Improvements to the Addiction System
Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2016 1:40 pm
So, I decided to get rid of a bunch of mushrooms last night by eating them (haha, whoops!), which resulted in my first experience with the addiction code, and holy crap is it spammy as hell! While I appreciate the fact that I'm being told the addiction has harmful effects, I'm literally being spammed once, sometimes twice, a minute with "Jules suffers from his addictions!"
Are these messages entirely necessary? The other messages (the ones that suggest how my character is feeling and how to RP the addiction) are fine -- they feel like affects, which is a familiar and fairly well-integrated system, and only occur every 10 minutes or so. (Keep in mind that this is my first exposure to this system and may not reflect the average experience, given that several mushrooms were eaten in a relatively short period of time.)
Proposed solution:
1) Get rid of the horrible "Soandso suffers from their addictions!" spam. It's incredibly distracting, and I don't feel inclined to RP while it's going on. It's so spammy that I feel like it's OOCly pressuring me to take action that I may not ICly want to take, rather than giving me outlets and direction for RP. Alternatively, make this messaging toggleable.
2) Give addictions an affect label (and/or flag) with a description to the effect of, "Soandso is suffering physically from their addictions over time." If players aren't already clued in by their prompt (e.g. if they don't have their health in their prompt and their prompt toggled on), the affect should nudge them to check the addiction helpfile and their health status, and they'll see that their health is suffering (HP going down, wounds occurring) while they continue to have withdrawal symptoms.
Are these messages entirely necessary? The other messages (the ones that suggest how my character is feeling and how to RP the addiction) are fine -- they feel like affects, which is a familiar and fairly well-integrated system, and only occur every 10 minutes or so. (Keep in mind that this is my first exposure to this system and may not reflect the average experience, given that several mushrooms were eaten in a relatively short period of time.)
Proposed solution:
1) Get rid of the horrible "Soandso suffers from their addictions!" spam. It's incredibly distracting, and I don't feel inclined to RP while it's going on. It's so spammy that I feel like it's OOCly pressuring me to take action that I may not ICly want to take, rather than giving me outlets and direction for RP. Alternatively, make this messaging toggleable.
2) Give addictions an affect label (and/or flag) with a description to the effect of, "Soandso is suffering physically from their addictions over time." If players aren't already clued in by their prompt (e.g. if they don't have their health in their prompt and their prompt toggled on), the affect should nudge them to check the addiction helpfile and their health status, and they'll see that their health is suffering (HP going down, wounds occurring) while they continue to have withdrawal symptoms.