ever have to click on an "unsubscribe" link or use the one-click junk flagger that your email client most certainly provides. But if you are, as a dev you should realize that this kind of user is now in the minority.

Hades_Kane said:
I don't know that you won't judge me coming into your game based on who I am or who I post as on the forums. Jodah from TMC should be able to log into my game with no preexisting bias based on how he posts on TMC, KaVir should be able to log into my game without having to be bothered about Godwars 2 or a snippet he wrote, Russ Taylor should be able to login without a bunch of questions about ROM or being treated any different.


If someone you know from another online medium enters your game with information that you can use to link these identities, then that someone has chosen to reveal enough information in these mediums to make a connection possible. Maybe they even wanted to be identified. None of the mediums you covered in the examples reveal users' email addresses against their will.

The only obvious exception will be if you have IP info access on multiple mediums, in which case you are entitled to know who all connects from the same IP, as a soft identification tool.

Again, I'm in total agreement with you on a tit-for-tat email sharing system being far better than a compulsory one. I just listed some points of difference I have.
06 Aug, 2013, Deimos wrote in the 42nd comment:
Votes: 0
@Tyche: I think those methods are closer to what I would consider possession, instead of shape-shifting. I guess there's really 3 bases I'd like to cover:
1) Possession (e.g. a domination spell), where, for example, a psionic player would dominate a weaker minded mob and subsequently be able to give it orders. The mob being dominated doesn't change whatsoever, excepting that its "brain" has been replaced by that of the player. No stats get transferred or anything of the sort.
2) Shape-shifting (e.g. a werewolf transformation), where a human having contracted lycanthropy would himself transform into a werewolf during a full moon. The formerly human player would essentially just be changing races from human to werewolf. The werewolf race would have much higher stat modifiers that would accentuate the player's base stats.
3) Polymorphing (e.g. a polymorph spell), where, as a target of some wizard's spell, I'm transformed from a dwarf barbarian into a little frog. I would obtain all of the stats of the frog, rather than keeping my own. Technically, this is the same as #1, except my brain is put into a different character against my will.

I think I can accomplish these three by having a hierarchy something like:

Character has-a Body has-a Race
Character has-a Brain

Thus, #1 would just be a matter of replacing the weak-minded Character's Brain with my own Brain. #2 would just be changing my Character's Body's Race. And #3 would just be having my Brain transferred to a frog's Character (with my own Character going into limbo until the spell wore off).
07 Aug, 2013, Tyche wrote in the 43rd comment:
Votes: 0
Replace? For more fun, how about a list of brains sorted by dominance.

* Character has-many Brains

That way you don't have to store the existing brain somewhere, you just bury it.
Imagine multiple players with equal dominant brains possessing the same creature.
All of them entering commands.
07 Aug, 2013, Deimos wrote in the 44th comment:
Votes: 0
Hades_Kane said:
We have an account system, so I'm not lumping them ALL into that. I just don't think that account systems are very useful for banning or punishing -players-, because anything you setup short of something like credit card verification is trivial to get around.

I have to disagree here. Obviously there's no silver bullet for this kind of thing. However, accounts can and do serve as passive deterrents for general douchebaggery. With no account system, a troll can simply hop on a different character if he gets banned, for however many times as he has characters (which can be a lot sometimes). With an account system, there is the risk that his account will be banned instead of one of his characters, so most people will take less risks. Sure, he can create as many accounts as he wants to, but doing so causes him to miss out on inter-account character bonuses. I don't know too many people who would say "nope, I'll give up shared rewards, just in case I get banned one day." I think it's actually a really elegant solution to multiplaying, for the same reason. The type of people willing to multiplay in order to get ahead are the same ones who would be wholly unwilling to give up the bonuses that accounts would provide them. So they end up having to use a single account for any characters they care about, and detecting multiplaying within an account is easy and 100% reliable.

Hades_Kane said:
I just don't think there is any real tangible benefit for collecting player's email addresses, and as a player, I'm initially suspicious of any game that wants to. If I want to be kept up to date with things in your game, I'll log into your game and check the notes, I'll visit your forum or I'll like your Facebook page or follow it on Twitter. There are plenty of ways to reach out and connect with your players without having to collect their email addresses, and statistics show that people check their social media more than their emails anyhow. Having the -option- to supply your email for signing up for a newsletter or for password retrieval is nice, but I don't see the point in forcing it. I believe in giving the players the option and choice in what information they want to share or how they are informed of whatever is going on in the game. And considering that I've always been the type of player that won't bother with a game that requires email verification (there's too many other good, free games to bother with one that wants me to jump through hoops), I see things from that side.

I wouldn't be sending out any non-transaction email without explicit opt-in permission, since that violates CAN-SPAM regulations. I think you have some misconceptions about the role of an email address when it comes to using it as a login for an account (maybe originating with some bad past experiences?). The primary purpose is as a convenience to the user. After users as a whole forgot their usernames for the 50 billionth time, the internet eventually got wise to the fact that people were much less likely to forget their email address than they were some random username. Don't you recall the days of trying to remember whether you were Hades1372 or HadesK8888 or HadesKane2001 on some particular app or game because someone had already taken HadesKane? :-P
07 Aug, 2013, Hades_Kane wrote in the 45th comment:
Votes: 0
Don't you recall the days of trying to remember whether you were Hades1372 or HadesK8888 or HadesKane2001 on some particular app or game because someone had already taken HadesKane?

I already have enough trouble trying to remember if I used "Hades_Kane" or "HadesKane" :p
07 Aug, 2013, Deimos wrote in the 46th comment:
Votes: 0
Tyche said:
Replace? For more fun, how about a list of brains sorted by dominance.

* Character has-many Brains

That way you don't have to store the existing brain somewhere, you just bury it.
Imagine multiple players with equal dominant brains possessing the same creature.
All of them entering commands.

That sounds pretty hilarious, actually. Multiple brains could also allow for more modularized AI, as well.
07 Aug, 2013, Runter wrote in the 47th comment:
Votes: 0
It occurs to me that shapeshifting in most games is just the ability to change classes. That's probably how I would handle it. If my human mage gained the skill to a transform dire animal I would make the skillset encapsulated in a separate (unselectable at creation) class. It would be no difference for me if a mage gained the skill, or a warrior. Nor does it matter to me how the transformation happened or the duration. The only important thing is determining which skills belong to the original class only, which stay in effect, and which belong to the transformation class only. And while I realize that something like werewolf is a better fit as a race, that also doesn't matter to me. I still find it to be an implementation of classes wrt to skills. Could always just set the race at the same time.
07 Aug, 2013, Runter wrote in the 48th comment:
Votes: 0
It's only in certain communities like this one that people think it's abnormal to require an email address to play. It's not suspicious or outrageous. If you don't want them to send communications to your main email address.. just make one just for the game. They're free and easily obtainable. If you still feel it's too much you can always just not use the service.

I do think that sites should indicate *exactly* the purpose of the email address collection. Here in Singapore we've recently required all businesses to do this any time they collect personal data. It has to be explicit "We will use your email address for promotional offers in the future." "We will use your email address only to contact you concerning game account." etc.

For the most part it works, but what we've noticed is people are willing to sign away rights for peanuts even when it's explicit. For example, a telcom company may indicate they will be using your personal information to sell it to 3rd parties for mailing lists. Yet individuals are willing to sign up for that 1 in 1,000,000 chance to win a free ipad mini. That generally equates to you selling your privacy for less than 0.01 USD.

What I'm trying to get at is you need to determine if A) you think your email address is sensitive personal data (I don't). And B) If it is, how much am I willing to sell it for? Is the value of the service worth it? If you've already sold the personal info (email address) in question to 100 services, is it still valuable?
08 Aug, 2013, KaVir wrote in the 49th comment:
Votes: 0
Tyche said:
Replace? For more fun, how about a list of brains sorted by dominance.

* Character has-many Brains

That way you don't have to store the existing brain somewhere, you just bury it.
Imagine multiple players with equal dominant brains possessing the same creature.
All of them entering commands.

Everyone is John MUD?

Runter said:
It occurs to me that shapeshifting in most games is just the ability to change classes. That's probably how I would handle it. If my human mage gained the skill to a transform dire animal I would make the skillset encapsulated in a separate (unselectable at creation) class. It would be no difference for me if a mage gained the skill, or a warrior. Nor does it matter to me how the transformation happened or the duration. The only important thing is determining which skills belong to the original class only, which stay in effect, and which belong to the transformation class only. And while I realize that something like werewolf is a better fit as a race, that also doesn't matter to me. I still find it to be an implementation of classes wrt to skills. Could always just set the race at the same time.

One could certainly define shapechanged forms as a type of class (from a design perspective), but I would still want to keep them distinct from profession-type classes as well as races. If a warrior and a mage both shapechange into wolfman form, the former should still be better at combat while the latter should still be able to cast spells. And if a dwarf and an ogre both shapechange into wolfman form, the former should be shorter than the latter.
10 Aug, 2013, Famine wrote in the 50th comment:
Votes: 0
If it was me, I would define any transformation as an ability. Shapeshift at the core, seems like an ability attached to a class. From there, I would define a set ability type as a spell with a sub-type as a buff (i.e.: affect). That's because to me, it's an ability that is looked as a buff that is in a sense an affect on your character. Then I could add all my bonuses to that affect that clearly show on the characters affect list or score card. Any additional abilities or functions I wanted to assign to that transformation can now trigger off the buff (affect) flags rather than defining a new class.

That's just me though.
12 Aug, 2013, Kjwah wrote in the 51st comment:
Votes: 0
Ssolvarain said:
It is a lot more secure. One password to access all characters is the main security flaw of an mmo.


Not really, having a weak password or getting a keylogger so someone gets your password are the security issues. Besides that, I can promise you almost all people will use the same password for all their characters.

That honestly doesn't fix anything. Most accounts that I know of that are "hacked" aren't hacked. They are simply sent the password for the account because the person on the other end wasn't secure with their PC.

Sure, sometimes there's some social engineering going on but let's be honest here, nobody is running world of warcraft. There can't be that many accounts of people trying to brute force accounts on MUDs. I'm sure there's those few people that do but other than that… I just don't see it.
14 Aug, 2013, Ateraan wrote in the 52nd comment:
Votes: 0
Kjwah said:
Most accounts that I know of that are "hacked" aren't hacked. They are simply sent the password for the account because the person on the other end wasn't secure with their PC.

I've actually never run into a hacked account before. It is always someone giving away their password or character to someone else.
12 Sep, 2013, Nich wrote in the 53rd comment:
Votes: 0
One way that I've thought of handling shape shifting is to make bodies a stack rather than a flat structure. At the bottom you have sane default values, on top of that you have character specific values. Then on top of that you can create masks (in the sense of images) that either overwrite, merge, or let the bottom layer pass through, for each attribute. This should be insanely flexible, while being easy to reverse, since changing back is just removing the change layer. But it's probably overcomplicated
13 Sep, 2013, quixadhal wrote in the 54th comment:
Votes: 0
I'm curious… who out there actually is going to spend the time to hack a text MUD account?

Jealous ex-boy/girl-friend? Cyber-stalker?

I really can't imagine anything else. Hacking an MMO account is usually done for profit… the hackers run a few scripts to hack insecure accounts (bad passwords and no authenticators), on the assumption that 1 out of every 10 they hack might have enough gold (or items that can be reduced to gold) to pay back the loss in banned accounts used to do the hacking.

Considering that the text MUD market (in its entirety) is a smaller population than any MMO I know of, why would anyone take the time to hack such a thing, other than to grief a particular individual… in which case it's a symptom of their own social issues, not a problem with the game system.
40.0/54