Kafuuka

Quality of English: everybody is allowed to have someone help them if they think their English isn't good enough. Besides, the game is in English and it never hurt anyone to learn a second language (or their first one...). Alts: it takes a lot of work to make an original character and write a background story. This is true even more if you are an adept writer because you will never be satisfied with your work. "For every sentence I kept, I have thrown away at least one page of writing." (don't remember which writer said that) No matter how good you think you are, there are no guarantees to win and there aren't any retries either. And there is a chance people will notice your style. The only reason people will try it against all odds, would be that they have too many active days to participate and too much time. I'd propose a side contest with a smaller reward, for older players/alts... but it'd be silly to have good character designs go to waste after the contest is over. Criteria: the story/writing - this one is obvious. the layout - this would favor html knowing people, but once again, asking assistance is allowed. and there are a lot of things one could do wrong even without accessing the html, eg. all CAPS would give you minus infinity points. character design - how balanced are powers and flaws, how in tune is it with MD? I also suggest having the candidates sign up for this and have them idle in a designated place, especially if you use a small amount of judges. Timezones make it hard to read everybody's papers.

If DNA consists of principles, then so could enzymes/hormones. In biology cells with the same DNA specialize into different functions: muscles, braincells, skin cells etc. If I remember correctly, cells acquire their specialization because certain parts of the DNA can be activated or inhibited by the presence of certain enzymes. Once activated, a cell normally starts producing the enzyme responsible for the activation until a certain threshold is met, thus preserving the specialization without wasting energy on limitless production of a single enzyme. This preservation is part of the balance inside a cell. Hormones are also produced by cells and then travel through the blood and enter other cells, affecting what those cells produce. A large concentration of one hormone usually inhibits further production of that hormone, thus balancing the concentration. Unlike biology, in MD a player's principle knowledge and stats do change over time. Their 'principle DNA' is not fixed. How would I incorporate 'principle hormones'? Based on the 'principle DNA' every player would produce an amount of hormones, which they transmit to other players and then change their 'principle DNA' and thus which 'principle hormones' they produce. Instead of a bloodstream, the medium would be speech, in essence a memetic infection. This also allows for places associated with a certain principle (or combination thereof) to 'infect' players.

This reminds me a lot of the diagrams I made when I was a little kid. Sloppy handwriting, symbols and acronyms that i invented and have since forgotten. If I'd look at those now, I could make a hundred different guesses at what each one was supposed to be: a perpetuum mobile, notes about that broken clock i dissected, designs for a rocket? I doubt one of them would've worked if build according to those designs, but MD isn't exactly real life and Manu isn't a little kid. (ever since that thermodynamics course, I stopped trying to make perpetuum mobiiles.. although i still think it'd be cool to break the laws of physics like that.)

1. We already have the silver and gold coin. Until the exchange rate for those stabilizes, I don't think adding more types of currency is a good thing. Furthermore I thought the MD economy was supposed to be a primitive one. The more types of currency involved, the more people that will try to become a bank. And if you think real life banks are criminal, wait until you see the proposed interest rates in MD: starting at 20% 2. What about people that want to be neutral? What exactly does land ownership offer? If it can offer something to both roleplayers and grinders, it'd be a good money sink and the coins could be redistributed with quests thus accelerating the money flow. But how it creates countless job opportunities I don't see.

Short notice is only a problem because i haven't got enough coins yet, though I might be able to get there. There should be at least one coin quest I haven't tried yet.

So far there has been a lot of discussion about what the MDS is worth, whether or not the currency actually has value, is stable etc. I thought it'd be a good thing to have a survey about prices, so I made one. [url="http://ihazquest.x10hosting.com/survey/survey.php"]http://ihazquest.x10hosting.com/survey/survey.php[/url] Once enough people have completed it, I can make some nice graphs and give them to the MD newspaper or post them here. If anyone wants to check my math, I wont mind giving the raw data either, I don't think there is any valuable personal information to be paranoid about, but a graphical representation of what people think the MDS is worth, might shed a new light on the discussion and speed up the stabilization. (or it might tell us that we are nowhere near a consensus) It only takes a couple of minutes do take the survey! (now let's hope the x10 server will survive all that traffic)

You could say the values were determined arbitrary. I would say they were a decent guess. At short notice it is near impossible to get at the 'real values', which are governed by supply and demand. If there is a large record of trades that have been made, one could calculate the average price and say that that value is not arbitrary, but there was no such record at the time. When Phantasm said it is up to the one organizing the auction to determine the value, I think he meant that it is normal for a shopkeeper to determine prices and the customers can either agree to that price or not make any purchases. If nobody agrees, the shopkeeper will be forced to lower prices. And if I remember correctly, paying in silver coins was highly encouraged, using creatures was only accepted because there were a lot of people that had too little coins. Prices change according to supply and demand, currency changes too. I think Phantasm's dollar example holds. Just because one person would think a MDS is worth a drachorn, doesn't make that true. Just because one person thinks a dollar is worth a brand new car, doesn't make that true either. However, if everybody in MD would agree the MDS is worth a drachorn, it will become true. If everybody thinks a dollar is worth a brand new car, it will be true. The main difference is that the dollar has a long standing history and a larger population that think about what it is worth. And even then the currency is ever changing it's value. The only way to increase faith in the MDS is to document the prices and history of the MDS. Which is something the newspaper could do: a couple of pages dedicated to the economy, including last month's average prices and some nice graphical representation of the evolution.

[quote name='Burns' post='31749' date='May 21 2009, 07:38 AM']creatures and items will keep the coins flowing, technically endlessly, practically until a few players who don't care for the market have all of them, as easy as that ^^[/quote] If they don't care, then why would they bother gathering coins? You can get a couple of coins without it being your aim, but to acquire a large part of the coins in circulation, would require a lot of trading. Why would you do that, unless you were planning to spend the coins on something? To have the most coins? [quote]you couldn't prevent that from happening even if you got a neverending flow of items, unless those items were slightly overpowered (anti-freeze to all your creatures, plus 1000 attack to all your creatures, something along those lines for combat, complete invisibility, hiding name, avi and mp and giving a new chat profile instead, teleportation... for RP) because the 'common' things like plus 20 atk or plus 3000 vit are definitely not worth a coin for a veteran...[/quote] I don't think the coin value is stable. Even real world currency is not stable and if a new batch of items is released, the market might change dramatically. Who is to say a coin wouldn't drop to being worth 5 atk? Some even stated a coin isn't worth anything at all... [quote]so, my idea of keeping a flow up would be the constant creation AND destruction of really valueable things, like those slightly overpowered i already mentioned, like an invisibility cloak which has 5-10 uses, a teleportation spell that can be casted 5-10 times, or a total anti-freeze that can be used 5-10 times before dissolving itself... such things, some that are worth the work of getting them ^^[/quote] This is along the lines of what me and others proposed earlier: constant creation and destruction of items, with a subset of items that give a temporary bonus. But creatures are already constantly created and some of them are also in high demand . The economy might just survive on that alone, or at the least give a lot of time for new code to be made. One danger to the economy might be people who have a little coin, but not enough to buy what they want. What will they do? Try to gather more coins, even if it might take a year to get enough? That is an ever growing amount of coins outside of the economy for a long time.

[quote name='Kriskah Arcanu' post='31713' date='May 20 2009, 09:13 PM']Never intended to be in charge of MD Market, I trully hope I am not.[/quote] Alas, people that consider leadership a burden are more prone to be trustworthy than people that consider leadership a position of glory. Meaning you've just doomed yourself to get even more people voting for you. And with that I hope I added something positive to this tread.

[quote name='dst' post='31709' date='May 20 2009, 08:46 PM']After reading all you said Kafuuka all I want to do is throw my laptop on the window. THEN I will be sure I am safe [/quote] advertising: install linux; even if you aren't an expert, it still is a hundred times less likely someone breaks into it. And there aren't as many ready made scripts to crack into it. Sadly there aren't that much games available on linux, but MD works!

That is incredibly low tech, but a simple trojan would do too. Most passwords are still stored in plain text on computers. All you need to know is where to look and how to get access to your target's computer. Last time i used windows, I had to clean spyware at least once a month to get rid off all the crap. Some programs even had the nerve to include spyware in them and politely tell you about it in the eula; that giant piece of text nobody reads. Basicly, unless Jazira used strong passwords, updated her anti virus and firewall regularly, configured them all perfectly and read all eula's, didn't open attachments, never browsed an unsafe website, used pop up and add blockers and who knows what else... there was no need for physical acces to her pc. Actually, I doubt it would take long for me to break into my own computer, maybe a couple of days to bruteforce the user password, which would be silly since i know my own password though.

You don't have to be a genius to be a script kiddie and even if it was necessary, the MD community has enough smart people in it. Yes, targeting is a plausible scenario, but not the only one... there's even the remote possibility some data wasn't removed when logging out out of a public computer, and someone browsed through all the mail and then got interested in MD. The odds may be one in six billion, but hey, there is enough people on the planet to accommodate them. What is the use of guessing at this anyway? Priority should go to determining if it was the email that got compromised or her computer. Finding out when this happened and knowing what else has been compromised. btw,' hacker' is technically not the right word, it is 'cracker', or the pejorative 'script kiddie'.

There are ways to change your ip, so tracking the ip of the cracker isn't a valid option. Even if lot's of crackers are actually script kiddies, they'll still know about those. What email address was the new password sent to? If it is connected to her Yim, it is no surprise it became compromised that soon. If it is an other one, she should check her firewall and scan for trojans. How strong was her Yim password, did she keep the registration mails? Did she use separate passwords for mail and MD? Did she keep other emails with passwords in them? It could be a lot more than her Yim and MD account that have been compromised. Especially if she didn't store her md password in an email and the passwords were strong (ie not something like '1234' or 'cookies'), because that would mean someone had to pry it from her computer.

[quote name='Thanatopic' post='31397' date='May 18 2009, 01:41 PM']The Challenger strikes first, the Challenged however chooses where the combat will take place.[/quote] You haven't mentioned this in your example. If the challenged chooses a desert, would that weaken water, or am I completely lost here? I'd like to try the game, but I think i could do with a longer example.

Imo everybody that isn't completely apathetic, has something (s)he hates. My 'problem' with the hate list is that there's so much other stuff to write about and I like to keep things neatly organized, not mixing quests and 'things I hate' in the same scroll. So either the name should be changed to 'multipurpose scroll' or we should get more paper to work with. Like giving people that have quests but aren't RPC a brown Quest page? I don't need it to be gold, I just want more papers.

I thought replies to ideas were supposed to go in a separate topic and i didn't see the one for this idea: [quote name='pamplemousse' post='31525' date='May 19 2009, 08:15 PM']I am a generally nosy person and like to know what people are up to. I think it would be fun to have status updates (like on facebook) that would tell people what a character is doing at the moment. .Pamplemousse. is _helping an adept_ or something. I have no idea how to implement this technology-wise, perhaps on the toolbar, or another menu where the RPC, Webcam, etc is?[/quote] I think it would be best put into the friend list. That way you would only get updates on a small amount of people, and wouldn't have to scroll through the entire list of players. And there is no need for a new menu, there are already a lot of those and i like the Keep It Simple Stupid approach for menu trees.

The Trial - Franz Kafka Not everything I read is that depressing though. I really like the discworld novels by Terry Pratchett and the hitchhiker's guide series by DNA, which like any good trilogy consists of five parts.

I'd prescribe a cup of lmaonade every fifteen minutes. Possible side effects include: pml (due to high fluid intake) and a sudden lack of spare pants.

4 billion... I would've thought there'd be a max Int limit, but 4 billion isn't a power of two

increasing the maximum entries shouldn't be more trouble than changing a single variable and it's not like text is the bandwidth eater, that should be pictures. Not green... is pink taken?

99% of the time live chat is perfect, however whenever there is a big event and dozens of people all post at the same time, the chat is suddenly too small. Messages like 'stay on topic' are then repeated every minute because they fall off the screen that fast and people seem to need the reminder. I therefore propose that the chat frame can be resized for such events. It can be made twice as high without interfering (at least on my screen resolution/browser combo) and if the friends/info frame is disabled (which would remove the attack button, but that kinda makes sense for a peaceful gathering imo) it can be about twice the width. That increases the text capacity a fair bit. A way to change the organisers' text color to green during the event. I think that color isn't taken yet and there's shades of green that don't hurt the eyes. Alternatively, large meetings could be held on an irc channel, but that would break the immersion and not everybody knows how to use irc. (and we'd need a nick protection bot)

[quote name='dst' post='30323' date='May 5 2009, 09:21 PM']Maybe the fact that there are almost no rules and features (except basic ones) for RP-ing helps the RP-ers the most. They are free to do whatever they want.They have the absolute freedom. What you could do to help? No idea... Maybe nothing cause in the moment you will bring rules and new features you will create some paths they will have to follow. So a part of the freedom will be lost or even worse:you\'ll reduce the game to a normal go there, click that, talk to NPC X ...tada! You\'re a delicate glass vase [/quote] I agree, giving up freedom for features is not a good thing. There are lots of things that could safely add to the roleplay though. Right now we have discussions about items all over the forum. There's the factions that are intended to boost roleplay. A lot of people have (had) a list of suggestions/desires since(during) the festival. Granted a lot of those were about spells or abilities, but judging people and handing them out is beneficial to RP (although there will be lots of complaining, impatience and I wonder if it's even possible for one person to read all those papers), but there were other suggestions that don't imply power (except for looking 1337). Eg. Shapeshifters having the ability to change their name from "Shapeshifter (form A)" to "Shapeshifter (form B)" at will. The only advantage they get is that people who enter the area later on, will know what form they are in. Not as big as the blue text thing, but still... Personally i wanted to mess around with scripts, I don't even need much help for that (I think). I kinda assumed scripts weren't allowed though, they seldom are since they can be used for both good and evil. And more paper! If you look at how i[url="http://magicduel.com/players/kafuuka"] 'solved' [/url]that problem... that's not the way it's supposed to be done right? Now, a question: You realize you're not as evil as you say? Not as pure a grinder as you say? You admit to having a (questionable) role, liking Baldur's Gate and thus you probably like quests and stories. You like trying new and fun ways to nudge the realm towards unbalance to see how people would respond. Actually roleplay is about doing little things and seeing how other players respond, what happens next. Whether or not roleplaying yourself is an interesting or a challenging role, is up for debate. And why not try the nudging on a smaller scale, afraid you'll like it? We really should have an 'interview with a stat grinding godmodder', one who wont report bugs but keep them secret, will get upset when accused of abuse or when noticing things don't go as expected. Or purposely destroy the game because someone did not respond the way it was desired. The kind of person that does not accept criticism and wont like being interviewed about that. But since you're the 'evil' one, maybe you should suggest a candidate for that interview?

1.coins for helping with papers/html A lot of people will help for free, but then again, a lot of people will give you all that 'inside information' that others promise future adepts, for free. 2.new players doing coin quests There aren't that many hardcoded puzzles and quests and if you pay attention, you soon notice that certain players have a 'quest' page and others put quests in their hatelist. And what about the players that never read papers? I doubt they will pay others to help them write their own papers. 3. trade supervision I get the not trusting part, but I'd rather see a trade interface where both parties have made their offer and agreed to the other parties' offer. Otherwise it's going to be a lot of trouble finding a supervisor and it will likewise not be a fun task. 4. trade logs Once again, hardcoded automatic logging is both safer and less tedious. I suspect some people would prefer privacy and so it would also make sense the logs are only consulted when there are reason to be suspicious. 5. banking I thought MD was going to have a primitive economy? What's next, stock options in Kafuuka Milling Inc? Does anyone want to start selling those and give me the proceeds? 6. Infinite items This is probably just an unlucky naming. At any given point in time, the amount of items should be finite. (if it was infinite the value would be zero, since value is proportional to 1/supply.) There should however be a constant (or growing) flow of items, maintained by creation and destruction. Creation and destruction can be mimicked through the garbage alt idea, though that will require trusting a lot of people. Ailith and Stormrunner are currently 'creating', providing coins to players who do a simple quest. The recent auction and the item creation quests are 'destroying', taking coins and items out of circulation. Basically we want to increase the flow and suggest to have more: More items More types of items (mundane items, limited use magical items, powerfull unique items) More creators (and destructors) 7. More creators I have stated this before but since it's already more than 10 posts ago... Either this implies more RPCs, or the availability of an even more limited creation ability for the non-RPCs. Imo it should have a limited amount of uses per month. It should cost a lot to acquire the ability (a wishpoint). It should be very limited in what it can do. Eg a miner can mine and get a couple of ores (iron, silver... maybe make it random which one you get at every attempt). A brewer can change any kind of wheat/mushroom into the appropriate alcoholic beverage (i forgot what blue ale is made from, but i guess there must be some mushroom based beverage in some fantasy novel somewhere). This is more restricting imo than Kragel, who can even make metallic muffins, not that I'd eat them. This would allow RPCs to focus on the unique items and not get burried in workorders for mundane items, while still having lots of items created and destroyed all the time. (I don't know of nonRPC care about the workload, but maybe, just maybe it will help more if i get RPCs to support this idea) Anyone ever played Dwarffortress? I've also mentioned death and taxes.. err thievery and taxes (death to the thieves?) as coin redistribution methods. 7b. More creators (bis) You could also use more quests for coins, more jobs (or slavery)... but the more people you involve, the less transparent it becomes and now that the issue of distrust is raised... effort, manual maintenance... It would be so much easier to rely on programmed features. 8. "I appoliogise for not reading this all so carefully' Wait, you what? Go back and read it you illiterate! Now you've even made me rant about this kind of stuff. And read my post at least five times, so that you can recite it without looking, I've made it long for that purpose you know

[quote name='Liberty4life' post='30237' date='May 4 2009, 08:19 PM']mur big problem is.... people dont know how to roleplay, and those who know dont want to teach properly big questions in quality roleplaying are how to do something and still get noticed, for example if i want to fight against necrovians, what should i do, i should attack them on sight, but thing is i wont get noticed my intentions seams fullish so to speak, this is just one example, not much people knows how to affect masses or not even few players, and how al works thats still mystery even for ones who have been in it[/quote] There are people that put hints on RP in their papers. I know I did. The one problem might be that I'm not considered as one who does know how to roleplay... but did you ever ask anyone to teach you? Only one person ever asked me anything RP related and I've responded to that within 24h. How to get noticed? First of all, is it in your characters nature to get noticed? Not everybody can be famous. The best place to start would be your papers though. People do read that, and if they like it, they'll put more effort into talking with you. And patience, patience and more patience. Fame spreads slowly. It spreads faster if you know famous people or do remarkable things. Note that doesn't mean being friendly with them. Having an enemy is probably the best way of getting noticed, if you manage to be on good terms with the player and have good battles with his/her character. Of course your character might end up dead because of making too many enemies... no risk, no gain? Sadly this will require a lot of ooc conversations with your 'enemy', but how else would they know how to react to your attacks? My theory is that quality will get noticed, will be talked about, but you wont notice the noticing until one day you wonder why everybody knows your character and knows how to anticipate his/her/its behavior. Though you might want to ask someone who achieved that to verify the theory, since waiting for it is rather boring.

[quote name='King Manu' post='30219' date='May 4 2009, 06:05 PM']NO no more fun stuff you (some) of you are happy to find ways to avoid rules, and never realised MD is not about such rules, then rules you will have, all of you.[/quote] I'm not against rules, but may I suggest a different set of rules? YES yes more fun stuff! There must be one person that plays the game the right way and inspires the many, right? @Burns: *sending a stream of red sparkles at your face* ... you're confusing godmodding and RP. I don't think there's a hardcore godmodding faction, since they tend to believe in the 'there can be only one' credo.