Messages

Nice, we should work on getting that system into BM aswell at some stage, would be pretty chill.

Either your maths is off or mine is, because at the age of 77, implying the 0.1% has been applied to every turn for the past 17 ingame years, there is a 146% mortality rate on that. By my reckoning you get 64% chance of living for 6 IRL months, which is roughly 4.5 in game years. You would have roughly a 50% chance of surviving past 66 and a 40% chance by 67. Infact, according to the statistics you shouldn't be able to survive past 72.

I'm not saying thats a bad thing, because 12 ingame years is still 16 months, which is pretty reasonable and would provide the right amount of turn over. Thats after of course, 4ish years of previous gameplay. Setting a "cap" of 5 years and 4 months per character wouldn't be a bad thing really. Of course there are always statistical anomalies so there could be someone who cheats the stats time and time again, even possibly to the age of 90, like how people in real life can get to 120ish even though most die in there 70's and 80's.

To be honest it would nice to be amazed by someones age in this game beyond the "Really? That person has been playing that character, in the same realm for 9 IRL years? Holy Crap" type thing. If someone cheated the mortality rate until they were 90, stats would say they should have died 2 and a half times over. That would evoke the same awe as if you met a 110 year old in real life. Like you could spawn roleplays about "That leader of such and such who just won't die, I wonder why the gods favor him so much".

Also with this mortality percentage you could add a bigger chance of death at the hands of an infiltrator for older people. I mean, I have seen some fit old people, but I just can't see a 90 year old fighting off a 30-40 year old in a sword fight. Not if the younger one is trained to kill. I mean yeah a battle hardened old general may not be easy to take down because of experience, but even someone in there 70's-80's is pretty frail.

I wasn't saying a 1% chance of death at 19, I was saying if the arbitrary "age of mortality" is 60, then start the 1% a turn then.

Age is about how a player feels but in optimal conditions, from what I have read it would be approx 84 turns per year, or 42 days. This changes with how easy or hard of a life the player leads. If a bureaucrat has an easy life he could live  5 years real time, BEFORE he even gets a 0.001% per turn chance of death. That is a small turn over, except for already old players.

That also means, that per game year that person has a 0.084 percent chance of death in the first year. In fact he has a 99.5% chance of living till hes 65.

The turn over would be far, far to low to even bother with. You would have to be really REALLY unlucky to die. Not even worth coding unless its a significant chance, like 0.5 or 1 percent per turn for someone over 60.

In my opinion, if you play from a young noble then its anywhere between 4 and 5 years real time before you get to this point. A 2% chance of dying each day is not a far cry. This is 1013 for petes sake, it really should be 40 because life expectancy for nobles was like 35-45, less for peasants. 50 was considered ancient, and we have a ruler in Perdan who is currently 90 in game. People barely live to 90 now, let alone in 1013.

Well then it could be a great boon to the game, and wouldn't really cost that much in terms of time.

If the bug code was emailed (or some other way we could all have access to it), then we could use the IRC to come together and discuss. If we started with that and built from there, then we could just take the rest as it comes.

Why don't you find some easyish bugs that need fixing, make an IRC channel for the four of us, and just let us know what its meant to do, yadda yadda, and the four of us can work on it. If we fix it, then you have a bug fixed, and it cost you a little time. If not, you lost a little time and no bug fixed.

However, if out of this experience you put 4 people in, and one comes out as any semblance of a coder, even if its just for fixing bugs, you have doubled the current battlemaster task force.

If you are willing to take people with no coding experience and show them the ropes then I will put my hand up, as I have basic knowledge of PHP (done some bug fixing and making code fit) and have had quite a lot of experience with HTML and CSS. I have never worked with Doctrine, reading up on it now, and I have never made a full project out of PHP on my own, but I have altered and fixed other peoples code basically, and I know how databases work and what not. I also have computer technician and troubleshooting experience, experience running support services and I have run and configured quite a few forums/blogs/basic websites for people.

I have to use reference sheets quite a bit, because I don't often remember exact syntax right away, but after doing it for a while its usually in there for good. I would love to try out for this probation type deal, fix some bugs etc, and with some guidance I may be able to get up to scratch and start pulling my weight.

Let me know what I need to do to get in on this and I'll give it a shot.

Well having it so you can write individual articles and save them for later would be amazing, then when you have enough you could copy and paste them to someone (or work with a permission system), he could drag and drop them all and you would be done. Then I guess it would just be a matter of displaying them. Even a simple message system could be used to let people know there is a new issue depending on the realm of the people who wrote it. So if the main author is from X and the editor is from Y, both X and Y realm get a little message saying "The XY Times has released a new issue. Read it here."

If you created a prototype then it could be beta'd in game for a while, see how people like it and if there are any major flaws. If there arent any then leave it, if there are spend an hour and fix them.

Hmm that would make a good reason to join the guild, make it a bit more fun, professional and permanent, and if you wanted to get a large spread you would have to make good content to convince people to build a lot of your guild houses.

If a custom newspaper platform made in PHP was created then yes Juane, you could.

A simple variable in PHP saying if they paid the fee or not would be enough to get access, that should be easy enough, and you could even have it that you bought certain issues of a paper and not others.

A cool idea then would be to make each issue 2 gold and have 1 gold of that go to the publication house (could be like a guild) and 1 go to the "delivery man" so that money could be made to upgrade the paper, increase distribution etc (maybe even go toward regions, which then could become famous for their publishing houses). Could be an interesting new feature, and would encourage people to make good papers so they could keep publishing. If the paper doesn't sell, the nobles would have to support it from their own pocket etc. It would give people something extra to use their money on, keep news in the game, and be a good talking point.

Seems like a lot of work, but it would bring some variety to the game, and give an interesting take on economy.

Hell this could even be extended, so that guilds once they were a certain size could create "guild newsletters", kind of like a mini paper that contains information pertinent to the guild and they could sell for 1 gold to members (because the messenger system for guild members is already in place). It would give updates to members, create a reason to get into a continent wide guild (cheaper news), and present it in a fun, roleplaying type way.

And hey if a realm didn't want to use the system, they just don't build a publication house.

Might be complicated but it would be fun, and would answer a lot of questions, keeping news ingame etc, and really, it wouldn't be game breaking, and would open continent wide news up to those who don't wanna join a guild.

Tom I don't think you looked at the examples and what I'm getting at.

Its not really like a "blog", and it can use all of the wiki formatting. So you could get a template, pop it in and have it as issue one. Each ISSUE would go to the top, with maybe small blurbs (formatted nicely and in character or whatever) if some important info comes up and needs to be talked about now, even though you don't have time for a full issue. You can still do the important info at the top of each issue yadda yadda (although i think your asking a little much, seeing as no one is doing newspapers right now, and any that have info are really incomplete because they take a lot of time.)

The point is, it would save 10min of the authors time doing the linking, it would be a nice way to specify writers and do collab work, it would be easier to monitor and a list of papers could then be linked from the front page, and the RSS and ATOM features would make it easier and likely attract more readers because they aren't having to physically check back all the time to see that there is a new issue.

Really, what have you got to lose by testing it out and seeing what the community comes up with. If you are expecting people to be pro journalists/editors your already aiming way to high. Also this saves people some time, and they can still go over the top and flashy with nice templates and such if that's what they so choose. Better to start of with something that is easy to use, lay down some guidelines, and see what people create.

In saying all of this, a custom solution would be good, and yes it could be sold. It would just be if people used it or not at that point.

If you read up on the extension, its not really like a simple blog, its like a easy system of linking wiki pages. Your letting bias towards a system cloud your thoughts.

Its a slightly more efficient way of doing the current newspaper system on the wiki. It could have the same amount of moderation and make it easier and quicker for people to publish news, which is a main complaint that people make when you bring up the newspapers, is that it takes so much time.

This could be the stand in for the local forums, with easier moderation and the added bonus of being roleplay.

Journalism is what you make it, if someone wants to make it "diary" like then your not going to have many readers anyway. But if someone can make more issues of a wiki newspaper because it wasnt such a chore, then it could be a a great boon. Also the RSS options, mean that you could get more readers, and have a higher retention, because a little notification is telling them there is another issue or breaking news, and they dont have to refresh the page each day to check for new issues.

Blogs aren't great, but since it uses all of the wiki functionality it could be a great asset.

As long as all of the posts can be formatted to look like a paper it could be an easier way of doing it, and having all the issues, or atleast all the recent ones on one page (with it easy to see the old posts too), it could put some more interest in the paper. I wouldn't mind bookmarking a few pages and reading the bi weekly paper or whatever.

Also a blog is good because if you are only interested in current goings on, it could show the last months worth of post. So between each issue there could be "breaking news" blurbs that could be sort of news as its happening events. Then there could be a full write up of those in the issues.

Not a perfect solution, but this isnt a perfect world. In a perfect world we would have a professional coder, ask for unpaid fulltime work because hes bored, so he could create us a fully custom battlemaster system with custom coded wiki and newspaper software etc.
This might be the next best thing, and it intergrates with our current system which means no extra links need to be added to the actual game, and it doesn't seem like it would be a huge amount of work to get running.

EDIT: Reading more into it even, since you can have collaborative "blog" posts it would be so much like a newspaper, much more than the current ones. Its not really even like a blog, in the traditional sense, and you can RSS or ATOM the newspaper (or all of them) to keep abreast of current affairs. Now if 2-3 realms on each island actually tried to make and maintain a newspaper (with this aswell, it would be possible to have a guild in game that is for a continent wide newspaper and have a collab project on the wiki aswell), then we could have 10-15 new newspapers, with semi regular newsupdates, with larger more comprehensive issues every now and again. Would be a great way to keep abreast of current affairs all over the battlemaster world, which seems to be the main reason people want to have the local forums anyway.

I agree with Valast wholeheartedly that the community needs to do more to bring more players in, and that the players need to try and bring more players in.

For me its like a shop. There are 2 reasons I would go into a shop. If I needed what it had, or if it had good advertising. Now for me, I barely even look at radio/tv/physical ads anymore, and only pay attention if they bring up something I had previously wanted. However, I am definitely likely to go into a shop, or try a restaurant/food joint if it was recommended to me, and I had even the slightest interest in the stores products. Word of mouth is an extremely powerful advertising tool.

The thing is, not a lot of people go looking for a roleplay heavy, medieval war simulator that is mostly text based. You would have to have quite a bit of previous interest in the subject, or see a review on it from a reviewer you liked to actually try it out. Currently we have Battlemaster on Facebook, but its extremely passive. Facebook is massive, but you still can't expect to just post things and have the masses arrive on your door step. Now if every player recommended the game to 10 people, even if they knew those people might not play, and you got a 1-10% conversion rate on those players, thats between 100-1500 new players. The games not big enough right now to pull, sustain and grow a player base by itself.

The Magistrates cases need to be made private. Whats the point in having dedicated volunteers, if everyone gets a say. May as well not have a council about it and put it up to a vote. From what I have seen the Magistrates have enough trouble being professional and decisive with their decisions anyway, without others muddying the waters.

Its not hard for someone to state their case, and if the magistrates want more info they can contact the defendant in game via the OOC and allow them to post their side of the story. Once both sides are presented the Magistrates can circlejerk about it all they want, without all the outside input, decide what is and isn't breaking the social contract etc and be done with it. Having every man and his grandma involved in a case, having a say, just muddies the water and makes bad blood.

The local forums can all go, it just brings up !@#$ about who started what war and why, and half the cases are because someone seemed to mix OOC from the forums and IRC and bring it ingame or vice versa. Roleplaying is about separating yourself from the character, not using it as a persona.

The helpline, Dev forums and roleplay forums could all be left, a long with anything that doesn't impact on Battlemaster, such as the other games forum. As long as those are moderated correctly then all is good.

The other thing about the forum is that the Dev's/Moderators/Magistrates are all volunteers (i believe) and they are not always professional. In all the times I have been a forum moderator/admin, there has always been one rule, no in-fighting. I understand people are all equal and what not, but when you see the Dev's openly disagreeing, either debatingly or almost aggressively with tom or another dev, it's a bad image. I don't know how the inner team mechanics work but from an outside observer it looks really bad, as if all the Battlemaster team does if fight with each other and circlejerk around issues. Its the same issue as with the magistrates. People can disagree, but its like a couple fighting about their bad sex life in front of their friends and family, its awkward and in bad taste.

Anyway thats my two cents.