Ease of Navigation

Hi, I took a minute to flutter around the Faded Zone and get a feel for the movement system because getting around is sort of really important to me. I haven't noticed any sort of automated travel, nor any clear way to queue up travel commands to get from one place to the next.

I assume from the kind of rooms I'm seeing that the playing-space is probably going to be pretty large. My suggestion is investing time into commands that make it easier for players to get from point A to point B, especially where points A and B are common locations like a specific bank and pub or something like that. Ideally this would still be usable for other kinds of locations. Maybe you could have it as part of street smarts and outdoorsmanship depending on the environment and allow granularity of utility.

It would be nice if my character could remember how to get to that shady backroom or that hidden glade instead of me having to memorize, say, a 30-step process to get to it from a particular town square. I am spatially-challenged, and needing to keep OOC notes and travel aliases messes with my immersion and makes it more frustrating to navigate. Being able to memorize locations by nicknames or keywords in the same way you can recognize players by nicknames and keywords might do the trick. Getting to a place is a pretty good sign you could get back there, especially if you've spent significant time there or gone there before.

But the basic idea is that I could type '(navigation command) (string that identifies a specific room)' and it spits out a command that takes you there or at least helps. For me it's a matter of accessibility. Pretty rooms with cool secrets are pretty and cool and I love to explore them (and sometimes get lost in them!) but needing to negotiate with the keyword police and the grid daemons every time I want to travel a routine path to my favorite pub and find my drinking buddies provides more hassle than it does story.

I did see there is an in-game map command and that's exceptionally handy and helpful for the immediate vicinity. It just wouldn't help very much with the process of going
"s
w
s
e
e
go shadow
go archway
n
d
u
w
say The password is snilbog!
emote waits for the guard to open the gate
n
n
n
n"

And while in theory I could handle this on my end with documentation, mapping, and aliases, a game feels far comfier where it just helps me "plug in and play". I've had some fun experiences in other MUDs with stepping into Snarf Pits and getting leapt on by snarfs when I actually meant to go buy rations for my upcoming adventure, and then I get stuck in the Snarf Pit without anything to eat, and then I get to eat the snarfs, and nobody actually likes snarfs.

I think mechanics like this also just generally help relieve the "sweatiness" of the game. Lowering the required aptitude to, err, engage with other people and the environment on the most basic of levels (that is, existence) just makes RP better, and the kinds of games that harp on mechanical excellency and think it's really funny that you died in the Snarf Pit don't tend to have very engaging roleplay. I did also notice there's a 'where' function, and I think what the game outputs there would be a perfect string for navigation if you feel like being particularly lenient with this kind of command. A character might know where "The Stinky Fishery" is and be able to take their player there even if the player doesn't know the difference between east and west or gets motion sickness from fields of scrolling, beautiful text. In fact, 'where' might be almost useless unless someone is already an expert navigator OOC.

EDIT: After posting I did review the public posts on r/MUD and found this:

"We've decided not to have a speedwalking feature for PCs (player characters), because we prefer that players immerse themselves in the world and see things on their way that their characters would tend to see (including each other!). But what we do have is a quick and handy way to ask directions from VNPCs! (Unlike NPCS, virtual non-player-characters are not actual "objects" in the game world; they're just part of the background bustle of people you'd find in any populated area. But that doesn't make them any less real in terms of the world and its imagined stories.)"

So it does look like you thought of all this and decided against it (I'm not reinventing the wheel here), but I still hold the above position and would like to hear how people feel about it.

"Getting to a place is a pretty good sign you could get back there, especially if you've spent significant time there or gone there before."

What if someone brought you there hooded and hogtied in the back of a wagon though?

Haha I'm sort of kidding, but also sort of not kidding. These are the types of complexities we tend to think about when considering how to implement a feature like the one you describe. However, I really appreciate this thoughtful and detailed post that you took the time to write. Even if you disagree on some design policies, this post shows you're excited and involved. 

We really want to preserve the immersion of moving through the game world. If we normalize speedy travel like this, then people will miss things that could be important. I'll elaborate a bit on this in two ways.

1. In the early days of making this game, we had actually implemented a cost to roundtime if you walked into the room with another PC. This is because even if someone is walking somewhere, we'd love if they could emote to others when moving through a room with other PCs. In the end we took it out, not because it was tedious or slowed people down -- but because it's a shot to immersion. The world past the ship is large enough that if you move somewhere fast enough, entering the commands successively, you're going to 'break into a run'. Now let's say you're frantically running to fetch a doctor because your best friend is bleeding out in the town square -- you're not going to suddenly stop for 60 seconds in order to post an emote to every other person walking along the street. I mean, you might. "emote runs past, frantic-eyed!" but it is definitely a hit to immersion to be forced to slow down. So, from this short anecdote about an ex-feature, you can see our values as taking it slow enough to interact through every potential development, vs trying being worried about reducing tedium for players -- and immersion, which factors even higher for us than the taking-it-slow value.

2. Let's consider a scenario where your character's home is in the south part of town and his shop is in the north part of town. Almost every time you log in, you go from home to shop, stock the shop, and go back home -- and maybe interact with others on the way, maybe go visit another player, maybe attend an event -- but that shop you've got 'recognized' as SHOP and your home as HOME and you just input FASTGO SHOP and FASTGO HOME because damn nobody's got time for that, your fingers are le tired. Let's say one day there's a new NPC standing on your route, covered in blood. Maybe it's even a staff response to your story arc that you've been searching for your long-lost sister, and staff set up this NPC for you to befriend and maybe hire to work with you in your shop. But you just never notice them. That would be really frustrating for us, because we want people to engage deeply with the world and find these things dynamically. But it would also be entirely our fault for implementing a mechanic where people just speed around through the world.

If we want people to stop and smell the flowers, then we aren't going to build a bullet train through the meadow.

Anyway, please don't consider this to be the last word on the topic just because I'm giving a more detailed explanation of our reasoning. Feel free to keep discussing it, but it's just unlikely that we're going to change our minds. A system like the one in the post you read, where you ask VNPCs for directions to important landmarks and then you get fed the directions one by one as you move through those rooms, is the thing closest to speedwalking that we're planning to have at this time.

Hooded and hogtied is right! I'd definitely like the capacity to do that to people and have it done to me without them having instant fast-travel access to my secret hideout and vice versa, that's true.

I appreciate the approach that you're taking here even if I might not entirely agree with it. The heart of my typical quibble really is how much "empty space" there tends to be in MUDs, and I expect you've built from the ground-up with flowers to be smelled.

"In the early days of making this game, we had actually implemented a cost to roundtime if you walked into the room with another PC. This is because even if someone is walking somewhere, we'd love if they could emote to others when moving through a room with other PCs. In the end we took it out, not because it was tedious or slowed people down -- but because it's a shot to immersion."

"So, from this short anecdote about an ex-feature, you can see our values as taking it slow enough to interact through every potential development, vs trying being worried about reducing tedium for players -- and immersion, which factors even higher for us than the taking-it-slow value."

"That would be really frustrating for us, because we want people to engage deeply with the world and find these things dynamically. But it would also be entirely our fault for implementing a mechanic where people just speed around through the world.

If we want people to stop and smell the flowers, then we aren't going to build a bullet train through the meadow."

These bits in particular I digest pretty well. You see the tedium I describe - something I imagine is rather familiar to you from other games of this kind - as a symptom and not the disease. If there are things worth interacting with, then people will do so - and facilitating shortcuts will make the problem permanent, because there will be no people on the road and there will be no reason to interact with them. WIth that in mind I do foresee I might have to keep my own notes about a lot of things depending on how the world actually shakes out, but if I am reading your approach correctly then I imagine you are building a different foundation than what I'm used to experiencing and I'm more than willing to give that a good shake and raise complaints later if I have them.

I tend to want to take bullet trains past haunted graveyards and embellished cardboard boxes rather than meadows.

Thank you both for your thoughtful discussion about this.  I'm another of those who has a habit of walking in circles down a straight path, and frantically typing STOP STOP STOP as I find myself approaching the looming maw of the Snarf Pit, when I thought I was going to the market.

The boat's pretty small though, so I haven't had much trouble yet*.

I like the philosophy behind the the way travel works here (and I actually think slowing down will be good for me, as much of my trouble stems from tearing off in the wrong direction).  I'm not a fan of fast travel, I don't like the sensation of being whisked off to who-knows-where under my own steam, and it obliterates any hope I might have had of creating even the most rudimentary mental map, so I think the availability of one-step-at-a-time directions will work well.  I'll have to see how it feels when we get to the big city, I'm looking forward to trying it out.

*I was mercifully spared inadvertently throwing myself overboard by the note that I would need to SWIM in that direction.  Which brings me to my navigation request.  Please include checks like this to help ensure that characters only do extremely stupid shit when they intend to do extremely stupid shit.  Usually rooms with an associated skill check will ask you to SWIM, or CLIMB and don't cause too much trouble, but fall rooms are malicious for players like me.  Yes I did read the room description, yes, I am aware that the room is titled "At the edge of a perilous chasm, near a forbidding iron gate," but no I can't explain why my extremely flatulent brain decided to try and target the "looming black iron gate: [open]" with, of all things "open" sending me instead into "the open air beside a rocky cliff" and now I am hurtling through space which doesn't make any sense.  Sometimes the intent to encourage players to slow down and pay attention to their environment results in absurd booby traps, pitching speedwalkers off ledges in a way that is very funny but ultimately unimmersive as icly they would have seen that coming, and probably stopped.