MedievaLands Forums

Just a few ideas. I'm not sure if these are possible to implement or how much effort/time it would take and if it's worth it to do so. These are just some ideas I've come up with while playing a game and interacting within a community I'm not fully familiar with yet. I'll respectfully leave the rest up to Zane, the dev, to decide. I may add more to this thread in the future. Anyone, please feel free to comment and discuss these ideas.

-A 'Help' section in the Bulletin Boards. I know the 'General Discussion' board is being used for this, but it doesn't feel quite right for asking in-depth questions about the game and helping other players, particularly new players. It would better divide the 'general' topics from the 'help' topics.

-Guild Specific Chat Group. A more permanent chat posting for leaving notes to other members of a particular guild who may not be online at the moment. Basically could be placed in another tab in the guild section, maybe just to the right of the 'Roster' tab. Members of a particular guild can chat, leave notes, instructions, try to arrange a party, ask for help, etc. Whatever is posted in this guild chat would be permanent and won't disappear when all players are offline or afk.

-Character Notebook. A simple, private notebook for each character. A player can use it to set reminders of where they are at in the game/dungeon, make notes on what goals they want to accomplish, keep a journal of tasks completed, or even personal roleplaying writings, etc. The notebook could be accessible in both the Dungeon and in the Guild Hall.

-Each Lockpick and Unique Key/Lockpick could have a very distinguishable appearance for easier inventory managment, basically knowing what you have at a glance. Key managment can be bit of a headache in early game, especially with all those rune keys. Example: a Blue Lockpick could appear blue in inventory - Lava Key could be visually distinguished from Thieves Key.

--more later--

Edited May 4, 2020

Hail Lokkrinn! Thanks for these ideas.

I think adding distinguishable graphics for the lock picks would be easiest to do, and a benefit to players as you point out. Perhaps this could be part of the new treasure tables that are slated to be added.

A character notebook might be an interesting addition. Where would the interface for this notebook live, and how would it be accessed? Adding new interfaces is one of the hardest things to do in programming - you need to design the interface, the underlying data model, the way the data model is controlled, and then hook up the interface object with all the creation/destructions routines required for those objects. Not to persuade you that I wouldn't do this - just to make it clear that it's a harder thing to do than replacing item graphics.

I'm hesitant to add permanent chat records for any group because of the possibility of abuse. If someone says something upsetting in chat, it goes away as soon as you leave the room (or game in case of global and guild chat). If I allowed permanent chat records, I'd need to add some kind of moderation capability, and that would require adding an interface for the moderation. I think this would be a hard interface to add.

We used to have a help board, but I found that it only received one request for help in 11 months - more often, people went to the other more-read boards to ask for help. I'm happy to add it again if there is more need or a way to drive people to it. Perhaps, as new features are added, there will be more need for help.

Hail Zane and thanks for the helpful response!

I kind of figured adding graphics to keys/lockpicks would be the easiest task.

For the Notebook - In the Dungeon UI it could be accessed via a button right next to the "Trash Bin" button (the spot where the "Quest Item Stash" used to be). In the Guild Hall UI it could be accessed via a button under the "Deeds" button. The notebook itself could maybe function like a bulletin board thread with posts, but just private rather than public and each character would have it's own unique notebook to use. You already have the interface for making threads and posts, perhaps it could just be reused for the notebook? Just thoughts.

Permanent guild chat posts is probably not a good idea I suppose. Constant moderation is a difficult task, then adding another interface for it on top of that doesn't seem worth it. I didn't think about the potential of chat being abused. My bad.

If the community is perfectly fine with the "General Discussion" board being used for asking questions and helping players then that's great! I just wasn't sure if there needed to be a seperate board for that or not since I've seen that on other forums.

Thanks again!

Edited May 5, 2020