Proposing an Area Revision Team

[Ellian]

I think the mud could benefit from an area revision team, to go over old areas and revitalize and bring them up to current standards.

Reasons for such a team include:

1. Forgotten Kingdoms has been around for nearly six? years now and over this time building standards have changed and evolved. Some older areas don't fit current standards.

2. Areas need to be updated to work properly with new code.

3. Some areas have broken room exits, typos, obscure keywords, bugs, quest issues, etc. that weren't caught in their revision process.

A new forum could be opened, similar to bug reporting, to report area problems. The area revision team would follow up on these posts and bring up the area in question on the test port for any necessary editing.

Any thoughts on this idea?

Jayson

[Lathander]

I think it is a very good idea. I would add that if the original builder of an area is still an FK player, any changes that are to be made be done only with the approval of that builder. This may be something as minor as "Hey, these are the things we found that need to be fixed and updated in your area." I would also suggest any changes be approved by the current building imm team (just as they are for new areas).

This would help those of us who have older areas in the game that need substantial updating but don't have the time to do it ourselves. It also would allow us to focus (revisit?) those newer projects we want to complete without having to worry about backtracking.

[Solaghar]

I agree that this is a good idea. I have noticed many little things wrong in different places, mentioned in Ellian's examples, slightly dented quests, a few rooms that don't go where they obviously should, a few problems with resets or repairs or the economy, stuff that could obviously be fixed in a few minutes if someone had the ability to do so quickly and in a sort of peer review setting still. What one person considers to be a bug might make complete sense to someone else, but if a few people involved can agree, it should be altered and quickly. We must fight constantly against the inevitable entropy of the universe.

[Andreas]

I also think this is an excellent idea. In addition to fixing errors (typos, bad room exits, quest bugs), some areas could also use a bit of "life" and perhaps the addition of some new quests.

[Selveem]

I would like to bump this suggestion.

With the loss of much staff and all the wonderful changes in the right direction, many areas and items have been made 'mundane' in that the resistance flags have been changed. I'm more than willing to offer up this list to any/all members that might be made for this team.

I wonder if it is impossible to have a command like 'bug' for room descriptions so that they can be suggested for minor edits when there are spare lines, typos, etc.

[Mask]

There is already a plan in place to fix the resistances, but broader than that, an area revision team would be an excellent idea. There has been some work done on giving waterdeep a fresh lick of paint, but there are many others that could do with the same treatment. Probably a good idea for someone to just pick an area they think is particularly bad, start a thread about it here, brainstorm a bit, then post suggested changes to the area. We can look into a slightly more formal mechanism depending on how things work out.