On Mon, 29 Apr 1996, Sammy wrote:
> > The way they do it is by ramdonly erasing parts of messages and
> > substituting them with "x"'s, so "What radio station is this" Could be
> > read as "Wxxxt xxdxo xtxtxon xs xxis" for someone that has no idea of
> > the language (thus simulating in some way the way some languages can be
> > partly understood) to something like "Whax radxo statxxn ix txis" for
> > someone more versed (say, 90%) and to the full "What radio station is
> > this" for a 100% knowledge of the language. This could apply to read and
> > heard language.
>
> I've seen muds that do exactly that. The simple workaround that players
> learn is to write mail or whatever like this:
>
> WWWWWhhhhhaaaaaattttt rrrrraaaaaadddddiiiiiooooo etc etc..
>
And it'll send something like:
WxWxWxxhhhaxxxaxatxxtx rxrrxaaaxaxdxddxiiixiooxoo
How do I know it says "What radio"?! In extreme cases where they
know very little of the language it's just:
Wxxxxhhxxxaxxxxxatxxxt xxxxxaaxxxaxxxdxxiixxoxooo
How do I know what the last word is? Look at this way, in any
event, the players will look for a way to break the language system and
use it to cheat and not bother with language skills. I personally don't
know, but feel that players probably don't care so much about speaking
some elven rune dialect as they do about being able to backstab someone.
Overkill on encrypting languages is thus not far from most of the idealic
solutions.
> 4) Encourage bilingual players to come to your mud and use real languages
Eh, why? That's not game mechanics; that's just making it so that
people don't understand what other people are saying unless they actually
bother to get off their fat ass and do something but MUD (oh, don't take
offense, I use to power-MUD, so)... And then you have no logical
segregration of race/continent/d.o.b. within the MUD to fit this. No
offense intended, but enforcing rules in place of code is often a bad way
of doing anything -- especially since it often makes you look stupid (to
most MUD players who have never programmed in C before, you're incompitent
if you can't/won't do something they requset [eg., preventing corpse
looting with a rule instead of coding a prevention]). They often times
don't realize that RULES make it more flexible than hard code, nor do they
often realize the intricies of the code, they think because they can make
an area with OLC and write stupid little programs in BASIC or PASCAL that
they can make the most unbelievable MUD in the world, but, because they
don't know the first thing about getting a MUD up and running, they
complain to you.
This reminds me of the player who got me kicked off my site and
put up his own MUD on that site... Guess how many changes he made to his
MUD in the month that he was allowed to stay there? NONE, he spent all
his time trying to kiss up to me, appologizing for getting me thrown off
my site... EH, anywho, I'm going off topic. The point is, in some
places, rules don't substitute code and in other places, rules are better.
In the case of languages, rules are far from suitable.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 12/18/00 PST