Character Description

[Xeres]

I didn't look but I'm almost positive this has been brought up before.  Can we please have the Character Description field in the I.D. section larger than 1023 characters?  Maybe 65534?

[MetaVileTerror]

I am definitely not against this.  In fact, I am quite FOR it! 

But maybe even a step better, and revamp the Description Box so it's just a call function to render an external XML file, which can have specific text formatting options.  Store those bios in the forum server, where we can edit them without logging in to the game.  That'd be especially jazzy!

[Fortuneteller]

Yes please. 1023 characters is extremely restrictive.

[Megajoule]

I'm a fan of lots of room for description (*looks at Virtueverse entries*), but I'm not sure that in-game is the place for it.

IMO, in-game bios are best kept short and sweet, like the text box(es) at the top of old comic splash pages ("Bitten by a radioactive Bar, Foo Fighter gained astonishing powers of flight and illusion!  Now he uses these, along with his flashing fists and musical ability, to fight crime!").  Think of it as a trailer or teaser, not the whole movie or show.

If you want/need more room to fully describe your character, put in a link to some off-site resource so the curious can check it out.

[Lines]

I echo Megajoule. I like to read the bios of other players, but I'd clock right out if they take more than half a minute to read.

[Display Name]

Especially with a team of descriptions to read!  Lol!

[Vanden]

I think our current info screen size is big enough, but I do think it would be cool if we had an extra 500 or so characters for each of our costume slots to describe them.

[M3z]

4 hours ago, Megajoule said:

I'm a fan of lots of room for description (*looks at Virtueverse entries*), but I'm not sure that in-game is the place for it.

IMO, in-game bios are best kept short and sweet, like the text box(es) at the top of old comic splash pages ("Bitten by a radioactive Bar, Foo Fighter gained astonishing powers of flight and illusion!  Now he uses these, along with his flashing fists and musical ability, to fight crime!").  Think of it as a trailer or teaser, not the whole movie or show.

If you want/need more room to fully describe your character, put in a link to some off-site resource so the curious can check it out.

you're actually against them expanding the character limit for bios? lol

[Megajoule]

I have an opinion and preference.

"Brevity is the soul of wit."  More words are not always better.

Edited November 30, 2019 by Megajoule

[FDR's Think Tank]

Considering that most people don't even use the I.D. description, I don't see a huge reason to have it be so limited. While Brevity is simple to read, I would prefer to leave that to each player to decide, especially since opening up the character count could see the I.D. Description used in a variety of alternative ways.

 

The main thing I would like to add to all this is simple: I want different I.D. descriptions with each costume... or barring that, an additional description space paired with each costume. This way, I can explain what each costume is or provide salient details to go with the look. If I am in my Civies, I might want to have a description of my characters alter-ego. If I am in my Artic Warfare outfit, I want to give a better description of the outfit than some dollar sign seeing executive who wants to make an action figure.

 

Brevity can be the soul of wit more often if we have more spots to exercise it.

[Oubliette_Red]

Sadly, the UI, especially for the Bio section would have to be updated before this happens. Expanded the Bio window any further breaks the UI, the Legacy devs attempted to increase it and it broke the window.

[Dragon Crush]

While I know this would require a good bit of UI work, slightly expanding the bio window and also being able to provide a link to an in-game resource for expanded bios would be cool. While the bio you read clicking the character might be a sort of teaser or summery, it's established that there are tons of groups keeping tabs on all the supers, it's not unreasonable to expect there's at least a few dozen pages in a FBSA database somewhere on each character. And also echoing that costume specific blurbs would be nice.

[Outrider_01]

Nuke the IO bonus list and Allocade, does it even help the reader?  Shit I made a joke the other day when a coupe of people went AFK it would take me 5 mins to read so I was gonna AFK to do that, one guys IO bonus was fucking long like twice or larger the bio box and another was pretty long.

 

Memory is fuzzy but Bio was first and I think just power set next, not a useless list of your chosen power, why the fuck was that add?

[EmmySky]

10 minutes ago, Outrider_01 said:

Nuke the IO bonus list and Allocade, does it even help the reader?  Shit I made a joke the other day when a coupe of people went AFK it would take me 5 mins to read so I was gonna AFK to do that, one guys IO bonus was fucking long like twice or larger the bio box and another was pretty long.

 

Memory is fuzzy but Bio was first and I think just power set next, not a useless list of your chosen power, why the fuck was that add?

I agree...I think  TankYou's bonus list is longer than the 1023 character limit.  Her bio is short and sweet but I have a couple toons who use every one of those 1023 and could use more!  But, in the interest of brevity I expand my vocabulary and make it work lol.

[DrRocket]

Yes, I am a role player, and need more space to properly set my charactr in context.

 

Thank you for this very good suggestion

 

 

[Grouchybeast]

6 hours ago, Outrider_01 said:

Nuke the IO bonus list and Allocade, does it even help the reader?  Shit I made a joke the other day when a coupe of people went AFK it would take me 5 mins to read so I was gonna AFK to do that, one guys IO bonus was fucking long like twice or larger the bio box and another was pretty long.

 

Memory is fuzzy but Bio was first and I think just power set next, not a useless list of your chosen power, why the fuck was that add?

 

I like reading the powers and bonus lists, if I'm honest more than the bios sometimes :-)   It's a shame that it doesn't include IO set information too.  You can often kind of guess the sets from the powers, but set names would make it a LOT easier.

[Outrider_01]

12 hours ago, Grouchybeast said:

 

I like reading the powers and bonus lists, if I'm honest more than the bios sometimes 🙂  It's a shame that it doesn't include IO set information too.  You can often kind of guess the sets from the powers, but set names would make it a LOT easier.

Should of been on its own page like the rest of the stats.  4 pages at most, bio/powers/IO bonus/badges with allocades separated.  Can't see a reason for the rest.

Edited December 3, 2019 by Outrider_01

[Clave Dark 5]

Trying to cram my AE stories into the limited space back before shut down really taught me the value of concise word choice.  It's a good skill to have in today's ADHD world.  You'll need to put your character's War&Peace elsewhere.

[Saiyajinzoningen]

while i do love more options i am against walls of text.

[Sailboat]

I am a big fan of the small space!  Brevity is a virtue, and forces a certain creativity.  Think of it like haiku.

 

That said, I am not opposed to more space AS LONG AS IT IS SEPARATE FROM, PREFERABLY HIDDEN BEHIND, the small bio space we now have.  Like a link to more text somewhere.

 

 

[MrNotorion]

I would not be averse to having a LITTLE more space for bios, though what it REALLY needs is better interface for entering and manipulating text in that box.  However, I also heartily agree with others that players should not be using the little bio-box to try and write The Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire.  If you want people to read novel-length fan-fiction about your character then point them to an out-of-game location that is far more appropriate for your epic tale to reside and you can blather on to your hearts content.

 

The in-game "bio" is your teaser/trailer.  Short.  To-the-point.  Description that is geared to act like headlines, grab a bit of attention, and MAYBE make someone interested enough to want more detail of the years you've spent developing your characters origins and backstory.  But the actual movie trilogy that depicts that exhaustive detail belongs WAY outside what the game should be providing space for.

 

TLDR: if you're genuinely and seriously chafing about the bio character limit then you're doing it wrong.  :)

[boggo2300]

5 hours ago, MrNotorion said:

I would not be averse to having a LITTLE more space for bios, though what it REALLY needs is better interface for entering and manipulating text in that box.  However, I also heartily agree with others that players should not be using the little bio-box to try and write The Rise And Fall Of The Roman Empire.  If you want people to read novel-length fan-fiction about your character then point them to an out-of-game location that is far more appropriate for your epic tale to reside and you can blather on to your hearts content.

 

The in-game "bio" is your teaser/trailer.  Short.  To-the-point.  Description that is geared to act like headlines, grab a bit of attention, and MAYBE make someone interested enough to want more detail of the years you've spent developing your characters origins and backstory.  But the actual movie trilogy that depicts that exhaustive detail belongs WAY outside what the game should be providing space for.

 

TLDR: if you're genuinely and seriously chafing about the bio character limit then you're doing it wrong.  🙂

NO

there is no doing it wrong in City, it's pretty much the whole selling point of the game that there is NO WRONG WAY

 

why the hell does it matter if someone has 2500 characters in their bio? noone is holding a gun to your head to read it!

[Call Me Awesome]

Personally I rarely use it for anything and never read them.  On the other hand, I don't have anything against them either, it really doesn't matter one way or another.  If it's a trivial change then yes, if it's more complicated then there's lots of other things WAY higher on the priority list.

 

I do occasionally check the powers tab so I know what to expect from teammates and the IO list, while mostly useless, does indicate if someone has an extensive IO build.  That list would be more useful if it parsed itself like "+10% S/L/M defense, +110% recharge" and so forth giving a total of the bonus.

[quixoteprog]

I would be fine with some link being created between characters and the forums. That could be handy, enough so that I might actually use it.

 

I imagine something where the forums link to the games character DB so that someone can generate a page that links to a specific character on a specific server. They could update it here, and people could access it here, but not in game. Except they could maybe access the short character description in the forums and even update it to be reflected in-game. That would be OK.

 

But I imagine adding a lot of rich text formatting and worse still pictures or other functionality to the in-game description would  be a pretty heavy load on the server, if anybody used it. If nobody ever uses any feature, of course, there is not much performance cost to it at all. And chances are most people would not, but it could still be a pretty big load each time someone opened it. Especially if they could grab an in-game screenshot and upload it to the page.

 

I don't know how often most people open another characters bio stuff (I almost never do) and so if most people are like me it would probably be no real problem if they added movies to it. But if it WERE popular, it could be a nightmare.

[Bastille Boy]

I love writing character bios. When I'm writing them, I often wish I had more than 1024 characters.

 

But when I'm running missions, I usually don't read bios that run the full allowed length. I do check my teammates' bios out while waiting for a mission to start. There usually isn't time to read walls of text. There is time to read a few sentences.

 

I have no opinion about what the devs should do, or indeed about what other players should do. I do think it's a good idea to keep your character bios short if you want to maximize the number of people who read them.