Shouts

Kui

I was sitting here thinking, one of the things I've noticed and complained privately (by clans, tells, etc) is the lack of 1 v 1 interraction between factions. I can fondly remember being a young achaean and shouting dumb things, and anyone whos been around as long as I have will agree that shouts were way out of hand, but what I was getting at was it used to be a great way to develop rivalries, and conflict between factions.

We all take oaths when we join a house or city to defend, uphold the.. whats the word. virtues? I can remember shouting something as dumb as "Shallam sucks" and someone else would shout "Name *whatever your shout voice was*? As an Infernal at the time Malaclypse would then tell someone to go deal with it, and boom. Rivalry begun. sometimes you'd get raped by someone way out of your league in combat, but a lot of times it brought people of equal might and ability together.

Obviously shouts need to be watched. no one wants to see or hear something as stupid as a shout about how someone likes pie, and the other nonsense that used to be shouted, and of course I am aware of the rams horns located around the world but no one really wants to blow a goat just to shout. As a channel that is and was intended for RP use, it should be more widely available and monitored. Hopefully after a few people lost their ability to shout, and standards were placed it would be an effective channel to use

Eld

If you're going to put something up on a channel that everyone (or the few people who aren't deaf or who have aural earrings) can hear, it really ought to be better thought out than "Shallam sucks". Restricting shouts by requiring you to go to a ram's horn (or buy an artefact horn, or get level 100) provides at least some minor incentive to put some effort into not sounding like an idiot when shouting. Not that that really does much to improve the quality, but failing that, reducing the quantity is the next best thing.

Bluef

You're right @Kui shouts are underused today for roleplay. When I was younger, it was really common for the ritualists to head over to a horn, pay a little gold, and finish their rite with a big, loud ending. @Flair was also fond of shouting prophesy and doomsayings long before Apollonia got into the act. I can remember sporadic month-long shouting wars between divine and mortals alike (@Reznik & @Estach had one particularly memorable one during the lollipop war). 

I've had some very disappointing experiences trying to rectify this lack of shouts in the realm myself. When I've shouted things at certain people or factions, a divine has chosen to respond via denizen. That just makes it appear as though the person initially shouting shouldn't have been doing so, in my opinion. I would have much rather had direct player to player interactions inspired, which was the goal. 

Cardan

If you want to generate RP opportunities, more often than not, it's going to take a little effort. In this case (auto)walking up to a ram's horn is your burden.

We've tried relaxing the restrictions and allowing everyone to shout from anywhere before, but this invariably goes from the initial decent use of the ability through a rapid degeneration of "No you do", "LOL ur mom", "that's what she said" to the point where the ability gets removed again.

Not something we're looking at changing position on at this stage.

Sarapis

Not to override Cardan, but we talked about this a bit more behind the scenes, and may run an experiment here. I, personally, largely agree with @Kui.