Suggestions:Miscellaneous

Other suggestions are made here. See Suggestions for a list of other suggestion categories.

Suggestions for Shartak are not often implemented but are always welcome. Comments on and improvements to existing suggestions are appreciated. Please don't remove suggestions you don't like.

Before adding a suggestion, please take the time to view the guidelines for advice on what suggestions are feasable, and please check existing suggestions to ensure that yours (or a very similar one) has not already been made. Please add new suggestions to the bottom of the page.

Implemented suggestions are moved to Suggestions:Implemented. Bug reports should be added to the Bugs page.

Example

To use the template, enter the following at the bottom of the page, but replace emboldened text with text appropriate to your suggestion:

===Suggestion Name===
{{suggestion|
suggest_type=Skill, balance change, improvement, etc|
suggest_scope=Who or what it applies to|
suggest_description=Full description. Check spelling and be descriptive.|
suggest_time=~~~~~|
suggest_author=~~~|
suggest_comments=
<!-- COMMENT **BELOW** THIS LINE - DO NOT DELETE THIS LINE -->
Comment here
<!-- COMMENT **ABOVE** THIS LINE - DO NOT DELETE THIS LINE -->
}}

Other

Tunnels

Tunnels underneath the island lead to interesting places.

Comments

How do you know they don't exist? :) Dr. J

Tunnels underneath the island lead to interesting places. --Tycho44 06:43, 8 June 2006 (BST)

---

Treasure to capture

"Capture the flag" type objective, in this case the flags are treasure from each village. Bonus points in the form of XP or gold coins to be awarded to the holder of the treasure at certain intervals.

Comments

I would like to modify this slightly Mystery Suggester. Please see the Unique Item Hunt suggestion. --Lint 08:40, 5 March 2006 (GMT)

---

Player VS Player Interaction

I would propoese a to hit % penalty for attacking members of same Home location. I believe this will promote exploration and perhaps offer a measure of protection of newly "birthed" population. As a recent victim of death by the hands of a warrior from my own villiage this has a bit of appeal to me ;). - Nan

Comments

Instead of a hit % penalty, what about reducing or eliminating XP earned for such attacks? It would be similar to the ZvZ penalty used in UrbanDead, and its easier to rationalize not getting as much experience fighting one of your own than to rationalize that its harder to hit your own people for some reason. --Jackel 19:52, 27 February 2006 (GMT)

The to hit penalty and the lack of XP should be combined to discourage intravillage conflicts but only on nonclan members(so clans from the same village can fight with each other to simulate a power struggle for leadership), extend this to shamans as well, as its not often the village shaman gets killed by an out-of-towner. --Daylan 00:27, 7 March 2006 (GMT)

I don't like this idea--especially with the inclusion of pirates in the game. It makes sense for pirates to trun on each other now and then, or to turn to pillaging from one of the outsider towns. All of a sudden, for our good RPing we get a reduced chance to hit and no XP?--Wifey 07:30, 29 March 2006 (BST)

I have suggested a full non player vs player implementation at Suggestions:Game_Mechanics#PvP_Protection. --Iamtas 10:10, 13 April 2006 (BST)

---

Spirit Movement

A couple thoughts on this topic.--Jackel 02:29, 6 March 2006 (GMT)

• My character has the "trekking" skill, but as a spirit, actually moves slower (1 AP per square) than when he's alive! Spirits should move at least as fast as someone skilled at traversing terrain.

Perhaps spirits have less impetus than live characters --Dr. J 18:55, 7 March 2006 (GMT)

• Spirits move effortlessly through the thickest jungle, water, swamp--as it should be. Why should mountains be an impediment?

Perhaps there's some kind of mineral in the mountain that prevents the spirit from passing through it.. could be mined later on to spirit-proof huts or something (clutching at straws here, can you tell) ?

They also can't move through the deepest water, but that is the boundary of the game I'm guessing.

So what's the suggestion here? Perhaps this belongs in the Talk page instead? --Simon 17:51, 27 May 2006 (BST)

---

Player Titles

To supplement the explored/killed statistics, give players rank titles based on percentiles. For example, if Jack is in the bottom 10% of explorers and the 30th percentile of hunters, his profile would show him as "Greenhorn Jack the Good Shot", if Sheila is in the top 10% killers and middle 50 explorer, she would be "The Adventurous Sheila, Grandmaster Hunter", and Murk would simply be "Demigod Murk". The titles would be determined once a day like the stats, only apply to active players, and only take active players into consideration when determining percentile. This will help statistics be more relevant to all players, as once time goes on and new players start, the top 100 may be quite a distant goal. --Frisco 04:15, 10 March 2006 (GMT)

Comments

I like it. It adds flavor to the game. I also agree that this system should be based on dynamic percentiles to allow for new players to compete with some of the more established ranking players. A static listing would be incredibly difficult for newcomers to break into. --Lint 22:12, 11 March 2006 (GMT)

---

Inventory Limit

I think I would like to have an indication of how much of my inventory limit is being used up. :D --Lint 22:12, 11 March 2006 (GMT)

• The inventory is somewhat flexible in size (+/- 2) so wouldn't be completely foolproof if represented as "(x/y)" appended to the inventory header, I could do something like a small bit of text just below the header like "You can carry lots more" "You can carry more things" "You can't carry much more" "You might be able to carry a couple more things" "You can't carry anything else". The question is though, is it just you that wants this feature? If so, you might be able to do something clever with greasemonkey. --Simon 11:02, 14 April 2006 (BST)
• Ah. In that case, a greasemonkey script would be fine. I imagine it would require a little list of all the inventory item names and then a size value assigned to each. Then parse through the list and do simple addition and display the result. I might try my hand at it, but I don't promise anything. --Lint 20:13, 14 April 2006 (BST)
  • "is it just you that wants this feature?" Hmm, I assumed everyone would want this feature. Perhaps "your inventory is getting full" and "your inventory is full" would be sufficient warning, but inventory size info seems valuable. Also, the Trader won't give me a rifle for my bananas (you can't carry more) even though I'm giving away much more than I'm getting -- the trading mechanism appears to check for overload based on carrying both the given and received items. Perhaps a feature... but he's the guy who owns an entire hut, you'd think he'd be willing to carry both during the transaction rather than requiring me to shoulder the burden. --Tycho44 09:10, 29 April 2006 (BST)
    • <Bump.> Also, why not "(x/y)" appended to the inventory header? If the game code can figure out whether or not the inventory is full, it seems that the player could be able to figure out the same info. Even a simple load indication "(x)" would work fine, if the worry is that total inventory capacity 70-74 depends on quirky variable info rather than being static based on class. --Tycho44 22:36, 15 May 2006 (BST) Besides which, seems like most everyone has an inventory limit of 71 now. (2 for blowpipes or rifles, 0 for gold coins.) --Tycho44 22:31, 20 May 2006 (BST)
• See the last list item at The_Shartak_Wiki:Community_Portal#Greasemonkey_scripts. — Elembis (talk) 07:51, 28 May 2006 (BST)

---

In-game Rankings

I was noticing recently that one of my characters seemed to have killed a lot of parrots lately. I realizing that such information is tracked on the game stats page, but not necessarily everyone looks at it, and I thought it might be fun to have something in-game to acknowledge the player who has killed the most creatures of each type. Maybe a line is added to the player's description page, or the color of their name is different, or a mysterious "crown of the fallen parrots" appears in their inventory--no real impact, just bragging rights. It should be easy enough to implement, and might add a little intrigue.--Jackel 01:03, 16 March 2006 (GMT)

Comments

---

Wiki: table CSS

It would be nice if there were a class set up in the wiki's CSS file so that we could make attractive tables (see my ugly, hackish one on Tips and tricks). I tried to edit WikiMedia:Common.css but it's edit-locked. --VTBassMatt 16:14, 23 March 2006 (GMT)

• I don't know that WikiMedia:Common.css is the right thing to edit - That link takes me off to an external site! --Simon 18:09, 23 March 2006 (GMT)
  • What the heck! Ha, sorry. Now I can't find the page on either this wiki or the WikiMedia page. Weird. Well anyhow, it would be nice to have a useful table class. Thanks, Simon.
    • What kind of table class? Do you mean something to give a particular title bar, and row colours? Similar to the one on the front page. Got an example of what you'd put in the css file? --Simon 11:58, 3 April 2006 (BST)
      • Colors aren't too important, I was more concerned with borders. Something simple like:

table.bordered, table.bordered td {
  border: 1px solid black;

---

Pets

Discussion of Pets has been moved to the existing Pet System suggestion.

---

ruins

the ruins in the game are mostly for show, and that can be aggravating at times, as i would love to "explore" ruins more if there was something there. i am suggesting several things such as:

• unique, ruin only monsters
• special items found only in ruins
• if quests are implemented, a quest location

this is a very vague suggestion, but i feel that alot of the ruins on the map are just too bland. i camped out at ruins with my character "Richard Rose" and i stayed there for a week (in real time) because there was nothing better to do. and nothing and i mean NOTHING passed by, no game, no fruit trees, no players. it was completely desolate, and i am just suggesting several "interesting" components for ruins.

Comments:

• I have to agree that last I checked, the Ruins seemed like a total bust. Fifty searches yielded worse than the typical Jungle average. No events triggered, no creatures, no spirits, no variable flavor descriptions.

• "As the wind blows through the ruined arch, you hear the spirit voices of the ancestors" (gain 1 XP).
• "You find a bundle of parrot feathers tied to a leather strap. The spirit magic of this amulet has long since faded away." (junk item that could be implemented with magic/spirits later).
• "Ghosts of the ancient dead chill your soul" (lose 2 HP, gain 2 XP).
• "Sliding the heavy iron lid to one side, you discover The Conch^(tm)!"

...And so on. --Tycho44 22:56, 15 May 2006 (BST)

---

Wind

Author	Timestamp	Type	Scope
Frisco	16:54, 14 April 2006 (BST)	Game Element Addition	Everyone

Add the concept of wind to the game. Could be either constant (always from the west) or random over time, possibly even dependant on the side of the island you're on. For now, including a changing wind speed (10mph to 30mph) may be overly complex. Wind can affect spirit movement, pigeon delivery times, fire movement, etc.

Comments

• Working this out technically might be a bit much, but I would like to see similar environmental variables on the island. It would increase the variety in the game and provide a creative amount of unpredictability while not being outlandish. Perhaps there can be a similar effect for the water current and tide as well. I can't wait until there are hurricane-strength winds that whip around everyone unless they're safe inside the mountain tunnels. Mwahaha. --Lint 20:08, 14 April 2006 (BST)

---

Animal Levelling

Author	Timestamp	Type	Scope
Frisco	20:26, 13 May 2006 (BST)	balance change	NPC Animals

Each time an animal kills a PC, the animal should have its stats increase: increased HP (possibly also reset to max), more damaging attacks, better chance of hitting, faster movements, possibly a more aggresive nature? There probably aren't that many animals out there that have actually killed more than one or two humans before being killed themselves, but this would increase that chance, leading to the natural formation of the mythical beasts that have been mentioned in other suggestions. And if it doesn't happen naturally, i'm sure it wouldn't be too long before animal cultists start sacrificing themselves to animals in order to create their gods.

Characters with the animal affinity skill should be able to identify stronger creatures:

"Also here is a man-eating tiger"

"Also here is an extremely large man-eating alligator"

"Also here is an extremely large man-eating elephant that is barreling towards you"

"Also here is an extremely large man-eating parrot that is barreling towards you with claws the size of cutlasses"

Comments
... That's a mite scary. I don't know how this would affect server load, but that would be my only complaint here.--Wifey 01:06, 14 May 2006 (BST)

• Sounds neat. Will there be a leveling cap? --Lint 01:45, 15 May 2006 (BST)
  • Probably should be a cap, though a rather high one. Time limitations would prevent animals from growing too powerful before someone takes them out, but a dedicated group of cultists could go crazy creating an invicible creature. Or perhaps once an animal reaches a certain level, it gets named (a monkey might be "King Kong" at high enough stats), and this one creature per animal type can continue advancing while all others are capped at that level (can't have more than one King Kong running around). —unsigned by Frisco 02:38, May 15, 2006 (BST)
• Awesome. --Tycho44, Cultist of the Man-Eating Parrot 22:57, 15 May 2006 (BST)
• So let me get this straight - if an animal kills a PC, they gain hp, and accuracy of their attack, and possibly damage as well. say hp + 2, accuracy + 10%, damage + 1, up to a certain level (accuracy can only go up to 100% of course). Easy enough so far. If they get killed, they reset to the normal hp/accuracy/damage and start afresh as a normal level animal? I must say, I quite like this idea. If this is correct, then there's no server load issue. --Simon 09:33, 28 May 2006 (BST)
  • This sounds very good. I recommend that you let each animal reach 100% accuracy and cap damage at base damage + 5 (a 9x100% elephant would be plenty lethal enough, I think). PC deaths to animals are probably rare enough that you could be more generous with HP bonuses: increase an animal's current HP and max HP by base health / 3 + 1 for each of its kills. You could cap max HP (after five increases?), but I wouldn't. An animal should be restored to base health if its HP bonus wouldn't get it there (so an elephant, with a 20+1 HP bonus, would go from 32 HP to 60 and have 81 max HP, or go from 42 to 63 and still have 81 max HP). In theory, after five kills you could see an elephant with 165 HP that dealt 9 damage at 100% accuracy, but only if it got those kills without being harmed at all. Such a beast would be incredibly intimidating, but also incredibly rare. — Elembis (talk) 22:25, 28 May 2006 (BST)

What about new players? They go into the forest for the first time, log out, log in only to discover that "an extremely large man-eating parrot that is barreling towards you with claws the size of cutlasses" has killed them in two moves. Nobody naturally gets stronger by dying and this would only prevent low level characters from leveling up.--One of many doctors 03:13, 29 May 2006 (BST)

The idea is that there wouldn't be that many of these, because they'd be rather difficult to make even a little better, anyways.--Wifey 15:49, 29 May 2006 (BST)

Simon has it right. hp + 5 (or +10%), accuracy + 10%, damage + 1, with only a few upgrades possible. Or, for example, promote to level 1 after 1 kill, level 2 after 2 more kills (3 total), level 3 after 3 (6) kills, and so on. If a max-upgraded parrot is only as strong as a level 0 tiger, this is nowhere near "kill-in-two-moves" monstrosity. This would add excitement and flavor to the game without any downside. I doubt any animal in Shartak has more than two kills. As the 300-hp Squid shows, any attention-getting animal will get torn to bits by PCs. --Tycho44 23:14, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

---

UDTool type Firefox plugin

Author	Timestamp	Type	Scope
Rip Purr	08:18, 27 May 2006 (BST)	Plugin	All players with Firefox

I don't have any coding skills, but I'm sure many of you out there do. Currently there is no way to add people to a contact list, thus making it difficult to recoginse people. Could someone please develop a UDTool style plugin (like that seen in Urban Dead) that allows you to add player's names and assign them to groups with user defined colours? Basically just port the UDTool over to Shartak users, so when you're in a hut or square with others, you can see people you've encoutnered with a llittle bit of text to pop up at your cursor telling you why they're important to you (like the 'notes' feature in the UDTool).

Comments

• This has partially been implemented in-game, we now have contact lists that identify people from the opposing side as well. That's not to say that an UDTool type plugin isn't required though. Perhaps this isn't the best place to put this suggestion though, but somewhere for the real greasemonkey wizards to see it? --Simon 20:50, 12 June 2006 (BST)

---

Hide Skills

Author	Timestamp	Type	Scope
Kripcat	08:18, 31 May 2006 (BST)	Technical	Everyone

I think it would be useful to be able to have a "Hide Skills" button which hides what skills you possess from those viewing your profile, I know many people wouldn't care but it would be useful for players whose skills don't fit with the way they roleplay. Besides who can tell how good a shot someone is simply by looking at them?

Comments

• Comment removed --Lint 20:06, 6 June 2006 (BST)
  • Well, hiding (as a skill) seems different from "hiding your list of skills"... although perhaps that would be a way to boost characters with Sixth Sense, who know how good a shot you are simply by looking at you. I like the effects of having fully revealed skills. Realistically, your home town should hardly be public knowledge, nor the date of your last demise, nor your killer, and so on. Perhaps a "Disguise" skill would give you access to a button that shields your character info (such as level) while you sleep (at a small AP cost). --Tycho44 21:51, 1 June 2006 (BST)
    • It makes sense. No more can I look at the victim's skills t osee how well they'll be able to track me if Ifail to kill them. ;) --Wifey 23:50, 1 June 2006 (BST)
    • That is another bonus to be sure, might add a little tang to your game. Kripcat 07:28, 6 June 2006 (BST)
    • The problem with doing anything "while you sleep" is that it's hard to know whether you're actually not playing, or just taking a very long time between clicks. Idleness is triggered after 7 days of not doing anything, although I'm not sure if simply loading the main game page is considered to be doing something, I'd have to check. I suppose "asleep" is either something you activate on your last go and the next time you reload the page, you're awake again, or else when you haven't done anything for an arbitrary length of time (say 3 hours). --Simon 12:18, 9 June 2006 (BST)
      • There's no issue with player-activated sleep conditions. Clicking a button ("Disguise Self 4AP" or however many AP you want it to cost) activates the Disguise. Player skills are then concealed. They remain Disguised forever until they click anything, at which point they leave the state. The state never activates automatically (in 3 hours or 7 days), because you have to pay to activate it. There are no mechanical complexities. --Tycho44 23:03, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

---

Jungle Regrowth

Author	Timestamp	Type	Scope
Kripcat	08:18, 6 June 2006 (BST)	Alteration	The regrowth of the Jungle Terrain type

As I understand the growth of the Jungle terrain is currently random. At any time a square of jungle can grow anywhere on the map, except for Water and Beach terrain, and when it happens to grow on a square which already contains Jungle it increases the density of that jungle by one. Now to me, this appears to conflict with one of the driving emotions of Shartak, the battle between civilisation and 'the wilds'. At the moment a player can spend a week's AP expanding the settlement's borders only to find that jungle has randomly cropped up in the middle of the settlement. This is highly demoralising and also leads to strange patches of jungle in the middle of no where. I prepose that new Jungle Terrain is formed in the following manner:

• Whenever a square of Jungle with a density above D2 or above is touching a square of D0 terrain it has a 1% chance every hour of "seeding" each D0 square with Jungle. By seeding I mean, the D0 square would become Jungle terrain with a density half that of the square that seeded it.

• Each square of Jungle (with the exception of D10) has a 7.5% chance of "growing" into the density level 1 above its current.

This would mean that roads would be harder to maintain, as they would have to be recut every 4 days or so, but settlements would be easier to maintain and expand as a dedicated weeder or two could slowly push back the borders of the settlement. I know nothing of coding so it may be a coding nightmare and the numbers may need to be tweaked, but I feel that this makes the Jungle more the second enemy that it is in all those Jungle Warfare fiction novels rather than an annoying and unrealistic random occurrence.

Edit: On second thought it may just be easier to create a "coding requirment" that new Jungle Terrain appear within 3 squares of an already positioned Jungle Square. Kripcat 08:24, 6 June 2006 (BST)

Comments
If I understand your comment correctly, you're bothered by the light green d1 Jungles that pop up inside settlements. It is possible that the game already uses a non-random algorithm to grow jungle; in any case, jungle does not appear to grow instantly two or more levels, so the cleanup is ongoing but minor. The crux of your suggestion could be achieved by modifying the current grow system so that d1 did not grow in a fully d0 zone. For example, the game checks a d0-d1 to make sure that there is adjacent d1+ jungle; if not, the game heads out in a random direction (or towards the center of shartak) to the last available d0 square before jungle, and grows that location d0-d1 instead. This would result in the same overall growth speed, but d0-d1 changes would occur on the boundaries rather than the interior of a paved area. --Tycho44 06:55, 8 June 2006 (BST)

• Yes that probably work better with less coding work, but do you have an opinion on such a change? Kripcat 08:36, 8 June 2006 (BST)
• There is a simple algorithm for determining growth of jungle, but it's not as clever as this, it's all to do with growth rate of the square and how often people chop it back. There is also a limit of about 10% of the island that can grow in any given day but it's not hitting the limit at the moment. Having to look at the surrounding squares would also involve having to write the growth as a script rather than a couple of lines of SQL so I'm not overly keen on this even though it would make a bit of sense. --Simon 18:32, 8 June 2006 (BST)
• If it requires a large amount of coding work I wouldn't worry about it, theres a lot of more imporant suggestions than this one about, I just thought it may have been something you overlooked when creating the regrowth system and could perhaps be easily fixed. Kripcat 09:49, 9 June 2006 (BST)

---

Animal Meat

Author	Timestamp	Type	Scope
Riddick	04:52, 8 June 2006 (BST)	Alteration	get meat from dead animals

well it's simple you kill and animal and you can get it's meat from the corpse!or.... and also eventually the animal on the floor will run out of meat and as it says"there is a corpse of a large stag" that will not be there when it runs out of meat....[meat restores 2 HP].

Comments

• There is an existing meat suggestion. --Lint 06:32, 8 June 2006 (BST)

---

Capitalize skill names consistently

Author	Timestamp	Type	Scope
Elembis	20:54, 11 June 2006 (BST)	Cosmetic	Skill names

Most skills, like Basic Tracking, are capitalized fully in-game, but some, like Body building, are not. If the first word in a skill is always capitalized ("You have Body building..."), why shouldn't subsequent words be capitalized, too? Skill capitalization should at least be consistent, and I recommend that consistency be attained by capitalizing the few not-fully-capitalized skills (which also include Native knowledge, Ghostly whisper, and a couple others).

Comments
Agreed. Cosmetic, but consistency is useful (especially when working with greasemonkey scripts or the wiki). --Tycho44 21:30, 16 June 2006 (BST)

• Sorted, except after some discussion, I went the opposite way to the above - Body building was already right, Advanced tracking is now right. --Simon 21:51, 16 June 2006 (BST)

---

Use UTC for server times

Author	Timestamp	Type	Scope
Elembis	16:43, 19 June 2006 (BST)	Time zone standardization	Timestamps

UTC (a.k.a. "Greenwich Mean Time"), the worldwide standard, is the time zone people are most accustomed to converting times to and from. In comparison, British Standard Time (BST), which is currently used, moves the clock ahead of UTC by one hour in March and keeps it that way until October. UTC is better for wiki timestamps (since a later time will always correspond to a later edit) and gives anyone converting a timestamp only one DST ("Daylight Saving Time") setting to take into account: their own.

Comments
If this is for the wiki itself, you can change your timezone in the preferences. --Simon 21:20, 19 June 2006 (BST)

Wiki default timezone updated to UTC. In-game events are actually in GMT. --Simon 20:56, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Simon and I found that BST was the default time zone for wiki users as well as the time zone used for death times. Both of those are fixed now, and according to Simon the only part of the game that still uses BST is the "Been on the island since" field, which doesn't really need to be accurate to the hour. — Elembis (talk) 02:28, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

---

Timestamp the Shartak Interface

Author	Timestamp	Type	Scope
Tycho44	22:52, 19 June 2006 (UTC)	Interface improvement	all

Put a small timestamp on the main Shartak interface screen, in addition to the current timestamping of messages, game events, last death, and so on. This would be a huge improvement for screenshots -- for example, tagging up checkpoints in marathon races or swims, capture-the-flag and other in-game games, verifying PKs, RP meeting attendance, etc. In addition, the timestamp would help those of us who don't use GMT to figure out the delta on game event messages. You could put the timestamp in the stats bar, or above or below the map, or above or below location description, or

Possible Actions: (22:52, 19 June 2006 (UTC))

... almost anywhere on the interface screen really. Trivial to implement and a major benefit for some of the roleplaying.

Comments
Done. Simon put this just below the HP/XP/AP/Gold text in a <div> tag that the game's CSS hides by default. You can see the server's time by editing your profile and checking "Include the server time on the main page?". — Elembis (talk) 02:28, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

---