Feedback Wanted - Tour Feature

AresMUSH
1

Ever since retiring the web client screen, I’ve been contemplating ways for someone to check out a game more easily from the web portal. Here is what I’ve come up with, and I’m interested in what y’all think.

Historically, guests have been pre-designated shared characters. connect guest (or tour in Ares) will connect you to the first available guest, so you can chat as Guest-1 or whatever. As soon as Guest-1 logs out, the next person who logs in as a guest can re-use Guest-1.

Having shared characters has always presented issues. For example, you don’t want the next Guest-1 to see what the prior Guest-1 had said in PMs. This also makes it impossible for guests to submit requests, receive mails, etc. since they can’t necessarily get back to the same character. Also there are security issues with this, because the first Guest-1 could cause mischief, but their IP would be overwritten by the second Guest-1. Finally, shared characters are unsuitable to a web app for many reasons.

But what if it was easy to make a temp character that wasn’t shared?

Here’s the pitch:

  • connect guest or tour will now just auto-generate a character for you with a temporary name and password.
  • A new ‘tour’ button on the web portal does the same thing.
  • This is a regular character, same as if you’d created them yourself from the login screen.
  • If you decide to stay, you can just rename them and keep on playing. Otherwise, that char will go into the idle queue for recycling.

I’m open to suggestions on how these temporary chars should be named. They’ll get recycled eventually by the idle system, but not necessarily right away. So any naming system needs to account for potentially a lot of different temp names. A few possible ideas:

  • An easy system mirroring tradition would just be to let you configure a base temp name (“Guest”, “Visitor”, “Wanderer”, etc.) with a number onto the end. So the first guest ever would just be Guest-1 and eventually you’d work your way up to Guest-999 or whatnot.
  • Common practice these days is having a big list of adjectives and nouns. Combine them to get a silly temp name like “TriumphantPanda” or “HappyWombat”.
  • You could specify a list of guest names, like [ “RedGuest”, “BlueGuest”, “GreenGuest”…] but if all them had been taken and not yet recycled, it could tack a number on the end.

A few other config notes:

  • If the game has allow_creation disabled, you won’t be able to tour either.
  • allow_game_tour and allow_web_tour allow you to enable/disable the tours.
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Forgot to add: for games that want to only do roster chars, a new permission allow_chargen will let you only allow staff-authorized rosters into CG.

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Given the items you noted, using names like HappyWombat might have a slight edge as they are more memorable than Guest1234. That said, they do run the risk of appearing more like a player than a guest at times. Still, I think using combinations of nouns and adjectives might make it easier to remember which guest you were chatting with. Just my .02

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