Improvements to the Addiction System

[Jules]

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.

[Rabek]

I believe the 'suffers' message indicates you're taking damage and even wounds from the system, unless they changed it. Which is an important thing to be notified about. It is spammy to an impossible level, though, I agree.

[Jules]

Yes, it was definitely notifying me of small drains to HP, but it was literally happening 1-2 times per minute, in addition to the messaging I was getting every 10 minutes informing me of the symptoms themselves.

I take it the spam is pretty bad regardless of tolerance level or how many doses were consumed?

[Rabek]

I was trying to build up tolerance to see how the code works. At like the second level of tolerance I decided the withdrawal was annoying and wanted to burn through it. Ended up hospitalized with the spam for like half a day and stuck at 1 hp for another week it felt like. I think they were going to revisit the system, but probably low priority.

I couldn't even RP or get treated because moving me from the triage room would have me 'die' again and teleport me back.

[Takta]

There's a totally different implementation of addiction code on the bugboard - it does, though, keep sliding down on priorities.

[Jules]

Okay! Good to know! Ignore my bitching, then. ^_^

[Temi]

Yeah, the current state does not work with new wounds. We've got a spec to fix all the issues, and make it better besides. Just a matter of getting it through the priorities list.