Zoning and/or feature: The Park

[Talon]

I’ve heard this about five times in the past week but there’s not a thread!

The Park is the center of everything. This is good. This is also… Something of the problem for a gathering area. Users, especially new exploring users run through the park… sometimes repeatedly… And it inhibits much meaningful conversation, etc.

The proposals I’ve seen are as follows:
1: A setting for room or client to turn off enter/exit notifications.
2: Probably the easiest, move the park so that instead of Sinder Lane passing through it is a stub off of it. The problems with this are that it may not stop traffic looking for people, and it is the theme for the town plaza, if you will. All other exits (to/from the train station, etc) would remain.
3: A separate less traveled plaza/park/etc. This suffers from much of the same problem as above since it would still be trafficked by people looking.

Discuss!

[Myk]

If I recall correctly, there’s a park bypass to the south that reaches both sides of Sinder Lane, via the beach>cliff>docks and vice versa. Although some form of drive to persuade players to gather in various locations rather than virtually all in one zone would be very welcome.

[Talon]

This is correct, there is a loop South of the lane.

The main problem with all of this is that many people think the massive Park traffic is due to its location on Sinder Lane. I instead think it’s just people running around looking everywhere. The location doesn’t help, certainly.

[maximus]

I think a setting to make room enter/exit messages suppressed or collapsible would be the way to go. Some IRC clients, for example, will start stacking NOTIFY messages after the first, leaving a collapsed list button to expand those events if needed. That could be one setting; the other being ignoring them completely, or seeing them all normally.

This is also something that could be a flag on the room - equivalent to MU* DARK flag, meaning exit messages are not triggered for that room/exit.

[Talon]

I agree. I was just trying to present everything people had come up with.

[Harcourt]

I would like to see more public teleport zones. Since other places people just teleport to activity zones. But it does come often at a price of cutting all ‘walking around’ immersion out. Maybe also moving… the hostel somewhere else might be a good idea.

[Myk]

If I’m being honest, having at least availably registerable teleport locations over greater distances than just two tile-spaces on the map is among on of my personal ambitions that I’m hoping for, and willing to contribute to… Maybe having around two or three purely public pre-registered teleports should be fine, given the medium-small current condition of the accessible world, but the ones I am currently aware of are much too close to one another, with one of them being quite literally adjacent, and the other being only two traversable tile-spaces away.

Although, for the sake of immersive value, I would like to request that there be a pair of alternatives to teleporting… Powerfully leaping between destinations (exclusive to an outdoor destination, or perhaps text handled to compensate for any potential indoor-outdoor location changing. I am willing to compose a brief context for this, if it would help), and for our winged comrades: flying between destinations (again, compensating for potential indoor-outdoor transitions in the flavor text for the sake of immersion). They would literally do the same thing, and have access to the same teleport list, but would be usable via a different command than teleport. Some of you may have seen me compensating for these differences when I gather a friend or more, and take my long distance leave of the park… So it would be a nice QoL treat to have.

But yes, more accessibly teleport enabled locations would be splendid, although this would mean that region builders, such as myself… Should leave some kind of flavor text in our room information to inform players that they are able to register a teleport to that location, in this case. The reason I’m mentioning this form of public teleport over the more publicly pre-registered is to allow for exploration and discovery, while minimizing any potential damage to the immersion of traveling to new locations.

[Harcourt]

You can register teleport locations already. I know there’s one in the prism apartments. Teleportation is a bit of an ooc mechanic, heh. I know other places use a fly command… I’d really not restrain this into ic context. Again, moving the hostel might encourage people to learn the movement commands if they don’t wanna traverse Sinder.

Forcing new people to learn teleport might be a good idea… You can easily wind up being lead to some unlinked zone with no idea how to get back…

[Myk]

Ah, now there’s something I whole-heartedly agree with. Definitely force people to learn how to utilize, and register teleports. Possibly add registering a home to that tutorial. Not everyone who invites others to new areas will be so attentive as to ensure that they know how to teleport out when they would like.

[Jagrabbit]

Having an waystone icon that shows up in the room view panel for rooms which are able to be registered as teleport destinations (either by limited permissions in the future or by public accessibility) would be a pretty cool feature. This could be a good thread of its own perhaps.

[Jagrabbit]

I think we can reduce traffic if we provide three exits in the hostel to allow traffic to either side of the park. (so long as that makes sense for the building itself?) Maybe we write it as `path that leads to the hostel an create a three way fork out of the hostel or lead the hostel to an outdoor area which has three paths which can lead to or around the park?

[Harcourt]

Teleport pads in other place sort of act as ooc staging areas where you can get your lookie loos in seeing who’s in the room before you step out to roleplay. I don’t know if this is desirable, but… it is nice. And people seem to be trodding through to get lookie loos in anyway. Some wa style see who’s in the zone features might be nice.

[Jagrabbit]

Sadly, we don’t have a remote room/area view tool, just the map population tool, so previous solutions we’ve seen applied in places aren’t as effective/viable here at this time.

[Xetem]

One thing that I don’t know if everyone knows is that you can at least view the number of folks in each (non-dark) room/area by clicking on the area title above the mini-map. It doesn’t show who is in each room, but I know population numbers help me decide where to peek around.

[Accipiter]

From reading all the thoughts and suggestions, I like the following ideas:

• Add an extra room - Sinder Lane - which will have visible exits to:
  • Station Park
  • West Sinder Lane
  • Sinder Crossing
  • Miranda’s Café
  • Hostel
• Change Station Park to only have visible exits to:
  • Sinder Lane
  • Train Station
• Add to the GUI a “Waystone” icon for rooms that allows teleport
  • Clicking on it will show a dialog to add the room as a teleport node.
• Remove the global teleport node for Sinder Hostel. Not sure why I even made it.

Things I am considering:

• Renaming teleport to travel, to make it less specific
• Moving the global teleport node of Station Park to some place near. Maybe a separate room in connection to the new Sinder Lane?

I am not convinced regarding muting travel messages, as they convey information where character’s come from. Perhaps making them less prominent (such as smaller font) can be attempted?

Also, the listing (MUCK style wa) of characters within an area…? Maybe. But, I am not entirely sure it is a bad thing that characters have to walk around to see who is in a room. It can cause a bit of walk spam. But if that is the only problem, then I’d rather see how we can make that less annoying.

And @Myk, I agree as well with the ‘register teleport’ aspect to promote exploration.
For this reason, I can surely imaging removing cape theia as well as a global teleport, only having Station Park (or wherever Sinder’s teleport node will be) left. But for this to work, the GUI must be clearer how to register newly found teleport nodes. The waystone icon might be the solution.

[Jagrabbit]

It sounds like we need a new room to connect to the hostel (and possibly Miranda’s) too which would help us form a tighter triangle Comprised of the new room, East Sinder and the park. We should definitely leave the train connected to the park, but maybe not the hostel. The waypoint in the hostel is probably fine since it is a default home point, so long as it is pulled aside from the park. (Of course nothing says that people won’t still just teleport to the park and then leave to where they’re going.) The question becomes do we get rid of the teleport point in both the hostel and the park and place it in the new room positioned in between everything?

Travel instead of teleport seems sensible too.

[Talon]

These all sound fine, really.

Though you say wa, which wa do you mean? FM’s wa doesn’t do that, the Taps wa doesn’t either (usually aliased to ‘lc’ because it’s so bad most people had their own). Now, most people DO have name-giving wa aliases for their areas. A compromise might be the default FM wa functionality which gives you number of people in a place, number of people -in your watchlist- in the area, and sometimes active people.

@Jagrabbit has good ideas too. Either will work.

[Windchaser]

FurryMUCK’s WhereAre has names. It doesn’t show them by default, and you can hide from it, but it has them. Try wa #n

[Talon]

Yeah, that’s true. I knew that!

I mean the defaults though. I also like generic numbers more than names. Prevents some things.

[Myk]

Ahhh yes, running from stalkers… Or otherwise. I can understand that, for definite.