Requiring a longer target indicator.

[preiman]

I want to start this by saying I am not complaining about what happened to Viridiana a few moments ago. That happened, and i am going to RP with it, But i was wondering if a longer portion of a things name could be required to target it? It would be very helpful in situations where A wall of text keeps some players from following a battle as closely as we'd like. A fringe bonus would be that people would stop talking to horses, benches and doors, at least when we don't mean to.

[blindndangerous]

Just doing battle doesn't work for you?

[preiman]

some abilities, some very useful in battle require a particular target be indicated. in a normal situation this is no issue, but during big battles mistakes can be made.
using my situation as example, I would not have tried to assassinate the guards woman, I would have seen i targeted the wrong person quickly, and could have changed my target before attacking in a normal situation, but in the battle, i didn't see. If we had to say type at least 3 letters of the targets name, that couldn't have happened, or would have been less likely anyway.

let me use another, for this we have a fictional character, lets call him Canrith.
now you are in a room with Canrith, a lost soul, and an infested carrier. The soul is in the room first, at least amongst your threats, but for one tactical reason or another, you need to kill the carrier first.
you can type bat/att/kill ca, or bat/att/kill c to normally target the carrier instead, but remember canrith? we like Canrith, he's our friend, and yet when we type att ca, we shoot him in the face.

[Avedri]

Type attack carrier?

I know it's not easy but that's been a factor of playing text-based games for as long as I can remember.Not ideal in the heat of battle, but if you're going to use those non-basic abilities, type the full noun.

Or ask for help on the technical boards about setting aliases/hotkeys.

[merin]

I remember when the caravan had infested merchants. I also remember people woult att/battle mer and go after merin with axes, nether, swords, brawling, eetcetera. So even three letters wouldn't do any good at times, although I do think att l should be forced to be longer.

[Jirato]

I was wondering why I never really had this problem, then realized after thinking back on it... I never actually type attack (whatever). I just always use the attack verbs by themselves. Attack and battle will auto-target the first hostile critter in the room. If there's multiple targets and you want to specify, you can use the target command first.

[Lavi]

I've always used at least 3 letters, and at times four. But, I finally stopped almost killing merin!

[Kent]

Oh yeah, and get this, Kent was crafting an item, and at the final stage, I typoed "attac h" instead of 'attach' and I ended up attacking my horse. Fun times.

I agree with the suggestion to have at least 3 letters after target, kill, and attack.

Maybe also you have to first add a PC to your enemies list before you can attack them, since attacking a PC can have such serious repercussions? Maybe attacking your own horse can be just coded as impossible, just like digging a new shaft in someone else's mine is, as well as petting most non-bison wild animals is?

[Rias]

I'm leaning toward encouraging people to just remember to be careful. Accidents are going to happen regardless of what we implement, and I don't want to bog down high-paced combat by adding all sorts of hoops to jump through just in order to be able to target something.

[baerden]

I'm leaning toward encouraging people to just remember to be careful. Accidents are going to happen regardless of what we implement, and I don't want to bog down high-paced combat by adding all sorts of hoops to jump through just in order to be able to target something.

+1

[Noctere]

I think this may also fall within the boundaries of a personal typing idiosyncrasy. I myself have played for a long time and have never found myself attacking my horse or my guild leader or another player by accident. (well with one exception and that was due to a funny bug we had during an event) Perhaps because I tend to use "bat" for battling a hostile target or "att" for single target.

Now if this is a MAJOR problem for anyone there are a few client side methods to prevent this. You could easily make your own personal trigger. In fact, BAM! I just made a plugin for Mudlet that does this very thing. It stops you from typing things such as "attac h" or "battle ca".

Use at your own risk! Do not install if you are not familiar with plugins.
Download here or the attachment link below.

[merin]

Hey horses are monsters too. I demand the right to attack them!

[jilliana]

I've only had trouble with this once or twice, and that's because I had someone on an enemy list and forgot to remove them before the canim invasion.
Otherwise, just typing attack or battle has never failed me. There is no particular reason to specify the noun unless it's an invasion in which I want to target a slightly different MOB than the one everyone else is just for expediency and the like.

[blindndangerous]

I've never had this problem myself, except for the day when I think target was bugged, and my character attacked Liani instead of the carrier which was also in the room.