I think the game has moved in the right direction when it comes to having certain socials causing people to step out of their cover, or the shadows that they are hiding in, etc. However, there seems to be more work to do. Here is a log snippet that pretty much sums up my concerns:


Raja hugs someone.

Raja beams a smile at someone.

Raja waves happily.

Someone growls in amusement.

Someone hugs Raja.

Someone waves happily.


In my mind, as soon as Raja did an interactive social ("hug", in this case) with a hidden person it would be pretty easy for me to get a fix on the person in question. On the flip-side I don't think that someone who enters the room after the action in question would have any idea of the hidden person's presence. So, basically, stealth should be based on the perspective of each individual. Think about that for a moment...it makes sense, and it might not even be too hard to code (admitedly, I am not any kind of authority on that), since it seems like it would just be based on a series of checks between the hider and the hide-ee (that is, the person who may or may not see the hiding person based on many factors). Anyway, a clunkier version of this fix might be to just make it so that circumstances such as those in the preceding log would cause a hidden person to become visible. As it stands, the only way for a person with some form of detection ability to get a concealed person to become visible is through some exposing spell/song/supp/ability or by initiating an attack...what happened to just pointing your finger and saying "Look at that guy!"?

Problem is, it then becomes very trivial to 'out' someone not in your PK range. It isn't, right now, and I think we'd like to keep it that way.

Very good point. If there were some way to limit it only to those in a given PK range, while having people outside that range be unaffected by the "perspective" idea that I posted, it could be cool. I am not sure how that could be done without being confusing as hell (especially to new players), as well as clunky.


Thanks for the response though.

How about, if someone does a social to a hidden person, only the people who can detect hidden see it.

Last I checked, our social technology wasn't really up to that task. Maybe somebody will get fired up to upgrade it someday.