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-   -   Nodeka: prospectives from a blind player (http://www.topmudsites.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7647)

sorressean 04-01-2017 11:05 AM

Nodeka: prospectives from a blind player
 
I've posted some of this on reddit here:
This is more enlightening because you can see some of the appologists come out of the woodwork, but I want to write an actual review.

When I started playing Nodeka, the first thing i noticed perhaps was the vast amount of spelling issues, typos and other problems on the website. All of the classes looked fairly unorigenal, and would say something like "This race is the strongest in the game," but it would say that for other races that were strong. It didn't provide much information and didn't really say what set the races apart so much, so I was forced to just choose one and go with it.
Once I got into the game, I started playing and found a lot of fun stuff. I really like the newbie area quests, as they teach you the basics of the mud, which is important because some of the commands have a slightly different syntax from what most would be used to. Once I finished that, I started exploring and in general having fun. It was grindy, I can do grindy, the people were in general pretty helpful.

I started running into issues when I stumbled on a help file for bots and bot checks. Apparently the solution to insuring that people aren't botting is to display an ascii letter/phrase on the screen, which can be inverted, turned sideways, upside down, etc. You have to enter the term it gives you. Not only does this sound really hard and inaccurate (phone mudding, anyone), but there's a whole help file that says "This letter will never be shown, this letter will look like this," etc. Also from the little print I know, I can only imagine what happens if you get an M or a W and it's upside down. With this said, I am a totally blind player and have all hell with ascii art, for pretty obvious reasons. My screen reader reads things left to right, so it would essentially start reading it left to right character by character and not be able to come close to figuring out what the actual letter is. I asked on newbie and I was told to get in touch with the main admin, who is Justin.

So I did, expecting that like most other places with these barriers he'd say no problem, disable it for me and I could go on happily playing. I pretty much planned on wasting an entire weekend on this mud, so I was looking forward to it and hoping I didn't hit a botcheck in the meantime.
So I was a bit shocked later when I received an email that basically said we can do this for you, but we require a photo ID. With further investigation, not only do they require a photo ID, but they also require a doctor's note that says I am actually legally blind and do require this to play a mud.

Now imagine for a second that in order to play a mud, you need to send a copy of your photo ID when most others don't have to, and you also need to go make a doctors appointment, have them somehow send over this data with more personal information on it. i'm sorry, but I'm not going to pay for an appointment just to play a mud. I don't even have to jump through these hoops to take a guide dog into a restaurant.

While I fully understand that this may not be an issue for sighted folks, Nodeka is basically excluding a huge community of people who would otherwise be interested in the game as one of the few online games we can play. If the admin is going to go this far just to prevent bots, it's not unlikely that you'll run into issues as well.

AldoRaines 04-01-2017 02:47 PM

Re: Nodeka: prospectives from a blind player
 
Why do they hate blind people?

sorressean 04-01-2017 03:11 PM

Re: Nodeka: prospectives from a blind player
 
I don't think they -hate- blind people, I think in general the admin is re ignorant and misguided and has some overinflated ideas of his mud and what he should or shouldn't be able to ask for.

AldoRaines 04-02-2017 02:34 AM

Re: Nodeka: prospectives from a blind player
 
I understand. I just can't understand why a mud admin would hate blind people so much that he wouldn't try to figure out a way to get their business.


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