Originally posted by Induane
OK I catch what you are saying. I guess I assumed /tell was for whispering as I think the first time I logged in ever there was a message saying \"Use /tell to whisper to other players.\" - something akin to the \"PlaneShift works best when your PC is turned on.\" Messages.. I guess I should have assumed it was in gest.
Now that you mention it I, too, recall that message. It is true that /tell is sometimes being used as whispering, and can be justified if you know the other players can\'t RP that well. You can also /tell the whisper and /say a jumbled version of it, with parts missing and malformed.
However, I never assumed that /tell was to be meant for that, even less to be unconditionally IC. Re-reading the message it says \"players\", not \"chars\", which hints that it was meant as OOC tool, so that players know that they can discuss matters in ways besides /say.
If that message would have been meant to refer to chars, it\'d likely have been designed with more care and looked like this:
\"You can use /tell to make your char whisper to another!\".
Originally posted by Induane
I guess that I\'m just thinking that a /tell with unlimited range pretty much makes postal service type things pointless unless they are used for offline messages only.. and even then that is still kind of limited.
AFAICS they have quite different uses, and a postal service is still a nice addition, because the sort of communication that travels these channels will differ. /tell is naturally a more or less realtime medium, which is used for comparatively short messages, because you can always add another /tell and the recipient can easily ask for clarification. A postal service will carry letters, which will be longer and include more details than a /tell. They will also be different in content, even assuming a way of using /tell IC-ly. A letter is for things that are comparatively important, things that can\'t wait until one returns, or that need physical evidence, like treaties. /tell, which would be used like /say in the assumption, would carry more or less normal conversation. A postal service that uses actual documents that can be passed on would also add depth for RP, because you\'re not forced to re-type everything whenever someone reads the letter (which is the case ATM), thereby enabling the letters to be much more adapted to the writer and less of a summary.
Therefore, even if a postal service could be abused as offline messenger (which can be reduced by requiring to go to the post office to fetch the letter unless you have a permanent address, which is
way off), decent RPers, while using it only occasionally, could draw quite a bit out of it when they can make use of it.
Given the limited size of the world it would suffice to merely have writable paper ATM, because RPers can deliver the message in person. We would, however, need a way to properly dispose of the letters. Selling them to NPCs isn\'t such a good thing from an RP POV, though it would do for now.
