DISCUSS: +Rumors

[The Dark Griffin]

I thought this might be a good place to put up suggestions and feedback on the +RUMORS system.

I'm personally still uneasy about many aspects of it, but I would like to read other people's thoughts on it as well.

One initial suggestion... there are a lot of rumors floating on the board right now. I would suggest a limit to how many rumors one character can start, something like no more than 1-2 rumors per character, per week. If a character can start more than this, it should require use of an asset (perhaps the Rumormonger one?)

~Ace

[Ran]

There's currently no player with more than two rumors in the system, actually. Perhaps a limit on targetted rumors, or making them more expensive, would be something to consider, but we'd want to wait on that until we get the Renown targetting working correctly to better gauge usage. So far targetted rumors are not particularly used.

We are looking at various adjustments, such as the costs of spreading and quashing vs. starting a rumor, to give people more incentive to work together on keeping one rumor (or crushing it out of existence) going, rather than deciding it's more economic to just start a separate rumor on the same theme. Having six different rumors on the same topic may be giving the prominence of the rumor more credit than it ought to have. By making it cheaper or easier to successfully spread or quash, it would be more appealing to do that rather than spend points on starting a fresh rumor, or so we'd think.

[The Dark Griffin]

Another suggestion... if a rumor is a targetted one, and your character is a target, it would be helpful if there was some sort of OOC notification.

I realize that rumors don't work this way in reality, and sometimes the target is the last to know. But it's a pain in the butt to have to read through all the rumors to see if you're being singled out.

[Ran]

Actually, I've now fixed that part of it, or at least I thought I did. If you look at Rumor 4, for example, it should indicate the tenor of the rumor (positive/negative) and the subject. We realized that a rumor could rather easily be used abusively -- someone targets someone else with the rumor, but puts in a completely unrelated message so as not to draw too much interest in investigating/quashing it ... or even convincing people to spread it, thinking that it is a positive rather than a negative. This should nip it in the bud. If it's not working correctly, let me know and I'll look further into it.

Making +rumors/view somehow highlight those rumors which specifically target you, so you can quickly check up on them, is a good idea. I'll see how doable that is.

[Dagur Saltcliffe]

One aspect I'd like to see added if it's not too complicated code-wise is negative consequences for Person A starting a negative rumour if the person he's targeted, Player B, manages to successfuly investigate it -- a hit to A's influence/reputation/renown/whatever the appropriate stat is, but a smaller one than the one suffered by B in the case of a successful rumour.

One the one hand, players won't be too scared to start a negative rumour if the possible hit is a small one. On the other, if they're in the habit of starting such rumours, they could stand to take a significant hit cumulatively. That makes it more realistic, IMO, since they have to consider the consequences of their actions. The influence/whatever hit would reflect the fact that ICly, people would be wary of or dislike someone who gained a reputation as a backbiter.