18 Oct, 2010, Scandum wrote in the 21st comment:
Votes: 0
balakoth said:
Perhaps someone could help develop a better screen reader to help with vt100 support (The cursor is still redrawing certain areas, does the screen reader only scan the input that is incoming and not the change in the entire output window?)

As far as I know it gets all the screen updates, including the ones outside the scrolling region. I don't think many screen reader developers are going to bother implementing a VT100 state machine, especially as I don't know of a VT100 mud that doesn't allow disabling the feature.


On the subject of Earth Eternal, I tried it out some weeks ago and while it was fairly nice looking it appeared to be somewhat of a WoW clone with a furry theme, except that it was geared toward children, and the TOS stated that all communication is monitored and people who don't keep things PG will be banned. I wasn't planning to stick around, but after reading the TOS I quit right away as I don't like the idea of being monitored.

I guess IRE's plan was to get kids hooked young, and encourage them to whine till their parents buy them credits.
21 Oct, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 22nd comment:
Votes: 0
Rudha said:
I find it a frustrating recurring arguement that suddenly by supporting something, you alienate everyone that doesn't want or support it. This is not the case, if you have designed it well.


I beg to differ. However, my definition of "support" is likely different than yours. Allow me to add one more quote and then elaborate.

Scandum said:
I don't think many screen reader developers are going to bother implementing a VT100 state machine, especially as I don't know of a VT100 mud that doesn't allow disabling the feature.


To address both of these at once, let me ask what you'd consider the point of implementing a vt100 (or any other terminal/screen handling system) interface over TELNET is?

If it's just cosmetic fluff, to push a few things to status bars or cute little windows, then by all means… give people the option to turn things off and problem solved. If it's to expand the capabilities of your game, by doing things that are impossible, or extremely unwieldly to do with plain text streams, then you are talking about a required feature. Shutting it off would deprive you of supposedly important information and/or make the gameplay significantly more difficult.

That's the basis of my whole argument in the other thread. If you're implementing an interface to expand your game's capabilities, that interface becomes a requirement out of fairness. It's not fair to the players if they are at a disadvantage to others due to the UI. It's not fair to the builders to expect them to use the fancy new toys AND still write things that work without them.
21 Oct, 2010, Tonitrus wrote in the 23rd comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
If you're implementing an interface to expand your game's capabilities, that interface becomes a requirement out of fairness. It's not fair to the players if they are at a disadvantage to others due to the UI.


What is unfair about allowing players to knowingly choose a less effective interface?

Is it unfair to allow players to choose to knowingly remain in combats they can't win, or to knowingly make character builds that are ineffective?

While I agree that implementing advanced features in a specific client is somewhat counterproductive to the goal of supporting other clients, calling it unfair to give the player a choice in the matter strikes me as too nannyish for my tastes.
21 Oct, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 24th comment:
Votes: 0
It's not "unfair", it's just kinda … dumb.
And it means work on the developer's end to support both the more and the less effective interface, which is also kinda … dumb.

Incidentally, you added the word "knowingly" before "choose" – it isn't clear that players will necessarily actually know they're making this choice if the game is presented as a fully standard MUD that you can talk to with vanilla client.

You need a pretty good reason to support both; saying that it's not fundamentally unfair is not a good enough reason. Saying that you want to support players who cannot use the fancier interface is a better reason.
21 Oct, 2010, Runter wrote in the 25th comment:
Votes: 0
Interestingly do you consider it nannyish when you play practically any other genre of game where they've determined you should be using something more advanced than gmud to play?
21 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 26th comment:
Votes: 0
Making a game have a graphical interface isn't instantly an advantage, something which I feel hasn't been considered here. TO bring up something that this topic has touched on a few times, a blind user is probably just going to find a GUI-based MUD hampering their ability to play, as opposed to a CLI interface which they would be more easily able to use, for a variety of reasons.

Maya/Rudha
22 Oct, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 27th comment:
Votes: 0
While I appreciate that the MUD community has a significant number of blind players (understandable, since graphical games can't be easily described to them), blind players are STILL a minority of the already tiny audience that MUDs attract. Limiting your game's design to accomodate such a small segment of the population seems ridiculous, unless you are creating a game specifically aimed at blind players.

Much of the discussions about good vs. bad aren't aimed at particular people, or a particular group of people. They're aimed at the MUD genre as a whole. If you're going to focus on a small subset of the population, perhaps I could counter that a vt100 interface that provided hotkey auto-completion of commands would be a distinct benefit to users who can't touch type.
22 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 28th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Incidentally, you added the word "knowingly" before "choose" – it isn't clear that players will necessarily actually know they're making this choice if the game is presented as a fully standard MUD that you can talk to with vanilla client.


This is easily enough fixable by just stating somewhere on the MUD (newbie motd, newbie school, etc) that "It is suggested that you use This-Client to gain access to all the functionality of the game itself. While you can play it using Your-Client, some of the game's features can best-be or only-be enjoyed with This-Client."
22 Oct, 2010, KaVir wrote in the 29th comment:
Votes: 0
Tonitrus said:
What is unfair about allowing players to knowingly choose a less effective interface?

This is actually the way most text-based muds have always worked, and the disparity has only grown as clients have improved over the years. I guess you could (for example) ban people from using anything other than CMUD, to ensure that everyone has access to the same automapper and other features - but a MUSHclient user could configure their client to identify itself as CMUD and then write a plugin for their own automapper tool, and it would be pretty difficult to catch them because it would all be handled at the user end.
22 Oct, 2010, Rudha wrote in the 30th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
If you're going to focus on a small subset of the population, perhaps I could counter that a vt100 interface that provided hotkey auto-completion of commands would be a distinct benefit to users who can't touch type.


This arguement could be made for any single part of the interface, in any situation, so I find myself rather disinclined to rebuke it. I could also dumb down the systems of my game to cater to peple come of the effects of general anaesthetics and what-the-whoo-hah, I think that because there's always going to be a trade-off, the much more meaningful discussion becomes whether the tradeoff is worth-while.

Personally, while I'm not going to go out of my way retooling every game facet so that it caters to blind people as some blind people demand of games that advertise that they're made with blind people in mind, I think that the inverse, writing them out of the game design by requiring a GUI application is just as silly. (note requiring here, not just having, as this isnt the same thing) They're a significant part of the demographic at this point.

This is stepping into the personal belief tangeant, so take it with a grain of salt, but that said:

It seems rather dishonest to suggest that we could have some sort of hugely increased demographic we'd target if we required GUIs. Ultimately to me it would just come off as pretentious, because for all the make-up you can put on the ol' girl, at the end of the day, its still just text, on a screen, being manipulated by entering more text. Reducing it to pressing a red button saying "HIT THEY MONSTER" seems rather a step in the wrong direction to me.

Maya/Rudha
22 Oct, 2010, Scandum wrote in the 31st comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
If it's just cosmetic fluff, to push a few things to status bars or cute little windows, then by all means… give people the option to turn things off and problem solved. If it's to expand the capabilities of your game, by doing things that are impossible, or extremely unwieldly to do with plain text streams, then you are talking about a required feature. Shutting it off would deprive you of supposedly important information and/or make the gameplay significantly more difficult.

That's the issue I addressed a hundred posts back. These interfaces aren't necessary and possibly counter productive to immersive gameplay, and people will mainly use them because a tactical interface gives them an advantage. There's an argument to be made that an interface can make a game more accessible.

quixadhal said:
That's the basis of my whole argument in the other thread. If you're implementing an interface to expand your game's capabilities, that interface becomes a requirement out of fairness.

I've seen a couple of prompt based VT100 interfaces that are tactical equivalents of what KaVir has done with MSDP. A well written script can mine various kinds of data and present it without needing MSDP, though the protocol makes it easier to access data for the client, and easier to provide data by the server. Most clients also support keyboard macros.

So when neglecting the fact that most players are incapable of creating a complex client side interface, the playing field isn't fair to begin with, so by providing a tactical interface you might in fact balance things out. Obviously you're increasing the gap between blind and sighted players, so MUDs that focus on a better descriptive interface might come out ahead.
22 Oct, 2010, David Haley wrote in the 32nd comment:
Votes: 0
Bobo the bee said:
This is easily enough fixable by just stating somewhere on the MUD (newbie motd, newbie school, etc) that "It is suggested that you use This-Client to gain access to all the functionality of the game itself. While you can play it using Your-Client, some of the game's features can best-be or only-be enjoyed with This-Client."

Well, yes, that is true. If you believe that players read all of that, at least. Given some of the questions I've seen players ask, I don't always have faith that they'll notice that straight away. Besides, MUDs have a very strong stigma (we've seen it in this thread alone) of "I can use whatever client I want, darnit" – so how come those MUSHclient people get this feature but I don't with CMud?!?

Rudha said:
I think that the inverse, writing them out of the game design by requiring a GUI application is just as silly. (note requiring here, not just having, as this isnt the same thing) They're a significant part of the demographic at this point.

With statements like this, you have defined yourself into a small demographic.

Rudha said:
It seems rather dishonest to suggest that we could have some sort of hugely increased demographic we'd target if we required GUIs. Ultimately to me it would just come off as pretentious, because for all the make-up you can put on the ol' girl, at the end of the day, its still just text, on a screen, being manipulated by entering more text. Reducing it to pressing a red button saying "HIT THEY MONSTER" seems rather a step in the wrong direction to me.

And yet the wildly successful MMORPGs are for the most part "just text" with pretty pictures showing you what a text stream is saying. If you look at DAoC, for instance, you can see the same text you might see in a MUD – you just happen to see some graphical stuff at the same time. Everquest famously had to fight rumors that they ripped off Diku.

So, dishonest, or a recognition of people who have actually been successful in the gaming world?

For all you might say, it is an utterly inescapable fact that graphical games have a vastly larger playerbase than text-based games. We can argue until we're blue in the face about why that is, and that's an interesting discussion to have because it can help us improve, but nothing will change the fact that, quite simply, graphical games are more popular than text games.

In fact, I almost feel silly saying something like this, but I guess it would "seem rather dishonest" to not state this empirical fact in this context.

Scandum said:
These interfaces aren't necessary and possibly counter productive to immersive gameplay, and people will mainly use them because a tactical interface gives them an advantage.

You say that they're not necessary as if that's a damning criticism, and in the same breath say that they give people an advantage. Isn't that kind of the whole point of these things…? … to make the game more enjoyable or improve somebody's interaction with the game world…?

Scandum said:
Obviously you're increasing the gap between blind and sighted players, so MUDs that focus on a better descriptive interface might come out ahead.

Come out ahead with respect to catering to blind players, that is absolutely true. It's less clear that they'd come out ahead when catering to the general population.
22 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 33rd comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Bobo the bee said:
This is easily enough fixable by just stating somewhere on the MUD (newbie motd, newbie school, etc) that "It is suggested that you use This-Client to gain access to all the functionality of the game itself. While you can play it using Your-Client, some of the game's features can best-be or only-be enjoyed with This-Client."

Well, yes, that is true. If you believe that players read all of that, at least. Given some of the questions I've seen players ask, I don't always have faith that they'll notice that straight away. Besides, MUDs have a very strong stigma (we've seen it in this thread alone) of "I can use whatever client I want, darnit" – so how come those MUSHclient people get this feature but I don't with CMud?!?


Honestly, I think as a MUD Admin you have to approach your game with the idea of "People are going to read everything, and if they don't then I can't help them" sort of mentality. I think that most people will read it, especially if they aren't brought to the game by a friend, but if we start trying to code a text-based game around "will people read everything?" then we've got bigger issues than just preferred client-support. I think people are much less likely to read a massive chunk of text sent their way, to be sure, so a line as simple as what I mentioned above stands more chance of being read, especially with good use of color to draw attention to the key points. That we have methods of asking Clients what they are using helps us even more, since we can find out if they are using CMud and have the MUD say "While CMud is an excellent client in all respects, this particular feature was designed to use MUSHClient's abilities, given that it is a more easily available client that is free to download." Even better, if there's a player who has made their own custom-plugin to use the data their client is sent for a particular client, we could possibly mention that to the player as well.

Err, wait, this is the internet, so my official answer should be: "Cuz ur See-MUD Iz 4t3h suxz lol."
22 Oct, 2010, Tyche wrote in the 34th comment:
Votes: 0
22 Oct, 2010, Bobo the bee wrote in the 35th comment:
Votes: 0
quixadhal said:
That's the basis of my whole argument in the other thread. If you're implementing an interface to expand your game's capabilities, that interface becomes a requirement out of fairness. It's not fair to the players if they are at a disadvantage to others due to the UI. It's not fair to the builders to expect them to use the fancy new toys AND still write things that work without them.


It's also not fair to the players if they are at a disadvantage due to having a dial-up connection then, right? There comes a point where – arguments of a UI offering a massive tactical advantage, enough to negate player skill, aside – players need to be responsible for maintaining their own advantages if that's what they are out for. I don't see the point of penalizing a player who uses MUSHClient, and all the other players who are able to take advantage of the systems, to pamper both the people on the game who still connect from the Windows Telnet Client. But, at the same time, as an admin you need to make certain that the game is playable and enjoyable to as much of the audience that you get as you can.
22 Oct, 2010, quixadhal wrote in the 36th comment:
Votes: 0
Scandum said:
That's the issue I addressed a hundred posts back. These interfaces aren't necessary and possibly counter productive to immersive gameplay, and people will mainly use them because a tactical interface gives them an advantage. There's an argument to be made that an interface can make a game more accessible.


In the games we have TODAY, they aren't necessary. That's because you can't design a game that really does require them unless you're willing to abandon players who won't use clients that allow them to work.
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