Suggestion: Tone down the teleport text

Bugs & Features
#1

I’d like to see the text displayed in the room when a character teleports to be non-descriptive about how that character arrives or leaves, leaving it up to the player to decide how detailed of an entrance or exit they desire.

Currently, a character always “appears in a flash of light”. I read this as taking the notion of “teleportation” quite literally, as if my character (and everyone else in Sindar) can effortlessly zap themselves around at the speed of thought. That doesn’t really mesh with my notion of how my own character works! I rather envision him as simply and mundanely walking around town. When I-the-player teleport him, I see it more like a jump-cut in a movie: the hero leaves their house and immediately arrives at their office, skipping the understood commute for narrative convenience.

My proposal involves replacing the messages with “[Character] arrives” and “[Character] leaves”, or something similarly anodyne. Players can choose to leave these messages as-is, or follow/precede them with poses putting more detail into how they arrive. To be clear, I do this already, but the effect is a little jarring, looking like a weird space-time skip:

Halstrick appears in a flash of light.
Halstrick pads in, sipping his coffee. "Good morning."

Replacing that first line with a much more neutral message, and letting players fill in details as desired, strikes me as both more IC and an incentive to role-play a little bit more.

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#2

The flash of light travel text plays into the rift nature of the realm and also conveys that they showed up from anywhere rather than an adjacent room - so its been a good default because leaves/arrives could just as well be literally from the next room over. I’m not keen on the idea of losing accuracy on travel messages vs exit leave/arrival messages when they’re already in italicized grey to help distinguish them from actual pose/say messages.

We also need to inform users when somebody has abruptly shown up in the room in case they do not opt to make that clear themselves.

If we’re going to help further distinguish them and reduce how prominent the travel messages are, perhaps we can lean into an even further reduction in luminance/brightness for the text color being used to convey travel messages in order to make sure they don’t mingle with OOC messages too readily.

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All that said however, I do think that having the travel messages customizable would be nice. If we do so, we should have a character limit to help ensure that users cannot assign a teleport travel message which is longer than one line (target maximum length - character name length = maximum field size for character?). This will allow users to customize their teleport travel message a bit for flavor (since we’re looking to get away from the idea of it being a teleport in favor of travel anyhow) and in combination of reducing the prominence of the text color it could be reduced visually still to make sure it’s not ‘in the way’ too badly by the time we’ve enabled this too. I’ll see if I can throw a mock-up together.

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#3

Allowing users to generate an area which has travel messages turned off specifically in that area would be good however. Preferably alongside some guidance to area owners that they should include an about area note stating that condition of the area when its turned off obviously.

A simple flag for teleport/exit travel messages disabled in both the area or in individual rooms (alongside the rest of the useful checkboxes) would be great, so we can have hub rooms where travel spam is removed. For users who find this lack of notification so undesirable that they do not want to use the room in question, they can discuss it with the area owner politely or opt to use a different area of course. Enough people are seeking this feature that the option should be on the table in some way at least so people can reduce the travel noise in their own builds even if we’re not going to utilize it in station park because we want newer users to more readily recognize people coming or going and meet/greet and such.

BTW: As an aside. There is the focus command for helping colorize people’s posts if they’re the target of current roleplay. It’ll put a highlighter nib on the left of their posts.
focus name=colorname

#4

We’re in agreement on desiring a message that can apply to an arrival from any direction! That’s why I would prefer to see something like a very neutral [Character] arrives without adding the additional, specific detail of …in a flash of light. While that detail is directionless, it also implies that all the characters can literally teleport around like ninth-level magic-users from the get-go, which strikes me as a bit odd.

However, if it is the case that part of the realm’s backstory is that new arrivals show up on the train with both the ability to teleport and a shifted perception that prevents them from finding anything unusual about it, then so be it! (I actually did read the backstory post from last year just to see if there was anything there about this. :slight_smile: )

I would also support your alternate proposal of customized teleport messages! Speaking as your fellow software engineer, though, I did suggest changed default messages first, since that’s about a thousand times easier to implement…

#5

There was talk of renaming teleport to ‘travel’. If this included more neutral travel messages. I’d like to see that.

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#6

I just had an idea and I hope Accipiter doesn’t chase me with the shaver for it.

What if… we could go/travel(teleport) exit/destinatonname=:_custom arrival message_ and have it state arrival via method or room name` in superscript above the character’s name.

So if I typed:
t station park=:wanders in with his cup of coffee, giving a brief wave to folks.
then it would output a proper pose as an arrival message of:
Tasho wanders in with his cup of coffee, giving a brief wave to folks. as my travel message arriving utilizing the travel/teleport command and also providing my desired single line arrival message.

This does leave the question of custom travel leave messages… but maybe we can just ignore that side of things?

Maybe this idea is just too much. Please don’t hurt me Accipiter. .w.;;;

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#7

Well, here’s the thing. When you use the fast travel feature to go somewhere, you are literally writing teleport . So the game is accurately representing what you’re telling it to do. If you want your character to be unable to teleport, the alternative is walking.

Making teleport accept an argument to set a telein message is an alternative, of course, but comes with its own abusable can of worms.

#8

Don’t worry! That idea is actually quiet easy to implement. And I like it. :smiley:
However, I am not sure we would want it. Let me elaborate:

We choose either:

  1. Allow instant travel, but give functions to allow players to pretend it wasn’t instant; the @Jagrabbit solution
  2. Incorporate the instant travel as part of the lore. Be it a high-tech teleportation pads or magical teleportation circles. Room descriptions would then include hints of these nodes.

Actually, that was my initial idea, to go with option 2.
In my roleplay, I have imagined Sinder to be equipped with some sort of teleportation grid - unclear whether it came with one of the reality fragments, or if it was installed by the wolf himself.
This teleportation grid has even been an active part of some roleplay, where the boss wolf (me) saved himself and Widget from a huge centipede creature in the forest by using his phone to successfully make a partial teleportation of the monster. (It resulted in a messy cabin filled with partial monster chunks, and our naga Kasseth to stop using teleportation all together after hearing about it).

Option 1 is more free, but breaks immersion a bit. Option 2 does not fit everyone’s character, but would give an explanation to why we can insta-travel.

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#9

If “Actually, no, it’s literally teleportation” is part of the lore, then I’ll roll with it. I don’t actually mind adding a followup pose if I feel like “correcting the record”, case-by-case.

Here is my modified suggestion, then, which plays on what you just said:

If I understand correctly, not every room in the world can be freely teleported to; only locations set as “teleport-ok” by their owners.

How about every such location can also have its own teleportation message, suited to that space? Describing a character stepping off a step-disk, or zipping up from a pneumatic tube, or whatever. And let “appears in a flash of light” remain as the default.

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#10

Because of a request, I was reconsidering this.
The abusable can of worms…? Maybe we can put a marker telling if it is a teleport, to avoid it?

Tasho teleport wanders in with his cup of coffee, giving a brief wave to folks.

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#11

I’m not sure that delaying the functional line that declares the player’s entry is mechanically practical.

Informationally, the teleport itself is a single action and the pose is another. If somebody uses an exit to enter a room, they would generate the same spam line.

Infrastructure wise, I’ve been doing my best to encourage practices which relocate teleport locations away from conversational lobbies when possible… and then players instead live on top of the teleport hub despite the room being completely wasteland levels of comfort where only a cat might find a way to contort into comfort… but if the issue continues to be a problem, we’ll simply need to adopt the practice of set teleport hubs as quiet to avoid this being an actual issue, because as far as I see it the issue isn’t the teleports as much as players trying to live on top of locations that allow players to teleport in.

However, aside from the idea of a teleport which poses for you (while you’re entering a room blindly and possibly writing a disruptive pose): If we want to move away from flash of light to something neutral, we simply need a set field which users can customize which is contained in the teleport help text as supplementary information pointing to set character teleport:a/b/c suboptions=arrives with some subtlety. ((or whatever else users want to get themselves in trouble with by abusing the customization.)) If we also want to mark the teleport customized line as a teleport with superscript, then that’s probably good info too - so people know to regard it lightly or what to correct when there’s an issue.

We also have another issue which I’ll detail in another post and edit the link in here shortly.

#12

I think it might be worth considering why travel messages would even be considered spam in the first place, though.

For long-time muckers, such messages have been a fact of life for a long time already, and although they tend to be much more customizable, people also tend not to see them as a thing that needs to be managed or reined in. What’s the difference between the way it feels on FM or Taps and the way it feels on Wolfery? Is it just the sheer volume, because Wolfery has more users, or Wolfery has users that are more active, or is it something else?

I’ll admit, I use travel message muting myself, but I’m not sure I’d want the notion of travel messages to go away entirely for some locations, even high-traffic ones. Would it reduce the notion of a physical presence? Make the place feel more like Telegram and less like a place with a geography?

#13

This thread is less about the teleport messages being potentially spammy than about the teleport message itself taking some agency away from one’s role-playing preferences. (There is a separate thread discussing the spam, culminating in the mute that Acci implemented.)

Beyond the upthread discussion that landed on “Well, no, everyone can literally teleport”, I really like @Jagrabbit’s policy-based solution of putting heavily-trafficked teleport destinations one step away from actual destinations. Since I started this thread in June, I see that Sinder’s central teleport location has changed from Station Park itself to the town center—and I think that works very well, on this same theory. (Prior to this, I preferred teleporting into the hostel and walking into the park or whatever. Same idea.)

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#14

Yeah, I’m keen on teleport text customization at least, but it is abuseable up to a point in the same way people type out custom suicide messages (while in Sinder) for sleeping sometimes. <_>

and… when somebody uses sleep is put into suspended sleep., as a moderator I would like for it to automatically suspend the character in question while changing their sleep message to “Soandso puts themself into suspended sleep. (By trying to make joke in bad taste)” just to teach them a lesson about making a disturbance that appears like moderation actions. <:)

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On second thought, I’m of two minds. Mechanically, the function of exit/teleport entry to a room shouldn’t always be considered IC, so I feel like we need tools to address that side of the site in general.

But doing a t sinder=wanders in along Sinder Lane with a family of squirrels still clinging to his tail and his hair a complete mess. to functionally teleport into Sinder Center (where arguably there shouldn’t be a scene going on most days now.) is still functionality we should support I think (while working on other tools for RP status clarity as well.)

I do have concerns about use-cases though. I’m thinking we might want to have a somewhat small character limit on the teleport customization, like 120 char input just to discourage people going too crazy before they even know what is going on in a room.

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