18 Mar, 2012, Chris Bailey wrote in the 41st comment:
Votes: 0
I think the point he was trying to make with his made up statistic is that given enough people, at least one person would quit explicitly because the mud allows configuration of color. This is generally considered to be true but you should also consider that there is a similar likelihood that with the same amount of people one will quit because you don't offer color customization.
18 Mar, 2012, plamzi wrote in the 42nd comment:
Votes: 0
Runter said:
I don't think a customization system for colors is a cure for a poor default scheme.

However, I don't think it's a bad idea. I just think that the bad scheme shouldn't be default. It should be what is configurable. I shouldn't have to configure your game to have sensible colors… btw, most game already have at least 2 configurations. Colors and no colors. Some have "low and high" colors.

And I'm not sure numbers like "1 player out of 10 does [think it's a bad idea], though" is useful. It's invention of statistics that I am certain isn't even near accurate.


Agreed 100%. For instance, we have " color off | sparse | normal | complete" in addition to a default color scheme that we consider to be very much part of the game design, and that we spend considerable time thinking through. Now, I'm sure that there are other souls like DH who would quit because they want to change the default color for room descriptions to something else, and for some reason they don't want to do it in their client. But, like HK said, chances are that those folks would quit a few seconds later for some other reason, anyway. This is why I consider offering total color customization on the server-side to be very low priority.

I should also add the usual disclaimer that my game is very different in that we target primarily people who haven't played a MUD before. Our telnet usability features are prioritized using the test case of someone who discovered the game via one of our custom GUI clients, but who wanted to then have a bit more control and better responsiveness so is prepared to learn how to play via telnet. Obviously, if you're targeting MUD vets, some of whom would love to be able to recreate the color scheme of their first MUD or their all-time favorite color scheme, then you might consider it worthwhile to spend some time on server-side color customization, like Rarva has done.
18 Mar, 2012, Runter wrote in the 43rd comment:
Votes: 0
Chris Bailey said:
I think the point he was trying to make with his made up statistic is that given enough people, at least one person would quit explicitly because the mud allows configuration of color. This is generally considered to be true but you should also consider that there is a similar likelihood that with the same amount of people one will quit because you don't offer color customization.


It's not that I think the statistic is wrong (which it clearly is), I think it's just a cop out. Someone could literally make up anecdotes about some guy who baselessly objects to any feature in any discussion to throw cold water on any idea. Generally we share ideas and what we believe to be true based on our own experiences and real data, not fantasy anecdotes that didn't happen and that nobody else is willing to entertain as being plausible. I honestly would find it hard to believe that anyone is going to quit your game because you add an optional feature that they don't even have to use, know about, or care about. I find it much more likely they were going to quit your game anyways, because your color scheme sucked and they found it absurd to have to go through a process to customize it. On those two points, your color scheme shouldn't suck and the process to pick a new scheme shouldn't be onerous. You can even have a few pre-canned.
18 Mar, 2012, Lyanic wrote in the 44th comment:
Votes: 0
Runter said:
I honestly would find it hard to believe that anyone is going to quit your game because you add an optional feature that they don't even have to use, know about, or care about.

You are welcome to find it as hard to believe as you would like; but, I promise you that for every feature X, there is some player A who will quit merely due to the existence of X.
18 Mar, 2012, Cratylus wrote in the 45th comment:
Votes: 0
I think that by focusing on 10% of Lyanic's prediction, y'all are tacitly agreeing with the other 90%.

Whyncha just agree with him on that and say somethin like "I get the rhetorical tool you employed about that 1 guy quitting, and it sounds exaggerated to me, but it's a valid point that some people are just unreasonable and it's worth taking that into account."

It's liek you guys LIKE fightin.

-Crat
19 Mar, 2012, David Haley wrote in the 46th comment:
Votes: 0
plamzi said:
If you're not sure what people are saying, then consider that maybe you need to re-read their post before calling them silly. If you still don't get their point, then try not to assume they're arguing that the earth is flat. And finally, when you try to pull a super-obvious straw man on a reasonably smart person, don't try to feign ignorance when they bust you.

Hello? Yes, this is pot.

:smile:
19 Mar, 2012, Deimos wrote in the 47th comment:
Votes: 0
The simple truth of it is that if a player cares enough, s/he will customize your game's colors to suit personal tastes whether you like it or not. Trying to control the look and feel of your game is understandable, but stop and ask yourself if your personal preference for magenta room names is worth the potential loss of players who don't care enough (which, incidentally, is likely to be quite a few if your color scheme sucks, or you allow customization server-side, but your default sucks).

I say pick your battles as a game owner. Text color just isn't one of those things worth standing up to players over, IMO.
19 Mar, 2012, Hades_Kane wrote in the 48th comment:
Votes: 0
Deimos said:
I say pick your battles as a game owner. Text color just isn't one of those things worth standing up to players over, IMO.


This was part of my point as well, though coming at it from a different angle.

As a coder, I pick my battles as far as what features I feel are worthwhile or will overall add something to the game. I think it would be a vast minority of the players that would care to customize their color, and the time spent on appealing to a very small percentage of players or potential players could be better spent building a new area or adding in some other feature that may more likely be used by more people.

I have been considering having a few different modes for display anyhow, though, most of it has been centered around compressing what I can in combat to reduce spam. Our rounds aren't static like a traditional Diku, we have broken it apart where every actor in combat has their own round speed, so when you are in a group fighting a group of mobs, it can get pretty bad. I figure things like seeing your allies or even enemies evading combat strikes through things like dodge and parry, seeing your prompt every instance when there hasn't been any change in hp or mp, and reduce combat strikes to something simple like "You damage [56] a newbie orc." (or something where all combat damage indicators fall in a column), and other such things could help eliminate some of the spam.

I suppose having a third option for color besides just off and on (probably a 'low' setting) wouldn't be that bad. Stripping the color out of room descriptions and defaulting them to dark white and maybe putting the room titles either black or dark cyan, and giving the who list, score sheet, and other config menus a similar dark white / black scheme wouldn't be too bad. It would allow all of the non critical information to be bland with anything that needs attention standing out either with another color or just using bright white.

I think color customization isn't a bad idea, I just don't think the payoff for full customization is worth the time to do it, and I do stand by my "I want to dictate the mood" mentality… but I think a mid point in color options would be an acceptable compromise between the two thoughts.
19 Mar, 2012, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 49th comment:
Votes: 0
Hades Kane said:
I think color customization isn't a bad idea, I just don't think the payoff for full customization is worth the time to do it

What would you call full customization ? There are not that many things to configure in the first place, aren't they ? Exits, room desc, people objects, communication channel, then ?
19 Mar, 2012, David Haley wrote in the 50th comment:
Votes: 0
I don't understand why people are saying this is such a hard feature to add. Even if your fixed color scheme isn't designed properly to begin with, it's very easy to add a simple map that translates color type to actual color. (Your hard coded scheme should use a map anyhow, in case you want to change it!) And it's not like there's a bazillion places that text gets sent to the player.

I fully agree that there is always a payoff-to-cost ratio to consider, but it tweaks me to have people talk of this like some big endeavor to implement.

Hades_Kane said:
I think it would be a vast minority of the players that would care to customize their color,

I'd be curious to know if you have data about this, or this is just your suspicion. If you poke around online for custom text coloring, it's not that uncommon (see DAoC or WoW as examples).

Hades_Kane said:
Stripping the color out of room descriptions and defaulting them to dark white and maybe putting the room titles either black or dark cyan, and giving the who list, score sheet, and other config menus a similar dark white / black scheme wouldn't be too bad. It would allow all of the non critical information to be bland with anything that needs attention standing out either with another color or just using bright white.

Frankly, if you're going to have this level of customization, then you might as well have full customization, because you cannot do what you suggest here without having the code under the hood to customize it anyhow.
19 Mar, 2012, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 51st comment:
Votes: 0
Guess I am a minority, but the first thing I do in a mud is finding a way to differentiate descriptions, exits, objects and mobs through colors.
If not available then I leave, cause I consider very painful to have to do this work while the server is in the best position to actually make a difference between then.
For the color scheme I concur I dont really care as I redefine the colors in my client to the ones I like and am used to. But I can only do it if the server provide a way to actually make a difference between all of these (usually with colors)
19 Mar, 2012, Hades_Kane wrote in the 52nd comment:
Votes: 0
room titles
room descriptions
exits
objects
characters in the room
affect flags
border color on the who list
border color on the score sheet
unhighlited color in the score sheet
highlighted color in the score sheet
damage you take
damage you deal
dodge/parry indicator
every world map tile
border color on the config menu
highlighted color on the config menu
unhighlighted color on the config menu
sent tell color
reply tell color
ooc channel (border and text)
ic channel (border and text)
music channel (border and text)
question/answer channel (border and text)
auction channel (border and text)
arena channel (border and text)
clan channels (border and text)
group talk (border and text)
say (border and text)
osay (border and text)
yell (border and text)
info channel (border and text)
scan command
identify on an auction
auction info
items in shops
item quantity in shops
item level in shops
item border color in shops
item category in shops

I could keep going, but work is about over and this was just what I could think of off of the top of my head. That and more would be what I would consider full color customization.

I don't see how going in and adding values to each and everyone one of those along with the code to configure and load each instance of those would be anything but a headache for something I don't really think would be widely used (which is based on my suspicion, from personal experience, discussion with others, and the fact that color customization hasn't been brought up by anyone ever to me or any of the other staff members in the 6+ years of development).
19 Mar, 2012, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 53rd comment:
Votes: 0
Indeed that is going into an extreme.
19 Mar, 2012, Deimos wrote in the 54th comment:
Votes: 0
@Hades: The fact that no one's requested it is hardly a good indicator of how popular it would be if you implemented it. I'd wager you'd get quite a surprising result if you pollled your players about it. I mean, it's totally alright if you just don't want to, because that's all the reason you need, but don't make such baseless assumptions. :-p
19 Mar, 2012, Lyanic wrote in the 55th comment:
Votes: 0
Hades_Kane said:
room titles
room descriptions
exits
objects
characters in the room
affect flags
border color on the who list
border color on the score sheet
unhighlited color in the score sheet
highlighted color in the score sheet
damage you take
damage you deal
dodge/parry indicator
every world map tile
border color on the config menu
highlighted color on the config menu
unhighlighted color on the config menu
sent tell color
reply tell color
ooc channel (border and text)
ic channel (border and text)
music channel (border and text)
question/answer channel (border and text)
auction channel (border and text)
arena channel (border and text)
clan channels (border and text)
group talk (border and text)
say (border and text)
osay (border and text)
yell (border and text)
info channel (border and text)
scan command
identify on an auction
auction info
items in shops
item quantity in shops
item level in shops
item border color in shops
item category in shops

I could keep going, but work is about over and this was just what I could think of off of the top of my head. That and more would be what I would consider full color customization.

This. Certain people in this thread seem to be operating under the mistaken assumption that color is only used in a couple places, and all the text in those places is the same color. Yes, that would be easy to provide full customization for. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. It is not always a trivial thing to implement. Which leads into the next point…

Hades_Kane said:
I don't see how going in and adding values to each and everyone one of those along with the code to configure and load each instance of those would be anything but a headache for something I don't really think would be widely used (which is based on my suspicion, from personal experience, discussion with others, and the fact that color customization hasn't been brought up by anyone ever to me or any of the other staff members in the 6+ years of development).

Also this. Except, in my case it's 10+ years of development that no one has ever brought it up.
19 Mar, 2012, Runter wrote in the 56th comment:
Votes: 0
I think, and I don't mean this in a slight in any way, priorities change when you have a small player base. It's way easier to poll every active player when the count is say 10-50. It's more difficult when you have to count the people you want to attract, or an established huge player base. It's harder to determine why your player base isn't larger, too, since you often can't poll the people who didn't stick around. They almost may not know the definitive reason they left even if you could, but I'd wager that a sensible color scheme (not really the customization part) is a contributing factor for some people. My suggestion would be if you want vibrant colors to just make it an option, but to make the conservative approach of just highlighting information with solid and consistent colors the default configuration.
20 Mar, 2012, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 57th comment:
Votes: 0
Lyanic said:
This. Certain people in this thread seem to be operating under the mistaken assumption that color is only used in a couple places

Useful colors (the one that actually provide an information, borders is not one of them) are in few places. It is definitely not a mistaken assumption.
Coloring and providing each channel a configure color option is about 20 lines of code if you did your job correctly
Everything concerning objects, moviles, flags, also should not be hard at all to consistently code, ediousbut definitely not hard at all.
And you can modify it when you go after a code part. Unless your code is the spghetti kind, everything that deal with object presentation should be in less than 2 or 3 methods.
Data/presentation separation is a basic pattern.
20 Mar, 2012, Dean wrote in the 58th comment:
Votes: 0
It really doesn't matter how easy colour customisation is to add - it is time spent adding a feature which could be better spent elsewhere, in my opinion. In 10+ years I've never seen a player once suggest or ask for it and while this doesn't mean that it isn't something some people want, the level of importance/care they are placing with it is quite low.
20 Mar, 2012, Rarva.Riendf wrote in the 59th comment:
Votes: 0
Dean said:
It really doesn't matter how easy colour customisation is to add - it is time spent adding a feature which could be better spent elsewhere

That is something you can do when you go modifying a method, very progressively.
And for user care…give them more power over others players/mobs it is all they want anyway…so sure colors is not in their 'priorites'
20 Mar, 2012, Deimos wrote in the 60th comment:
Votes: 0
Again with multiple people citing years of players "not asking for a feature" as some kind of indicator that said feature would somehow be ill-received or unused. I really don't understand this line of thinking at all.

I posit that the vast majority of features in your respective games weren't requested by players. I also posit that all three of you have introduced at least one such feature and had it turn out to be quite popular.

People don't always know what they want before you give it to them. Apple made a killing off that very premise.
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