Rigwyn has a habit of saying useful things, but not saying everything about them that needs to be said. Then I have to come out of my hole and say more things. Godammit, Rigwyn.
Firstly,
who tricked Rigwyn into following her into a courtyard where he was drugged, tied to a tree and given a choice - leave vayl alone or become hydlaa's first gelded diaboli.
Diaboli don't exist and have never existed. Compete retcon. Ministry of Truth would like to have a word with you.
Now, onto the topics of distribution of news (which I think is a very, very good one)
In the past, we had some players who took it upon themselves to distribute newspapers. Some gave honest IC stories, others deliberately slanted their stories for IC reasons. All good. It seems that nobody really sticks to doing this.
I have experience with such distribution (once being Yliakum's premiere source for all news and quality information). The true nature of the Rockbrain would not have been unearthed without my highly-skilled sleuthing. Illysia can definitely attest to the quality of my work. The important thing here is that
it is not sustainable for a player to do. Your comments about creating work are definitely true, but they apply to players too. There are no ingame functions for permanent distribution, and that means it's on a player to be:
1) Logged in
2) Hunting down people on the street and peddling books
3)
NOT engaging in other roleplay while they are doing it.
Number 3 becomes the problem. How does a character discover new things and enhance the world (god knows the playerbase is limited so everyone has to contribute) when they must be focusing on peddling news? The simple answer is, they can't and burnout occurs. There gets to be a point where there are two unpublished Toenail novels that are just about completed (and quite good), but they never hit the press because doing the same selling spiel over and over again is exhausting.
Problems are all good and fine, and I know we can all come up with as many problems as we like, but I also have (and have had for a long time) a proposed solution to this problem: The Industrial Revolution. Planeshift needs to invent the printing press, and it needs to be user-accessible. Here is my ingame flow proposition:
1) Authors write a book, piece of news, whatever, and insert it into the printing press. This is located somewhere central. By the octarchal building seems reasonable, government and publishing going together and whatnot.
2) This piece of news is then distributed to each printing press on street corners around Hydlaa/Other Cities. Think a standard newspaper box, players can access it and it's like the forges, there are several slots each containing pieces of news. These can disappear after a day or two, or be archived somehow, that's a detail. My preferred solution is news stays for a week before being archived in Jayose's library. This would give players
real, tangible and permanent influence on the game world.
Monitization could occur on either end, people could pay for news and all that, but I don't agree to that. The goal is not for capitalism to thrive, it is for an imaginative game to thrive and if that requires fiscal suspension of disbelief, so be it.
The topic that will inevitably come up is moderation, and who has to moderate. I think this question is incorrect. Any player can /shout. Any player can spam any number of expletives in /gossip. Players already can influence massive numbers of players negatively through bad behaviour. The solution to that is /report and this is also the solution to the news problem. GMs are already there to deal with reports of bad behaviour and this would be no exception, but I absolutely, completely disagree that each piece of news would need to be moderated before being published. That's just wasteful.
Being a programmer, I understand that the devil is in the details when adding new features, but the implementation of this feature is trivial in the scope of such a large 3D game. The entities and much of the logic to complete this is
already ingame, the biggest prohibiting factor is executive leadership and lack of decision to implement this strictly roleplay-focused feature.
I won't comment any more on this other than to say that I don't think this feature will ever make it ingame, and I think that's a
crying shame.
That is all I have to say on this, thank you for dragging me out of my hole and getting me nostalgic. Godammit, Rigwyn.
