|
I definitely agree with the sentiment that gameplay needs to balance with realism. I played a mud where you had to practice to improve your skills, but they imped something called skillrot. Meaning that your skills decayed over time if you didn't continuously practice them. If you took a few days' time out to rp or just chat, you'd lose hours and hours of skill development. The admins absolutely refused to alter or remove skillrot, even though the players all hated it and loudly and continuously said so. Did skillrot make the game more realistic? Maybe. But I've yet to meet a player who liked skillrot or thought it improved gameplay. I'm sure most of us have stories like this about some feature or other.
As for tells, I just wanted to comment on the best ways I've ever seen global channels handled icly. I'm not sure if they still do this, but when I played Dragonrealms, they had these helms/headsets of telepathy. I'm not sure where they came from- I just know they cost a #### of a lot of money and I was too new to be able to afford them so I didn't worry about it. But basically the helms enabled tells- you could "think" to other people who were wearing helmets.
In the aforementioned mud with skillrot, we had blue gems you bought in a particular shop in one city. You could hold this gem and use it to 'gemtell' other characters, but it also required mana to use.
Both these systems have two advantages:
1. They restrict the use of tells/globals to older, more experienced chars which one hopes would cut down on abuse by nitwits, although not necessarily. (In some cases this can backfire, like with the blue gems...older players would teleport to the island and buy blue gems as a favor to newbies a lot of times. If you have a level-based equipment system you can solve this by restricting the level of the item.)
2. They provide an in-character explanation for the ability to talk to others mentally across distances. You could also possibly restrict the ability to particular classes that are more mentally attuned- or make communication possible only among people who have tuned their gems to each other. Or you could make use of the devices a trainable skill. There are a lot of ways to set it up.
Rhakshai
|