I've created a thing call account association. Go here:

http://www.rohonline.net/assoc.php

Essentially, you tell the forum that a mud character is owned by a certain forum account. By doing this in game, the forum can trust that you actually own the character.

As you'll see, right now, all you can do is receive notifications that you have private messages. Try it out - associate yourself with an account, then send yourself a message!

There's a help topic (HELP FORUM) to direct you to the URL above as well.


Because we now have a trusted way to know who your characters are, I'm taking out the free-text field that lets you list characters. Using this method will show your list of characters on your profile. This means that, for those of you who listed characters, the list won't be displayed anymore.


Any comments or suggestions for more functionality, please post!

I like this... often i come back after a long period and not know who the hell anyone is ne more with all the new chars.

How useful it is depends on if people hook up their characters to an account! I could make a page that displays all forum accounts with characters.

You can now associate/unassociate a character by logging in to the Character Interface. A button will be on the main screen.

There's now a nice page to see characters associated with an account.

Just a couple of ideas for accounts.

What Have I Missed?
Lists all the levels and deaths since your last log in. Since I assume the forum now knows when you're in the mud or not. Also lists who's logged in, how many times, and total time for those players.

Personal Statistics Page
You can set these as public, but are otherwise private. They show simple stats for each of your characters.
Mob killed the most:
Killed the most by:
Highest mob killed:
Rooms visited:
Your ranking by level among your class.
things like that.

The forum has the ability to ask if you're logged on or not - knowing when you're logged on would require a lot of communication with, so it doesn't do it. With the Who's On Now page, the forum asks who is on and then remembers it for a short time so it's not constantly asking.

The statistics you're suggesting would update frequently; the forum would be a poor place to track this information. Some of these statistics would require a lot of record-keeping, so unless there is a lot of demand for this information, I'd prefer not to do it. What does everyone else think?

I think the death and level notifications would be cool, especially for someone like me who never logs on.

Just have data older than 14 days not store.

The best thing you can do for any game is add a gotta catch em all appeal. Give people lots of numbers to aspire to. Little victories you can do other than grinding and leveling. For instance, "I've visited 15,000 rooms, I'm the top explorer in the game!" "Look, the highest mob I killed is some super perm other people are scared of, suck on that fools!"

A general page would be easier - who has died/leveled in the last week, irregardless of who is looking at it. That way we wouldn't have to store when you last looked at it - you can do that yourself.


I agree that those statistics would be cool. Some of them are easy - toughest mob killed, for example, just 1 field to store that data on the toughest mob you killed, possibly replaced whenever you kill something.

How many rooms you visited would not be easy. There are two choices - your character remembers every room you've been to, or the room remembers everyone who has been there. Either way, the mud has to remember a lot of data. If there are 1,000 characters on the mud, we're remembering an average of, say, 5,000 rooms for each, that's 5 million extra points of data we're keeping track of.

My concern is that this kinda of data traffic will slow down the mud. On the other hand, Bane says the mud doesn't use very memory. I suppose the only real way to know is to try it out and see if anyting slows down.


Another thought is, since the mud only tracks this data, but never uses it, we could create a program to manage this data while the mud's only responsibility is to fork over the information. That's frees up the mud from putting in the effort of tracking the information.

I like Jacko's pokemon idea.

# of rooms visited, # of mobs killed and so on would provide a few extra bragging rights for delta to try and horde