Walk To Command (Petition for Reversal)

Caelan

Youre in UK, yes Arch?  You known it should be asked "Houw?"

@Nicola - while I hold no hope you won't catch a rash of shit for posting because ..  well, people (and yeah I enjoy giving admin shit when it is things like promos and not making enough talismans/gems available) - but for what it is worth, thanks for the clarification, broken down Barney-style in Crayola. 

Is there a way to bring back the old WALKTO (for the masses. I rarely use it), while disabling the feedback message(s) - even if only during events?

Peak

Accipiter said:

You are acting like we should be happy for any scraps that might be thrown at us. Achaea has terrible customer service for anything that doesn't involve credits. There were super elementals on the fire plane left over from a GH for like a year that made several rooms instant death and would of taken all of a couple of minutes to get rid of, even if it was just sending an immoral toon to kill them manually. Left over stuff from events that don't do anything but confuse people. For a long time broken quests, trade guilds having wildly inconsistant standards.

If they can't be bothered to fix the easy stuff in the game why should they get the benefit of the doubt when they do stuff like this?

I found one on Tapoa, issued myself about it, embraced, and it was fixed before I was alive again.

Peak

And the "breaking the rules" I was referring to is the super easy auto-bashing it was used for.

Rino

Dear admin, 

I appreciate your explanation, and admit defeat. I'll just make do with what's left. 
It is  a tough year ahead, and adapting to embrace it. 

Meriet

It would at least be nice to have a little scan thing for denizens or something, to know you've done your work & not to keep wandering around every room for roaming enemies anymore. Something like:

scour for [buffalo]
"You scour the environs for signs of [buffalo]."
(2-3 second balance offset)
"You think there's about [12] [buffalo] left in this area." / "You're rather certain no [buffalo] remain in this area."

Or if it's used for an individual denizen:
"You surmise that [Zsarachnor] is somewhere nearby." / "You feel certain [Zsarachnor] is nowhere near."

Maybe have it be more accurate with your vision level, or something - if you haven't got any, good luck, if it's transcendent then pretty much 100% reliable.

You could even have fullsense access / sphinx artes give you more specific directions, like "to the east", or "at Atop a Hill, to the south" or whatever - only the most basic of 'pathfinding' to avoid the massive load that was there prior. Or maybe fullsense/sphinx artes would make it go to a couple other areas, rather than your specific one - say you're in Darkenwood, it would also scan Northreach, etc.

But even without specifics, just knowing 'x amount of y are still in the area' or 'x is *somewhere* nearby but we won't tell you where' would be a MASSIVE boon compared to the current situation of just... wandering massive areas over and over for moving enemies that aren't even worth much to fuss over unless they're tackleable in a time-reasonable manner.

(And in the case of Zsarachnor specifically, people trying to lead him to city gates and his tendency to instagib lesser players just makes him into a powerful weapon if you can never ever ever know where he is without walking into the room he's in.)

Walkto was just a bit too much quality of life to utterly be done with, *something* has to be done to fill the gap.

Astarod

Not gonna lie. Things not being dead constantly is a big QoL for me. I liked walkto, I'd be down for something, but I'm not really bothered. 

Can Nexus be given a command that pulls room # without coding investment?

Thaisen

Why are you so against scripting? The Mapdb package already has an alias called 'map info' that will give you this:

 

Cooper

Sooo are there any top bashers that stopped playing bashing or playing around the time the walk to change went in? Time to shame auto bashers.

Astarod

Cooper said:

Sooo are there any top bashers that stopped playing bashing or playing around the time the walk to change went in? Time to shame auto bashers.

Cooper stopped bashing and playing. 

Saonji

Cooper said:

Sooo are there any top bashers that stopped playing bashing or playing around the time the walk to change went in? Time to shame auto bashers.

Most didn't use walkto anyway. Walkto was better for reagent hunting, and glubbers/polyps. Not actual bashing out of areas.

eta: I guess also people who bashed knights/keepers/bodyguards in Moghedu, and left everything else alive, too.

Cooper

It sounds like you could actually do walk to sidhe581019 - the numbers always stayed the same, so much easier to auto bash.

Saonji

You could, yeah. But it's functionally no different to just walking to the room, which is a lot easier and less time-consuming to setup. It's a very small script, to get mudlet mapper to give you a list of rooms in the area, and use pathfinding to get an optimal path to cover all the rooms in the least amount of steps.

Personally I prefer manual pathing since it lets you cover the occasional time you miss a roaming mob, but yeah. Mudlet mapper already pretty much gives you all the tools needed to do it.

Accipiter

On high ping walkto was faster if you didn't use wormholes or a dash equivalent because it runs at the step limit so you didn't get the hasty message. Other than that and the ability to ping an area so you didn't find it empty I don't think walkto would have too much benefit over a client-side path finding system for non-roaming things like @Saonji says.

Swikaan

Overall this change is fairly useless. please reverse . Like who even remembers where Barakus is. 

Add the fact that nexus doesn’t support room numbers (I have no figured out a way to find and display a room number on Nexus), you are basically making the game highly unplayable

Chubbs

Nexus absolutely supports grabbing room numbers.

Zahan's MapDB package has a nicely displayed interface for pulling room numbers and searching through a database of room names for rooms you may want.

You can get the room number of any room using Nexus by standing in it, accessing the GMCP data, and parsing the data for the room number. Then you can display that however you want. That's essentially what the MapDB package does, with some extra features.

Here's a link to one of Zahan's github pages that has several of his nexus packages on it: https://github.com/AchaeaZahan/Nexus

ETA: In case you didn't know about it, Khaseem ported over Saonji's denizen location/landmark walking script: https://forums.achaea.com/discussion/comment/447128

Rino

hi, 

is it possible to request walkto function to some denizen per approval basis?

perhaps players can produce a list of denizens which we would like to walkto, and subject to admin's approval?

might be abable to balance adventurer's request and admin's burden. 

Shecks

Given the player feedback and the many valid points that have been made, it feels like the right answer is to soft-revert this and do the unpleasant work of removing NPCs that are a problem, and leaving all others alone.

I personally agree (and I think IRE was thinking this way) that WALK TO should not work for anything that 1) moves or 2) can be used to check for alive/dead for things like quests or renown.  This opens up WALK TO for abuse and spoils the experience in a bad way in many scenarios while also opening the door for automated questing which is definitely a bad thing (noting that there are still plenty of other ways to do this anyways).    Since this applies to maybe 5% of NPCs (probably far less) this appears to be a heavy-handed attempt to fix that without going through the trouble of sorting through thousands of NPCs to identify which should be fixed.  Perhaps theres a way to automate that, though (surely a script could just remove NPCs that meet certain criteria).

 Seems unarguable that things like ferries and such should be permitted.  There's also the somewhat obvious fact that this entire change will be pointless as soon as all the necessary scripts to replace it are populated, which will just give even more of an advantage to people with advanced systems / social networks with access to custom scripts, which newer players may not have.


There might also be more creative solutions like allowing WALK TO <npc> to work even if the NPC is dead or if it has moved.  Just set the WALK TO location to a fixed location regardless of NPC's actual location or being alive or not.  This gives the functionality that's needed without any opportunity for abuse.  You just walk to the location to find something is dead - or start your search for where it may have wandered off to, just like someone with mudlet mapper or manual walking would do.  (each NPC already has a field for room# that it spawns in - so easy solution would be to make WALK TO just walk to that room number regardless of its actual location or alive/dead state).


For what it's worth, I'm a 100% unbiased party.  I have probably used WALK TO <npc> less than 5 times in my life, and didn't have plans on changing that.  I mean to say, I have no interest in this being reverted, and I still thing it should be.

Tysandr

I was surprised when I discovered WALKTO existed as it is extremely costly to find paths for any one person alone, and that it was being done for everyone is insane.

Peldin

For Nexus users:

Make an alias for grabbing a room number.

Matching type: Begins with

Check the boxes for "Whole words only" and "Match case"

Under Actions, change from "Send a command" to "Show a notice"

In the box, type the following: @room_num @room_area

Here's a picture of my alias...

Peldin

For Nexus users:

Don't waste your credits for more landmarks. You can use a simple alias to walk to whatever room number you want.

Just make an alias to PATH TRACK <room number>

Picture below:

This is a little redundant as I could make "walk to mhunna" just "PATH TRACK 41018" but I use the "wt <number>" alias for other random rooms that I want to get back to quickly.

Caladbolg

So as an older player, I think walk to was a dumb idea to start with, but here's my suggestions since everyone else has given theres.

1:Make sure walk to works for certain mobs that you would need to walk too (I think it already does but someone said newbies had problems with it)

2: Change the walk to system to make it easier to disable walk to from effecting mobs at will, then in the future random events won't cause further problems.

3: Delete it from working with any mob. because we don't need it.

4:Return full use back to Caladbolg as he found out it was a thing 30 minutes before nerf and bashing is one of the most boring things i've ever done in my life.

5:Think about all the hardships Poor Caladbolg has had to go through, bashing without using walkto.

6:Seriously don't you like me? Why can't I be a cool dragon like everyone else.

7:Gare? I want Gare

And those are a few of the suggestions I feel would really make it a better system overall

(For the record I read part of the first page realized there was 7 pages and commented so if someone's already suggested giving full use back to Caladbolg I would rather just support them)

Darzo

filthy casuals and their WALK TO.