Communication While Phased

Feral

I apologize if this topic has been discussed previously, I was not able to find anything relevant when doing a forum search.

I love phase, I hate the workarounds people use to communicate while phased. I hate using messages to get around the fact that you can not do regular communication while phased. I find the whole thing to feel very OOC. One can also use the HISTORY command to get read access to channels, which feels like a hack. I have no doubt there are other ways around the communication blocks as well.

Before I went dormant years ago it was also getting rather common to use OOC methods to communicate (the old Dawnstriders used to have an AIM chatroom set up) which I really hated.

I understand why communication is limited while phased but I would love to see a balanced change put in place so I could actually use in character methods. This would also reduce the incentive to resort to out of game workarounds.

1. New active ability which has two settings. The first setting would add a minor increase to the endurance cost of phase but allow you to read your city/house channels. The second setting for a large increase in endurance drain would also allow you to receive tells, party, and clan channels. (phase used to allow read only access to unphased comments made to channels in the past, I assume someone finally got around to fixing that bug).
2. New ability that for a fixed endurance cost each time would allow you to send a tell while phased. Perhaps for an even larger cost you could communicate on a channel.
3. Disable the ability to send/read non-system messages while phased.
4. Disable the HISTORY command while phased.

Optional : New artifact that would reduce/eliminate the endurance drain on these abilities Instant ROI for the coding effort.

I have less experience with the other phase like abilities (blackwind?) but perhaps this could be adopted for them as well.

I wanted the communities feedback before I submitted an IDEA. I am the first to admit that I am completely ignorant of the current meta-game environment and how this might change things.

P.S. If all this post does is result in some more loopholes being closed with no replacement I hope the serpent cabal does not take it out on feral in game, he really is mostly harmless.

Antonius

Messages ARE in character, so just change your perception.

Cesarina

The idea of a message never seemed like a super IC thing to me... I mean characters aren't mobile phones, we don't have some voicemail we can check. I always thought of letters as semi equivalent to messages with messages being the OOC ish method and letters being the IC ish method. I may be wrong, I am probably wrong, in fact I very often tend to be wrong (about almost anything), however that's how I have always viewed it.

Achimrst

I always thought of messages as secret mail.

Sylvance

Cesarina said:

... characters aren't mobile phones, we don't have some voicemail we can check...

No, we're magical beings capable of telepathic communication, vanishing whenever we start to write something and shouting loud enough to be heard across a continent

Strata

The IC nature of phase is that you're phased out of reality. So communication with the normal reality the rest of Sapience lives in is very limited. Messages, as @Cesarina said, are not really IC to me either, but are most often used for serpents to communicate with players whom cannot phase.

The ideas are good but I think something like this would be much better as a new artefact instead of added abilities. Something like this:

Create a new artefact that is very similar to Earrings of Sinope (each person must wear one half of it, and it may or may not be paired for use only by two specific characters). When the artefacts are worn, an interdimensional link is created between the wearers to allow them to communicate as if they are both on the same plane. For best ROI, this artefact could also be made to work for communicating between Bopalopia/UW/Annwyn/Nish and also work for blackwind/astralform (so it benefits non-serpents as well)

OOC comms (skype/aim/teamspeak/mumble/etc) are lame. Period. Still - it wouldn't make sense for IRE to simply open up lines of communications between realities/planes in order to discourage the few who resort to such lameness - unless it could be capitalized on in the form of a limited use (only works between two characters) artefact.

Feral

I  would be fine with your idea as well @strata and I like how it can be applied more generally. I really do miss being able to have read only access to channels while phased though.

I find messages to be one of those realities of the game that I have to just deliberately ignore for immersions sake, much like the rift. Using them to get around communication restrictions has always felt like a grey area to me. I do my best to maintain all of my "written" communications with other characters in letters.

I fully acknowledge that I might be in a small minority who feel this way.

Xith

Yeah Tonguestud of Sinope. So you limit tell-triggered backstabs to pairs of two people at a time.

Taraus

Achimrst said:

I always thought of messages as secret mail.

I always thought of it kind of like that, only more like leaving a post-it note in a place where only the recipient would find it.