Well... it seems I was somewhat less than clear about what I had in
mind, so here's a more thorough (but hopefully concise) explanation.
As somebody else mentioned, what I had (have?) in mind is a system
where people can choose not to see any messages of the form:
(PC) hits (MOB). or
(MOB) hits (PC).
Performed naively, this would cause some difficulties. However, it
would be easy to 'upgrade' it a bit, with the following modification:
The player still sees a message whenever a combat STARTS or STOPS,
just not the intermediate combat messages.
As for the problem of knowing when to rescue... this can easily be
solved by having the person-to-be-rescued sing/shout/dance-a-jig
when they feel they are in danger. It's also rather easy for the
person who is blocking messages to look at people to evaluate their
condition (or will be, at least).
Here's a question that take's my original thought a bit further,
though:
If one were to implement such a system, would it be best to:
a) block all combat messages other than those that DIRECTLY
involve the PC in question, or
b) block all messages from combat that involves neither the
PC in question nor the mob said PC is fighting (ie you'd
still see the combat of group members if they were fighting
the same mob as you), or
c) allow both options?
Can anybody foresee any particular difficulties in implementing any
of these setups? I haven't put a great deal of thought into it yet,
but it appears, at first glance, to be fairly simple...
--
-Mathue Moyer
-mathue@ucsd.edu
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