[...] if NPC1 says "Tell Frodo to give you to MacGuffin", then I think Frodo should respond to "Give me the MacGuffin", don't you? Or is that somehow brainless?
Emphasis my own. 'Nuff said.
Honestly, this is silly. Didn't it occur to you that it was more likely I had mistyped a fictional interaction than seriously expected that an NPC would instruct me to have another NPC give me to another NPC or to an object? As far as I've been able to tell, giving oneself to an NPC hasn't been implemented, but sounds rather kinky.
In other words, I have many times experienced stuff like:
NPC1 says
"Tell Frodo to give you the MacGuffin", and then
"Give me the MacGuffin", elicits no productive response, and neither does
"Give the MacGuffin to me", nor
"Give me MacGuffin", nor
"Give MacGuffin", nor
"about MacGuffin", nor
"NPC1 sent me". It isn't that I'm getting 'stuck' on variations of some sixth form, but that I'm trying a dozen significantly different variations and Im despairing whether the quest is broken (which seems likely at that point) or if there is some trick that I haven't mastered.
Re: PM'ing a developer with the phrases that didn't work but that I thought should have (@
http://hydlaaplaza.com/smf/index.php?topic=29353.0) --
I'm usually good at my research, but you're right -- I missed that one.
A better idea would be to create a table of NPC queries -- discussed in that thread but discarded. Instead of a table keyed by NPC and char:
- On an NPC-by-NPC basis, accumulate queries that produced the equivalent of a "Huh?"
- Tabulate the number of times NPC-specific keywords (and, perhaps, game-wide-keywords) are in those queries.
- Tabulate how many queries that contain *no* known keywords on an NPC-by-NPC basis.
- Generate reports periodically showing which NPCs generate the most confusion along with the list of queries and keywords they have seen.
BTW, any idea how long before that point-and-click ui makes life better? I haven't been around long enough to know how aggressive the development cycle is.