[Poll] Rumors

[Geras]

HAHAHA WHAT

So the idea that Baz (the main programmer at the time) had was to use Markov's chain to string words together and spit them back out as random mob speech, drawing on in-game conversations as the input. In general it just spouted out nonsense plus fragments of sentences that people had said... regardless of if it was public conversation stuff or more private shady RP. This was around 2002?

[Niamh]

HAHAHA WHAT

So the idea that Baz (the main programmer at the time) had was to use Markov's chain to string words together and spit them back out as random mob speech, drawing on in-game conversations as the input. In general it just spouted out nonsense plus fragments of sentences that people had said... regardless of if it was public conversation stuff or more private shady RP. This was around 2002?

I am so sorry I missed this...

[galaxgal]

You know, a while back I was thinking, "What kinds of comedy would happen if someone tried to train a text generation AI on a corpus of TI logs?" But, besides my personal qualms with ever doing that, apparently we already have our answer.

Back on the topic at hand, my biggest worry with the new rumor system is how the 'rehashing' seems to discourage use of the system. While I didn't like how unaccountable the old rumor comment system felt, the overall system feels even worse here with such short comment 'chains', especially since the part of it that makes Bards feel different/special (being able to see 'stale' versions of a rumor) seems to so rarely come up. This is even with a much more active pbase, possibly due to the summer break!

[Starstarfish]

There are some positives and negatives to the update to the rumor system.

On the positive side, the change seems to have encouraged Bards to have more proper thematic control over rumors rather than it feeling so mechanical.

On the negative side, with rumor length expanded again, we are again getting paragraph long rumors for things that seem better suited for public boards, mail, or posted announcements than the rumor system. As that's super spammy in the middle of public scenes. IMHO shorter snippets are better to RP about. It also does seem to be encouraging against participation though whether that's the new format or the new expectations/policy I'm uncertain.

But there's been some pretty high-end RP about lately that people aren't really commenting on via rumors and I sort of feel like under the old system they would have been.