Mildly Irritating: Aetolia's Pet Peeves

Phoenecia

The nature of the sheaf of falsified documents artifact.

I love that it allows you to essentially 'fix' the age of player kids if you don't manage to find one in time, but I hate that people will still use it as an excuse to discredit you/your character background because of the age discrepancy regardless of any established RP.

Saturnine

It sounds like your issue is not with an artifact, but with irresponsible roleplayers.

Nia

I'm mildly bummed out that once you've hit end-game, the level-up notifications are no longer fancy and yellow and exciting. It's like the game has gotten bored of cheering you on. 'Yeah, whatever, you reach the illustrious level of 109.' Feels less like an achievement.

Though in fairness, when I think about the hours wasted, it probably really isn't.

Serrice

Our level names at 100+ aren't as cool as Achaea's.

For example:

106: Highborn of Dragonspire Mount
111: 1st Stratum of Puissance
120: Champion of the Dragon Soul

Zsadist

I don't know what you're talking about. Becoming a Chaos Lord seems pretty fancy.

Just sayin.

Irae

106: Highborn of Dragonspire Mount

The Achaean level titles still make no sense to me.

Toz

Irae said:

106: Highborn of Dragonspire Mount

The Achaean level titles still make no sense to me.

You killed so many things they gave you nobility to appease you.

Didi

staying weak llama

Erzsebet

I absolutely hate this 30 char display barding limitation.

I get wanting to put a limit on the spam that a person's movement gives when they pass through a room on a caparison-wearing mount. But we can't even use the word caparison in the display desc unless we don't want to be able to describe it further.

When you can't even do 'a $(mount$) in a $(dye$) caparison' or 'a $(mount$) wearing a caparison' the system is way too limiting.

Is 26 characters to just do 'a $(mount$) in a caparison', which gives absolutely no defining characteristics at all.

Not saying we need a 50-char limit like we have on appearances, but we should have more than 4 characters to actually add descriptive words, because 4 remaining characters limits us to 3-letter adjectives of which there aren't a whole lot of that make sense for the item-types in question.

Teani

One of my personal pet peeves is the setup of the Bloodlining system for families. It has been interpreted in different ways by a lot of people in the game since back when I started playing. Some have seen it as a pure family tie, by blood, completely biological, meaning that the children were at some point born by the mother, sired by the father. This is, after all, what HELP BLOODLINE specifies.

"It should go without saying that bloodlines are permanent and irrevocable.
After all, you cannot change who your biological mother and father are!"

Of course, others have considered adoption as a viable reason for the registered connection. Two characters meet up in the game, there's a nice RP connection and a wish to form a stronger bond without having to make up a story about how ones parents/child were lost and now somehow found. Some characters come into the game with a story in mind of how they got to where they are, and they don't want to change their history simply because they want to have a family tie and make it easier for others to see that relation.

This has created a lot of confusion when it comes to relations, not to mention some characters adopt others left and right, ignoring the bloodline system completely, making it essentially impossible to follow family ties.

I wish it would be re-written and make allowances for recording more than just blood relations. Something along the lines of this:

BLOODLINE RECORD AS CHILD/SIBLING [ADOPTED]

It should still, of course, require that both go to the Bloodregistry and register, meaning consent is needed from both parties, but it would show if the relation is through adoption or not, and also allow for siblings to connect without an adventurer parent.

Edit: I am fully aware that the code for this part is so tangled that Admin would most likely not want to even glance it its direction for fear of crashing the game. Just saying it would be nice if things were different. <.<

Xanchol

@Teani Complicated code or no code, I definitely agree. Its a bit overwhelming, and terribly confusing, when you meet a new character, and you check their bloodline, and its so big you have to enter MORE.

Especially for people who like to RP up the importance of their IG 'family' it can get confusing to have to ask "Do you mean your nine half-siblings, your eight full siblings, or your four children, two of which are somehow older than you?"

I'm totally cool with people using Adoption to create visceral IC bonds between characters, and creating 'families' to allow for a wider spread of IG allies/friends/etc. But a little tweak to make it so people can indicate siblings and adoption would be nice, and would help clarify some of the confusion.

TLDR Good idea

Zaila

To "third" the bloodlining frustrations:

Now that time moves so much slower, if people create characters that start at 18, last I checked, they still have to wait ages to be bloodlined. However, if you create a character that starts at the requisite age (which I believe is 20) you can bloodline immediately. While this is handy for those who start older, it's inconsistent and a pain for those who started young.

If we could just go to a "3 weeks of playtime" or whatever is deemed appropriate instead, that'd be awesome.

EDIT TO ADD: Unless this has been solved since I checked. in which case: Go team!

Teani

@Xanchol, it's equally confusing when you, as an established player, meet someone who speaks of their sister/brother/child and you check their Bloodline and it's completely empty. It's like WTF? There's nothing in here, you liar! Who are you talking about?!

Zaila

@teani like, when, "Well X is my brother by blood, but Y is my sister by adoption, and I adopted N, Q & Z but popped L out of my babymaker!" Aaaaaand NOPE. none of it on file.

Teani

Once heard someone say they adopted a personas their child, but the age difference was only 9 years. At least in that sense, the Bloodline system makes sense. It's not possible unless there's a 13 year difference, for obvious reasons (and even that feels like a low figure). If it's less, maybe a sibling would make more sense than a child.

Xanchol

Teani said:

Once heard someone say they adopted a personas their child, but the age difference was only 9 years. At least in that sense, the Bloodline system makes sense. It's not possible unless there's a 13 year difference, for obvious reasons (and even that feels like a low figure). If it's less, maybe a sibling would make more sense than a child.

I see your frustration re: that point, but we shouldn't use a mechanic to 'correct' someone's RP. If someone plays as someone else's child, all I want to know is if that's true. The way I see it, BLOODLINE, BACKGROUND, and HISTORY are all 'public records'. If someone has a reason for not recording a person as their family member, RPly, then that's fine. But if you're going to go around spouting "Yeah I'm so proud of my son John" "John's 4 years older than you." "Oh, I adopted him." Then maybe that should be recorded, with a qualifier that says 'ADOPTED'

Emelle

There's also no way to represent vNPCs with the Bloodline Registry. Emelle has two daughters, neither of whom have players, so they're not a matter of public record even though they technically exist!

Saturnine

This is why I've pretty much just done my best to pretend BLOODLINE doesn't exist.

Erzsebet

You also can't bloodline siblings, so unless you have non-NPC parents, there's nothing to tie you together via bloodline. And even then, you show up as half siblings if you only have one parent.

Not to mention when people 'die' their record vanishes from the bloodline. Taelyndara had a twin sister (who originally showed up as a half sibling) and a couple children who no longer show up on her bloodline. Wish it would keep them on the listing and just colour their name to represent death or something.

It gets pretty confusing if you're trying to use it as an accurate representation. Even moreso when people aren't clear with whether or not you're actually their kid, or if they adopted you to be so.

Aishia

I always prefer the "nothing exists until it exists" approach to everything. Sure there are kids but they not showing up until I meet them and they show up one day like "Why did you leave me on that island!" "Tradition!" People toting around nonexistent npcs is totes a peeve of mine. IF I CANT SEE IT, IT DOESNT EXIST.

Also feel like the "bloodline code so scary and complicated" argument surely is too old to be relevant anymore. They've overhauled p much everything else they've ever said that about by now!

Sarita

Then you also have a few cases of vampires who used the bloodline command after siring someone and treated the whole thing like the vampiric equivalent of parent/kid stuff.

Teani

@Erzsebet , if you look at my suggestion, it would be possible to record siblings as adopted or not, bypassing the need for a parent if it is an agreed upon NPC.

I agree that the complete removal of a permadead PC from all records is sad, because it messes with so many things (like books written by anonymous, making it even more tricky than usual to check validity), but if all players were kept on record, I realize how much added data that would have to be stored.

Aishia

I think that "characters as too much data" thing is kind of antiquated concept too. Back from when we were dealing with megabytes and gigabytes instead of terabytes. I imagine a character file doesn't amount to more than a bunch of lines of simple text. Unless it's taking ongoing processing power to maintain which I don't think it would I don't think data is a limitation for us anymore.

Xanchol

Sarita said:

Then you also have a few cases of vampires who used the bloodline command after siring someone and treated the whole thing like the vampiric equivalent of parent/kid stuff.

I don't think this is necessarily a bad idea. IIRC, I believe one could in Midkemia, BLOODLINE SHOW VAMPIRIC and that would show like

BLOODLINE SHOW JOHN VAMPIRIC

SIRE:
Mitch

SIRED:
Jane

I feel if we're gonna go making changes to Bloodline, we might as well make it more dynamic for all the people who like to use it in various different ways.

Erzsebet

Most houses keep track of bloodlines already, and a vampire bloodline that wasn't just automatically tied to the code would always be annoyingly incomplete because most of the old folk who no longer play are going to join it.

Also, think they coded something or other to do with the vampire bloodlines that automatically shows if you just check the pillars in the sanctum.

Also--even if characters -are- too much data, I'm not suggesting anything stay in the file but a name, doesn't have to be connected to the full character. I'm not even suggesting that the name be prevented from being taken in the future, just that once you die your name turns a colour to indicate deceased and you stay listed. And that way, it's just a name--if Bob
dies and a new Bob comes into existance, he's not automatically related to the people the first bob were, and the file is very not-confusing because the first bob is coloured as dead, so the new bob is clearly not the same bob.

ETA: Also, not needing to go at the same time would be helpful. Just having it not finalize 'til both signatures are available would work better, IMO.

Michi

Teani said:

@Xanchol, it's equally confusing when you, as an established player, meet someone who speaks of their sister/brother/child and you check their Bloodline and it's completely empty. It's like WTF? There's nothing in here, you liar! Who are you talking about?!

It's a bit silly that a character would call someone out for lying because they've just pulled out their copy of the universal registry for pedigrees of every single person to have ever existed, flipped to their page and didn't find an entry.

Zaila

Erzsebet said:

ETA: Also, not needing to go at the same time would be helpful. Just having it not finalize 'til both signatures are available would work better, IMO.

I think the biggest thing this currently prohibits is players playing their own offspring. Personally, I don't really have a problem with people playing their own offspring, but I know a lot of people look down on that.

Erzsebet

I haven't ever heard of anyone playing their own offspring outside of when they're still kidlets in a vNPC sort of way.

Mostly this would be convenient for the people who play less--like, I never ever run into Brendan, but I play his kid, so I'm only half bloodlined. Seems like it'd be nifty if I could go 'hey, this dude's my father' and the registry fixes itself and just marks (unconfirmed) or something 'til he gets around to saying 'yeah, this is my brat'.

Teani

@Michi, it's more that if someone speaks of "brother/sister/other relative" and don't mention them by name in any way in that context, and you try to figure out who the hell they were related to, then check their bloodline (because you know, some of us older Aetolians might still remember a time when this system was actually used quite a lot and we check it for such things) and there's nothing in it. It's frustrating.

Not claiming outright liars, but if there's no record, it's not confirmed in a way, and no registry means you can't check without asking. Makes it even more frustrating if you RP around a few people with confusing blood-ties and you can't remember if A was related to X and Y or if that was B, or maybe A and B were related, and X and Y were actually connected to C, or was it A and Y and C...? And asking -every- time you interact, because bloodties are something that comes up -very- often, becomes tedious and (for me) boring.

Erzsebet

Is useful to have a thing to check. It's all I can do to remember my -own- bloodlines, I can't memorize everyone elses. And there's only so many times you can ask before your character would remember in theory, unless you play them as hella forgetful. The bloodlines make it easier to remember / check stuff your char would know, especially since, as players, we have a lot of other things taking up memory space, whether it's alts and -their- relations to people, or real-world things.

Though a lot of people don't even know their own lines. The example I was going to use were two people who claim to be cousins, but bloodlines has' em as aunt/nephew.