making Join more enduring

[Kent]

For any number of reasons, a character may exit and reenter the room the group leader is in. Last night I exited the room my party leader was in and reentered, but before I could type in Join again the leader and party moved along without me. Death quickly followed.

How about we scrap the mechanic where moving into another room breaks the Join and instead the Join persists until, say, logout; but you have to actually type Leave to leave the group?

[Kiyaani]

I don't know about this one, Kent...

Considering the distance involved with most rooms, I would say leaving the area constitutes leaving the group. There are other mechanics from grouping that would have to be looked at for this too and it seems like a lot of work just so a character can stay in a group even from several rooms (or more) away. I think there's a reason someone can come into a room if left behind and still be in the group, but charging ahead breaks them from the group.

And there's the fact that if a character leaves a group and that group suddenly leaves that person behind when they re-enter the room, there's every possibility they don't want that person in the group, the person left didn't want to be in the group, or there's another IC reason and the whole group shouldn't be forced to re-form even though that stray character is in another room. Then you run into the problem of having to manually leave every time when a simple act of leaving would normally suffice.

*Character storms off in a fit of rage*

"Oh, hey, Bob, you're still in the group. Would you mind um... leaving?"

"But I already left?"

It just seems counterproductive to me. =/ I get where you're going with this, but maybe there's a different solution.

As for last night, it seemed pretty clear to all of us that you wanted out of the group because you did the following: attacked one of the group members (whether you meant to hurt them or not is another matter), asked the party leader to take you out of the area we were in, then left on your own when we didn't comply fast enough then, apparently, tried to get back in the group (which none of us were aware of or we would likely have waited).

If we had the mechanic you suggest, those very IC actions would have all been negated by code and that just seems wrong to me.

I would suggest, next time (if there is a next time with this type of scenario), the group and group leaving mechanics weren't the problem so much as you leaving without a light source. If you'd had one you may have made it out on your own. And honestly, in the heat of battle, I could definitely see someone running off in a rage and forgetting that *hey, it's dark, and I just left the light with that group of jerks.*

Things that groups impact:
AOE spells
Chants
Sharing
Tutoring

I don't know if these are currently coded for room-specificity or group-specificity. It's not really my business. But I could see this taking a lot of work for something that just requires a little observation by those RPing and a quick type of 'join group'.

Anyway, sorry about what happened last night Kent. I think you RP'd fairly well considering the circumstances.

[merin]

Until logout? That really doesn't make sense. Sorry to say, but, I think that's two long. Five minutes, maybe, sure. if you're fighting and duck out to rest or get lost or whatever and you get back within a certain time then I agree.

[Kent]

. Then you run into the problem of having to manually leave every time when a simple act of leaving would normally suffice.


Anyway, sorry about what happened last night Kent. I think you RP'd fairly well considering the circumstances.

Really? How often do you leave a group...maybe once per evening? Twice ?

How many times an evening of group playing do you or someone in the party get tossed out a room, attacked while the party is moving (Fredegar was unable to follow you due to being in combat); a newer person, while the leader moves, types in a roundtime command such as Search or Examine or Bandage me (Jimmy was unable to follow you), or scared out of a room by a fear or other effect, or knocked prone and the leader moves before you can stand up...compared to having to type in Leave maybe once or twice an evening?

Joining a group is less of an action, and more of an intention. It is one's intention to stick with the leader, right now, or at least, the next time you see him or her. You cannot judge Kent's intentions to stop following Alexander by anything he did. In fact, Kent's request to Alexander to take him out of there demonstrated that Kent was completely unfamiliar with the area and unable to leave without Alexander's help. After battle after battle after battle of no one caring to stop and find out why Kent was not fighting and ignoring his requests to drop the lantern, Kent would have just ran to the surface alone without all the drama, if he knew the way. It should have been up to Kent to conscientiously decide to stop following Alexander, and not for Eira or anyone else to decide Kent was no longer intending to follow Alexander.



Thanks what you said about my RP. When a person is holding a lantern out in front of them, its too bad there is no mechanic to describe the attempt to swat the person's hand to make them drop the lantern, and an attempt to go past the lantern and run them through the chest. The GM's can tell the command I typed in was Disarm but other characters cannot. Also, a trained warrior would have in reality easily grabbed the lantern out from the girl's grasp with his left hand without needing to use Disarm with his weapon, but no such possibility exists in game.

[Rias]

If you actively perform an action to physically leave a group (for instance, by leaving the room your group leader is in), you leave the group. What exactly is the purpose behind this request? Being in a group in CLOK means that you move with your group leader. If you've intentionally left the room, you're no longer with your group leader. If you didn't intend to leave the group, don't leave the room. If you intend to leave for a significant amount of time, I prefer that case to assume you've left the group (as you physically have) until you come back and re-join.

I'm guessing this request was inspired by a bug you experienced. The solution I would prefer is to fix the bug, rather than modify existing mechanics to account for rare potential cases that it might affect and make way for a whole new set of odd cases and situations to then need to account for.

And, of course, group mechanics are very complicated and finicky. There are still group-related bugs from the days of yore that are just seemingly impossible to track down. I really don't want to add to them by making dramatic changes to group mechanics for extremely rare minor case bug-related scenarios.

If I'm missing the point, please feel free to elaborate.

[Kiyaani]

What brought this on is the bug where it says you can't battle in darkness even when there's light in the room. If the lantern was dropped instead of held he could have used the battle command. But why should it have to be dropped at all? If the room is lit battle should work.

Anyway, just my thoughts on it.

[Rias]

That's a longstanding bug regarding order of operations and room lighting being re-calculated. It's not intentional that light sources need to be dropped in order to allow auto-repeating (or queued) commands.

[Kent]

. If you didn't intend to leave the group, don't leave the room.

Yes, the point was missed, even though I spelled out many instances where a following player and a leader find themselves in different rooms with no wish to so be. If I'm following Joe and I trip and fall, I get up, dust myself off, and start running until I catch up with Joe. Joe may even be unaware all this happened, and he just marches on with me behind him. At no point was there any intention for me to not be right with Joe.

Likewise, I may have an item I dropped, like a dagger. While Joe marches on, I quickly backtrack, retrieve the dropped item, then run to catch up with Joe. There was no leaving of Joe's group, I may have briefly fan back thirty or forty feet to pick up my dagger, the ran back to follow him from a few feet away. I have always considered myself 'with Joe' during this action.

The problem in game is that players don't really walk step by step, they effectively teleport from the center of one room to the center of another, repeatedly. Out in this wilderness this teleporting takes round time, but in-non wilderness rooms the leader can teleport many rooms per second. He could, with stacked commands, "walk" the entire streets of Mistral Lake or the entire tunnels Alexander's group was in the other night in under one second. In the status quo, a player has to retype in Join Joe while Joe is moving from room to room...Kent typed in Join Al again but before the Enter Key was pressed, Alexander and group had teleported one or more rooms away.

My contention is that it was never Kent's desire to not walk the same direction Alexander walked in, and players have to deal with the unreality of another person being able to move from one place to another 40 feet away in zero time (or the split second it takes to type in N Enter for north), all the while he has to type in Join Al to simply walk the same way as that person. Kent had to basically catch a falling star to walk again with Alexander's group as they instantaneously popped from room to room without them having to walk step by step.

It is this unreality preventing following players to easily catch up with and refollow a group of people for which I propose a workaround, easily solved in other MUDs by having to type in Leave to leave the group.

[Kiyaani]

Not to argue, but I'm going to argue.

Getting left behind doesn't make you leave the group. If you move back to the room the other person is in you're automatically still with them. You don't have to rejoin. What happened in the tunnel was you left us, then tried to come back, but again, the leaving was intentional. Even if it's 40 feet away to pick up a dagger, you still left and would have to come back to the group.

I do have somewhat of an issue in the scenario where someone is left behind, the group leader goes back for them, and the left behind person has to rejoin. The whole reason that person may have been left in the first place was b/c of a press or attack action taking their RT. Usually in those situations the group moved so they could take a breather and it would be better for the group overall for the person who was left behind to catch up (in which case they're still in the group already) than to take the whole group back for one person (in which case they're not in the group anymore) so it doesn't bother me too much. I see the RT situation as something people may just have to RP around.

In this instance though, you left the group and then tried to rejoin it. We weren't moving from room to room quickly by the way and we weren't trying to dodge you. We saw you leave after we were trying to take you back anyway and figured you were finding your way back on your own. We barely made any progress at all in that tunnel, but with the way the RP was going it seems like even if you had managed to get back in the group, we may have left Kent back at the temple.

[Rias]

I'll talk things over with the other GMs. Some things I would recommend in the meantime are saying something like "Hang on, I need to get my dagger" or even "just a second" or "be right back" before leaving, if you need to. This should cue your group not to zip off without you before you return and rejoin. If they do so, consider using ESP to say "Wait up" or "You left me" or somesuch.

[Kent]

I'll talk things over with the other GMs. Some things I would recommend in the meantime are saying something like "Hang on, I need to get my dagger" or even "just a second" or "be right back" before leaving, if you need to.

Just so everyone knows, I would have, but the leader and party had already established a pattern from the beginning of ignore Kent and whatever Kent says. They ignored repeatedly the fact that Kent wasn't fighting battle after battle. They ignored Kent's repeated requests to drop the lantern, except when Cigano gave Kent smartmouthed backtalk about it. They ignored Kent's request to be taken out of there. The truth was, it was the rest of the party who abandoned Kent long before Kent left them. It was in the context of this futility that I tried to quickly go out and back in to the room in order to attempt to break the light bug, but due to it taking longer to type in join Al than it took for Alexander to type in a one letter direction, Kent was mechanically prevented from rejoining in game whereas in reality you see someone walking west, you just walk west also instantaneously.

In fact, speech also is similarly problematic, isn't it? In reality, you speak two or three words a second over time. But in game the player has to type in his sentence at perhaps one word per second, then when he hits Enter, his character blurts out perhaps a twenty-five word sentence in a split second.

[Kent]

Until logout? That really doesn't make sense. Sorry to say, but, I think that's two long. Five minutes, maybe, sure. if you're fighting and duck out to rest or get lost or whatever and you get back within a certain time then I agree.

Ok five minutes is more realistic and preferrable. But I proposed until logout because I guessed it would be easier to implement and more likely to get implemented. Because as you know, a fantastic idea that just sits here in the BBS is not nearly as good a thing as a lesser good idea that actually gets coded in.

[xavier]

you have brought all of the issues you have upon yourself Kent. Your attitude, constant badgering, innanities, and the way you act toward other people have caused all of these issues. You don't get taken seriously because you never have anything serious to say. You get scorned because whenever someone else says something you make fun of them with some joke that only you think is funny. You consistently badger people about this or that, why you do this I have no clue. You bring ideas here on the board that are just something extra that only helps you out or are like you said lesser ideas that get implemented, thus giving less time dedicated to those big ideas or bugs that could use the work. The fact that for several years nowthe mud has worked just fine with the group mechanics it has until one day when they are not to your advantage and then you complain about them is not enough reason to change them. I'd much rather see that time spent figuring out the long standing bug issue of darkness rooms. I'm sure it is on the bug list because I personally have bugged it before. You don't just do these things listed above IC, you do them OOCly too, this is the reason you are not well liked. My best advice to you is to perhaps take a good long look at your behavior and try to be a little less the way you are and work on your communication skills. You may think it superbly awesome to help out a new player, I do too. This does not mean take them into town, load them up on equipment you think they should have and then give them an hour long lecture on what they should immediately go out and do. Please don't say this isn't something you have done because you tried to do it to me when i first started and I've been told by many other people that you have done it to them. Anyway, that's the best advice I can give you, do with it what you will.

[merin]

Can we not start accuing people again? seriously. there's plenty of threads with that in it, and it's pointless and does nothing but to make things frustrating and get out of hand.

I agree with Rias here -- if you leave, you left. One thing and I brought this up is I think there should be a way to, as a leader, not leave until your group is all ready (no roundtime), because that really isn't the person's fault -- if I'm healing someone and my leader leaves like half a second before my roundtime is expired, even with me trying to get done in a timely manner, I get screwed. I do think it should be a toggled thing though, because I get that people might wanna rush through and RP some characters as "Ok not ready your bad, I'm leaving."

But seriously, let's play nice for once, k?

[xavier]

first off I'm not accusing. I'm simply trying to state as politely as possible the flaws I've seen portrayed and give some advice as to why things are the way they are and how they can be changed. Thank you for coming up here and accusing me of accusing someone else of doing something . I'm not even going to start pointing fingers and I never once said that I was perfect, though if you want to play that game I can.

[Rias]

I'm pondering the best way to implement the option to not leave if any of your group members are in roundtime or incapacitated.

Let's just let the personal argument aspect of this thread lie and try to stick to the discussion of the group mechanics.

[Kent]

I'm pondering the best way to implement the option to not leave if any of your group members are in roundtime or incapacitated.

Let's just let the personal argument aspect of this thread lie and try to stick to the discussion of the group mechanics.

Well, I don't think it fair for Xavier to make a long ad hominen attack on me and me denied rebuttal. I request either his inappropriate comments be deleted, or else some of these many other players he dreams about come forward and describe the all equipment I've loaded them up on and the hour-long lectures I've alledgedly given them on what they should be doing. I would like to know which one of us is imagining things.

[Rias]

You're free to rebutt in a PM if you wish.

Topic locked.