So its been a few weeks and we would like to hear your feedback on the cover & disguise changes.
All feedback will be appreciated but I would also specifically like you to answer these questions:
- Did you notice any increased griefing by players using cover?
- Did PCs (and guards in particular) behavior to covered individual change? ("Remove your cover or else..."), do you find this change improves or harms RP?
- Are you pleased with the "DisguiseName" rather then DisguiseName (Disguised) change?
- How often do you use the -cover flag? to you change between states with the same armor appearance? please specify when and how.
- What's your thoughts on the difficulty level of penetrating cover and its affect by distance? please specify if you are usually using it or trying to break it.
- Does cover make you believe investing in bluff is a less useful? what did you previously use bluff for?
- In general, are you pleased with the new system?
- We will be removing the need to use -cover enable and have it enabled automatically when fully covered. The main reasons for this are to both keep things simple and so PCs won't sometimes be suspicious and sometimes not while looking precisely the same (Therefore slightly harming WYSIWYG). This change will be reviewed again and may be reverted or changed in a few weeks depending if we believe its better or worse than the current system.
- As part of the change the cover text will seem less "dangerous" and will simply specify this this person is covered and you can't tell much about it in gray color. Covered individuals should now therefore be treated as if they are covered and you can't see most of their features, but they don't act suspiciously in any way other than that. (A Paladin fully covered in armor and helm may just be a... Paladin in full armor and helm, nothing nefarious must going on there.)
- This isn't a change but I will mention it here again that if you don't want that covered text to show and have your appearance and description hidden just make sure your neck is visible, that's a barely visible change that will make you sure you are uncovered.
- As requested in the previous thread, the cover text will be moved to the top of the examine window and everything else will follow.
- When their cover isn't broken, half-elves will now appear as human.
- You can now disguise your race using the -disguise_race RACE_NAME command. This has a few limitations:
- You must have at least 20 base bluff/perform to use this feature.
- This feature works with the existing disguise system, if you broke the disguise you can see the real race.
- You can only disguise your race as a similar race, this include all subraces with the same parent race (Drow->Moon Elf, Shield Dwarf -> Gold Dwarf) and in addition Half-Elf -> Human.
- You must be covered for this feature to work, but...
- Breaking the cover without breaking the disguise won't reveal your real race.
- The main reason for these limitations is to maintain WYSIWYG - we don't want you to be able to differentiate races with different appearances (for example humans and elves) visually only to have the description say you didn't. The same goes for having Drow with dark skin disguised as moon elves when you can clearly see their dark skin and know them to be Drow.
- Limiting this feature to covered PCs of the same appearance makes sure you only see a hooded figure of about the same size and need the description to tell its precise race.
- If you broke the cover and didn't break the disguise you should treat it ICly as if you saw something of the player's skin but you still believe him to be whatever race he disguised himself as.
- This isn't a change but I will specify it here again because it will probably come up, as before if you didn't break the cover you can only see that PCs parent race (Elf, Dwarf, Human) so that disguise_race won't have any affect until the cover is broken.
And that's it for now!
Please let us know what you think, we will update when this change will go live after hearing your feedback.
Update - The Changes are Live
This happened slightly sooner than I expected, I have gone through your comments though and will discuss them with the team and make the needed adjustments in the coming days, the most apparent ones are:
- Automatic Description Hiding - this will most likely change now that cover is automatic, either by removing the feature, making it opt-in, allowing automatic alternative description under cover or in some other cooler way.
- Hoods - we got brand new hood models that completely cover the face, so the old models that didn't completely hide it can now be made not-covering.
- Lore Needed to Identify Races - The values of some races were already adjusted (such as Drow which was lowered considerably), more adjustments may be coming.
- TS & Clairvoyance spells + Cover Break DC - In essence breaking cover that way makes sense IG but I agree this being done without RP at all sounds rather annoying, I will discuss this further with the team.
Other than that thank you all for the feedback! and keep it coming if you have more to contribute,
I will update once the adjustments are implemented.
Update #2
These changes will go live next reset, the first may still change further after more discussion but for now its better than always removing the description it as before.
- Being covered no longer hides your description automatically
- Hoods that do not hide your face no longer count as cover, the new masked-hoods added to all races do.