On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, Bob Stewart wrote:

>
> In a similar vein to the discussion of bards wearing plate and other
> aspects of roleplaying, are there other hardheads out their who would
> rather drown than use /loc and numeric coordinates?

I just used the position of the sun to figure out East and
West, and assumed the boat took a mostly straight East-West
route and figured I'd hit one of the islands if I swam due
West. Little did I realize East and West are reversed in the
Ocean of Tears. I did hit an island, but it wasn't the one I
expected. Turns out I swam all the way across from the BB
zone back to the island of the Sisterhood of Erollisi.

> Personally I consider /loc a debugging command and a roleplaying
> abomination. I refuse to deal with it. If we are to have such a pin-point
> locating and finding capability, it should be a proper in-game mechanism,
> not a computer programming artifact.

I would not have as much problem with it if the compass were
more accurate than just giving the same directions as sense
heading. It's very easy to think you're going due West when
you're off by 10 degrees and completely miss where you're
trying to go. I suppose I could start dropping copper coins
as I go like Hansel and Gretel.

Another problem I've had was figuring out orientation
underwater. I've actually gotten lost in the lake in Oasis,
where it's murky enough that you often can't see if you're
swimming into a wall (i.e. not moving). Eventually I figured
out that I could center my view and just rotate to get a
proper heading (so as not to swim *towards* the spectres), and
swim slightly up to get to the surface. In real life, you can
at least feel when you're up against something, so I wouldn't
have a problem using /loc if I ended up lost underwater again.

The other times I use /loc is when the group gets separated
while running. That would almost never happen in real life,
and the problem is exaggerated by packet loss and chasing
ghosts. The follow command helps, but is not perfect.

--
John H. Kim
kim@...