Disguise. I miss it.

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Phoxly
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Phoxly » Mon May 28, 2018 2:05 am

Durvayas wrote:
Mon May 28, 2018 1:58 am
Seven Sons of Sin wrote:
Thu May 24, 2018 2:01 pm
ReverentBlade wrote:
Thu May 24, 2018 2:34 am
I'll be the contrarian and say that I've found the server more enjoyable without it. My character can pierce most disguises anyway so it's not like it severely -diminished- my enjoyment, but it did feel like it was limiting my interactions. I couldn't come up with a justifiable excuse to break character enough to interact with these disguised people. When you're running around obviously trying to obfuscate your identify, most normal people would assume they are criminals and avoid them.

Having previously been a "career evil" player on other servers, I can definitely see the use and appeal of a disguise system, but I feel like there's probably better ways to handle that RP.
I've wanted to return to Arelith, but unfortunately my character in question hinged on the entire idea of anonymity. It's been difficult to rethink how I can get around it while maintaining the same level of fun and interactivity.
Quite simply, you can't. I know of a person who tried, whose entire line of RP was compromised, and myself and another player entirely gave up trying our own crime syndicate RP because its simply nonviable without being metagamed, and once that cat is out of the bag, there's no going back.

Play another character; until disguise is fixed, there is literally no point playing any kind of concept that relies even a little bit on being unrecognizable.
I have to agree. Right now, as a guilded assassin, it's pretty hard to decide if I should put points into bluff and use disguise anyway just for some deniability? Or if I should just wait to put any points into it, or really start attempting assassinations until I'm higher leveled or they fix it.

I could just accept the life as a world renown assassin that everyone knows and fears when they see his face... but I'm pretty sure you can't sneak/move silently through exiled areas lol. I'd need 41 Bluff.

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Durvayas
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Durvayas » Mon May 28, 2018 2:18 am

In your case, I suggest either waiting until you're higher level and/or bluff is fixed, OR, shelving that character entirely, because you're going to become quite famous after you successfully assassinate even one high profile target(I play an assassin, word gets around), and regardless of what your bluff is, and regardless of if you are disguised, your character's identity WILL become known because people metagame. Not always intentionally(the disguise system largely prevented unintentional metagaming. People who were going to metagame you anyways were going to rely on clicking on your portait in the chat bar anyways), but it happens often, and even if you file a report and the metagaming player is punished, you'll never be able to put the genie back in the bottle.

The same thing happens to warlocks, 'heretic' drow in Andunor, pirates, closet sharran politicians in cordor, elves who can't get through Myon's mythal, etc.

Once word is out, its out, and you'll never be able to ret-con it into being unknown just because one player cheated, regardless of if they get caught or not.
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Nitro
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Nitro » Mon May 28, 2018 10:26 am

People who were going to metagame you anyways were going to rely on clicking on your portait in the chat bar anyways
Thankfully, this will be a lot easier to avoid now with the new beamdog login, since you can change your player name every time you log in to the server and still play on the same character, so once disguise gets fixed and if you're keen on not being metagamed, you can just rotate login names to go with different disguise names.

Seven Sons of Sin
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Seven Sons of Sin » Mon May 28, 2018 3:01 pm

It certainly tempts me to "go for it" regardless of anonymity, just to see how far I can get before I'm mobbed.
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cptcuddlepants
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by cptcuddlepants » Mon May 28, 2018 3:13 pm

Nitro wrote:
Mon May 28, 2018 10:26 am
People who were going to metagame you anyways were going to rely on clicking on your portait in the chat bar anyways
Thankfully, this will be a lot easier to avoid now with the new beamdog login, since you can change your player name every time you log in to the server and still play on the same character, so once disguise gets fixed and if you're keen on not being metagamed, you can just rotate login names to go with different disguise names.
This isn’t foolproof, unfortunately, as the portal site still shows your original login name regardless of what your ingame one is.
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TimeAdept
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by TimeAdept » Mon May 28, 2018 5:52 pm

I dropped bluff, it's useless for its main use until fixed. Nice for cheating Exiles, though.

Nitro
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Nitro » Mon May 28, 2018 7:30 pm

cptcuddlepants wrote:
Mon May 28, 2018 3:13 pm
Nitro wrote:
Mon May 28, 2018 10:26 am
People who were going to metagame you anyways were going to rely on clicking on your portait in the chat bar anyways
Thankfully, this will be a lot easier to avoid now with the new beamdog login, since you can change your player name every time you log in to the server and still play on the same character, so once disguise gets fixed and if you're keen on not being metagamed, you can just rotate login names to go with different disguise names.
This isn’t foolproof, unfortunately, as the portal site still shows your original login name regardless of what your ingame one is.
Would that matter though? If your login name ingame is different from the one on the portal, and they haven't managed to breach the disguise, there will be no way for them to correlate the two, right? Presuming a working disguise system of course.

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cptcuddlepants
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by cptcuddlepants » Mon May 28, 2018 8:28 pm

I’m not sure - haven’t done much with disguise in a while, even before the portal changes. I just know that my characters’ original login names show on there, regardless of what I log in with.
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Mithreas
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Mithreas » Tue May 29, 2018 3:32 am

If Names is going to be unavailable for the long term, we can probably work around its absence by making disguise change your actual name instead.

That would be a fairly significant engine revision, but since almost all functions run off PC ID now (which wasn't true when -disguise was first implemented) it should be possible to do.
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triaddraykin
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by triaddraykin » Tue May 29, 2018 10:26 am

There was some recent discussion of it on the NWNX Discord server, https://discord.gg/zEJv3W, but only really an explanation of what it is to someone else by Spyre. Beyond that, I don't know that it'll be worked on, as Liareth said she's currently taking a break from coding and NWN. Said after that she'd finish it off once she was back in action, didn't say when. All I have to report.
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NoOneOfConsequence
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by NoOneOfConsequence » Tue May 29, 2018 1:46 pm

Mithreas wrote:
Tue May 29, 2018 3:32 am
If Names is going to be unavailable for the long term, we can probably work around its absence by making disguise change your actual name instead.

That would be a fairly significant engine revision, but since almost all functions run off PC ID now (which wasn't true when -disguise was first implemented) it should be possible to do.
A NWN2 server I used to play used this type of system, and I loved it.
Please consider implementing something to this effect! :)

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Durvayas
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Durvayas » Tue May 29, 2018 8:03 pm

Mithreas wrote:
Tue May 29, 2018 3:32 am
If Names is going to be unavailable for the long term, we can probably work around its absence by making disguise change your actual name instead.

That would be a fairly significant engine revision, but since almost all functions run off PC ID now (which wasn't true when -disguise was first implemented) it should be possible to do.
Thats an alarming suggestion. Without the (disguise) tag, combined with the ability to change account name at will, doing this would make spoofing other players almost effortless to anyone with sufficient bluff. One could adopt a PCs appearance and name, then the player account name, and proceed to break rules and rack up reports to impersonate, defame, and frame another player as effectively as hacking an account, but with trivial effort.

Was not the disguise tag's entire purpose to prevent this scenario? Now, more than ever(with the ability to change account name), we need that tag.
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Jagel
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Jagel » Tue May 29, 2018 8:18 pm

The server enforces unique logins, so nope ^^

Ironsoul
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Ironsoul » Wed May 30, 2018 1:15 am

I personally have enjoyed not having the (slave) (Disguise) tags around. Once it returns - if the whole disguise mechanic could be relegated solely to the examine window that would be my preference.

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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by JediMindTrix » Wed May 30, 2018 7:40 am

Durvayas wrote:
Tue May 29, 2018 8:03 pm
Thats an alarming suggestion. Without the (disguise) tag, combined with the ability to change account name at will, doing this would make spoofing other players almost effortless to anyone with sufficient bluff. One could adopt a PCs appearance and name, then the player account name, and proceed to break rules and rack up reports to impersonate, defame, and frame another player as effectively as hacking an account, but with trivial effort.
calm your tits Durvayas he didn't suggest anything along those lines lol He's just saying there might be a work around.

@Mithreas I looked on the lexicon and it says that in testing SetName does not work on player objects, but maybe that's changed now for NWN EE? And if not, maybe we can just get Beamdog to do it?

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Mithreas
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Mithreas » Thu May 31, 2018 1:18 am

We use Ruby to change character names by editing the bic, so it's already possible to do this via NWNX code that works today.

How we choose to do it is up to us. e.g. we could make (Disguised) part of the "hard" name easily enough if we wanted to preserve tagging. I expect we'd store the real name on the character's hide for referencing as needed (or maybe even on the database cache object for the PC, since their real name is in the database). There's probably a dozen places in the codebase we'd need to update, but it doesn't seem like an impossible task.
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Rwby
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Rwby » Thu May 31, 2018 1:25 pm

That would be nice. I am sadface at my shelved characters.

NoOneOfConsequence
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by NoOneOfConsequence » Thu May 31, 2018 1:55 pm

Out of curiosity, what function is served by displaying the various (tags) by names? From my perspective, the tags seem OOC and an invitation to either metagame or reverse-metagame, so I'm interested to learn why they were originally included.

Nitro
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Nitro » Thu May 31, 2018 3:33 pm

The tags were included for OOC convenience, so someone can't, say, take someone elses name and then go around griefing and doing silly RP to besmirch that person. It could be argued that DM's can find and ban such abuses, but by that time the cat's already out of the bag, and whoever was targeted will likely have suffered a hit to their reputation in the eyes of a number of people.

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Atlantahammy
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Re: Disguise. I miss it.

Post by Atlantahammy » Mon Jun 11, 2018 6:30 am

Mithreas wrote:
Tue May 29, 2018 3:32 am
If Names is going to be unavailable for the long term, we can probably work around its absence by making disguise change your actual name instead.

That would be a fairly significant engine revision, but since almost all functions run off PC ID now (which wasn't true when -disguise was first implemented) it should be possible to do.
Ahhh I say go for it, since the thing needed has been broken for a number of months now, might be best to have a work around till it's fixed, does sound like you all have an idea to do this rather simply if it came down too it, I think it would be more a matter of undoing it once it's fixed though, is the real concern.

There is a lot of metagaming going on cause of -disguise not working at the moment, and it's causing a problem, specially with the uptick of people using "what you see is what you get" with this glitch, despite names over characters being OOC... Not to mention the bluff investment is a bit totally useless right now. Dl>

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