Ah, but you already mentioned that your game doesn't have policing.
Self-policing only works when there is also some absolute level of policing to back it up.
Players can tell each other how to behave, but sooner or later you'll get two players disagreeing, and you'll then need some authority that can decide what the game expectations are. And potentially enforce the expectations.
Without that authority, the players will each do their own thing and just disagree, and the self-policing will break down as more and more other players also buck the trend.
I am confident players would self-police descriptions and not put ascii images or log files, because I know that if a player did that they would be corrected by the other players, and if they refused to change they would be referred to staff who'd insist on the change.
What I'm not confident on is that they would self-police to a more subtle degree. I suspect we'd get a lot of "stunningly beautiful" characters, each with descriptions trying to outdo the next.
As a related question, do you guys have any tools to help make dynamic descriptions easier?
In ICO we can drop code into the descriptions, and use that to make dynamic content. We can also display properties stored in the object. But we also have "tags" that I pre-prepare for our staff.
An example is <quality>
So if a builder writes: A rucksack. <quality>
then it would display as "A rucksack. It is good quality."
It's a useful shortcut because a lot of items have quality ratings.
We also have seasons (which change automatically) as well as time of day, and have tags to use them in the descriptions. For example:
A small clearing in the woods<winter>, covered in a thick layer of snow</winter>. <summer>You hear the song of birds in the trees.</summer> <night>The clearing provides a welcome patch of moonlight in the otherwise pitch-dark forest.</night>
As you can see, it doesn't take any coding skills to make a rather dynamic description. As long as the writer is using the pre-prepared tags. Do you know of any other tricks or ideas to help writers easily make dynamic descriptions? I'm always eager to make their workload lighter and give them more options
