Higher Bio Character Limit

[Uden]

I don't know if there is a suggestions forum I am supposed to post this in, I did not see one. But as the title suggests, it would be really cool if we had a higher character limit for our bio's. I do like to write some backstory once in awhile for my toons, but I find myself dissuaded by the lack of space.  :(
I know this is probably trivial, and many others may not agree, but I personally would love to see said limit increased, if at all possible.

[lemming]

Suggestions and Feedbacks; One similar suggestion

 

 

[Uden]

34 minutes ago, lemming said:

Suggestions and Feedbacks; One similar suggestion

 

 

There is a "Suggestions and Feedback" forum? I thought I was looking at the complete list of forums, I guess I wasn't. Thanks.

I found it, yep. I was locked into the City of Heroes Homecoming section for some reason. If anyone can assist me with moving this topic to the appropriate forums, I'd be indebted.

Edited November 17, 2023 by Uden

[High_Beam]

Be careful.  You don't want to be a new player trying to familiarize themselves with the older aspects of the game and ask a question about an old post that would possibly have relevancy to a new player and be accused of necro-posting and have a GM lock it. 🙂

 

I am kind of being funny but a lot of the old hands have been forgetting that there are a lot of new players coming in and some are actually doing what everyone says they are supposed todo, search and read the forums before posting.

 

Welcome or Welcome Back.

 

I wouldn't mind a little more room to write in my ID card myself, well on a couple of characters.

[lemming]

6 hours ago, High_Beam said:

Be careful.  You don't want to be a new player trying to familiarize themselves with the older aspects of the game and ask a question about an old post that would possibly have relevancy to a new player and be accused of necro-posting and have a GM lock it. 🙂

 

I am kind of being funny but a lot of the old hands have been forgetting that there are a lot of new players coming in and some are actually doing what everyone says they are supposed todo, search and read the forums before posting.

 

Welcome or Welcome Back.

 

I wouldn't mind a little more room to write in my ID card myself, well on a couple of characters.

I'm of two minds on necro.  If it's still relevant, then no problem.  Bio limit hasn't been increased, but there's discussion in that thread about it.

 

Bringing up a thread that states an issue that has either been resolved or changed, then stake that one in the heart.

[Uden]

11 hours ago, High_Beam said:

Be careful.  You don't want to be a new player trying to familiarize themselves with the older aspects of the game and ask a question about an old post that would possibly have relevancy to a new player and be accused of necro-posting and have a GM lock it. 🙂

 

I am kind of being funny but a lot of the old hands have been forgetting that there are a lot of new players coming in and some are actually doing what everyone says they are supposed todo, search and read the forums before posting.

 

Welcome or Welcome Back.

 

I wouldn't mind a little more room to write in my ID card myself, well on a couple of characters.

I actually used to sub back during the old days. But yeah. I am new, once again. Though I'm not new to the idea of "necro posting".
I actually can't stand the term, or the idea behind it. Just because something didn't gain traction the first time doesn't mean it should never be brought up again. Seems childish to me to complain about how old a post is. *shrug*

They could at least create a forum specifically for older posts, to please both respective parties.

[Cyri]

Supported

Edited March 9 by Jynu

[Latex]

I've struggled with the bio limit too, but I think it's fine as it is.

Reason being is that it forces the writer to keep things concise, straightforward and to the point, the rest of the key information can be articulated in Roleplay or through some quick quips. For an example of how it can get out of hand look at World of Warcraft's Total RP addon where you can write as much as you want about your OC and it's often nightmarish unless people have written things in a concise and easily digestible manner.

Links in Bios are copy-pasteable, if you really want to go ham on exploring limitless character bios with art, pictures, fully fleshed out backstory and all the rest you could link to a googledoc in your character bio, and continue to keep things concise in-game, I usually do this myself just to remind myself about the intricacy's of the characters I'm roleplaying, theres a ton of free googledoc templates to make it look super good too.

Edited January 6 by Latex

[chase]

I don't know the full scope of the tools the Homecoming team has at their disposal, but there's considerably more going on to make such a simple-seeming "increase the size limit here." Besides any display changes in the client, there's how that info is transmitted to work out.

 

Back when CoH was in development was still dialup-dominant.  Every single bit of data being sent- and I mean BIT, as in a single binary value, was something that needed to be justified.   CoH was already really pushing boundaries with so many costume part id's, colorID's, etc.  Instead of sending data with values like "haircolorprimary=X, haircolorsecondary=Y" they'd send a bunch of unlabeled bytes  and have the game client know that the 6th and 7th bytes in the pack were the hair color. sometimes even partial bytes were mapped out that way (if you only have 55 pants options, why use a value that could handle 256?) 

There were MANY techniques used in this- not just how data was sent, but when it was sent and how frequently updates needed made to various changes. (Walking NPC's like our civilians are another great example of squeezing away bandwidth bloat.   Rather than having to transmit constantly their XYZ coordinates (and pitch yaw roll), they seem to run on preset "tracks" most of the time.   That way the game only needed to send the equivalent of "load character X, moving route Y, starting at coordinate Z" and nobody would need further updates unless you trigger something that makes them have to react).

Now, over the decade of broadband growth that the game ran, much of this was enhanced and probably made far more relaxed, but really old elements that haven't changed much since launch could still hide those original tight design parameters... and since I don't think the character bio size was changed once in all of the game's history, it's very possible the original design's limitations are still hardcoded in there.


--------------------
This is all very technical, and while I'm willing to dig out some of the fascinating (to me) technical publications authored by noteworthy MMO pioneers on the subject back in that era, it's not very roleplay focused... so maybe to keep the forums focused, we open a new thread somewhere more appropriate and let this one die off.

[MistressOhm]

Something I noticed a long time ago (yes, on Live) was that the bio panel seemed to be somewhat HTML driven.  You could change colors, bold text, and the like.  

 

But, with that, often the editor would throw in codes in place of characters, likely to keep those characters from 'escaping' and causing havoc.  Yes, this is a thing in coding - special characters need to be isolated so that program code doesn't try to interpret them.  This meant that extra characters were being used, only you couldn't see them.  So you'd fill out the bio, and... it'd get cut off.  Or the text focus would jump around, and you'd have trouble editing the thing.

 

What does this mean for bio length?  Well it's both a problem, in that you're only given so many characters to express yourself, and a solution, which is to redirect the bio to a Web-based resource that the game loads when you pull up someone's info panel.

 

Everyone here has a profile page, for their forum identity.  Imagine if there was a thread linked to your bio, with a post for every character you create (@global&server&character). 

 

Now, this trick DOES presuppose the game having enough resources to load that page, no matter how long it gets.  But it should (!) get around the issues of stuffing character bio info into database entries in the game's backend.  All that gets stored THERE is the URL to that character's "bio post".   It also means that your character list/bios would be available outside of the game itself, perhaps as a persistent link or table on your forum profile.

 

Now, let's talk editing, and redirects.  Obviously you shouldn't be allowed to throw just any link into the bio, and have the game load it for you.  That would be dangerous and foolish.  So, here's a possible scenario - 1) You can put in raw text, as how things work now.  2) you can click a button to spawn your browser to your character thread, with either the post for your character displayed and an Edit button featured, or (if blank) a new reply to that character thread, with a blank text box ready for editing.  I would expect the rules for what could go into such a thread would be very restrictive, likely text only, or if images were allowed, limited to size AND hosting domain so no adult pics were featured.  

 

There's still a lot of risks, as people who know HTML, CSS, and the like can tell you.  But it might be a possible solution.  YMMV.

Edited January 8 by MistressOhm

[chase]

On 1/8/2024 at 1:39 PM, MistressOhm said:

Something I noticed a long time ago (yes, on Live) was that the bio panel seemed to be somewhat HTML driven.  You could change colors, bold text, and the like.  

 

But, with that, often the editor would throw in codes in place of characters, likely to keep those characters from 'escaping' and causing havoc.  Yes, this is a thing in coding - special characters need to be isolated so that program code doesn't try to interpret them.  This meant that extra characters were being used, only you couldn't see them.  So you'd fill out the bio, and... it'd get cut off.  Or the text focus would jump around, and you'd have trouble editing the thing.

 

What does this mean for bio length?  Well it's both a problem, in that you're only given so many characters to express yourself, and a solution, which is to redirect the bio to a Web-based resource that the game loads when you pull up someone's info panel.

 

Everyone here has a profile page, for their forum identity.  Imagine if there was a thread linked to your bio, with a post for every character you create (@global&server&character). 

 

Now, this trick DOES presuppose the game having enough resources to load that page, no matter how long it gets.  But it should (!) get around the issues of stuffing character bio info into database entries in the game's backend.  All that gets stored THERE is the URL to that character's "bio post".   It also means that your character list/bios would be available outside of the game itself, perhaps as a persistent link or table on your forum profile.

 

Now, let's talk editing, and redirects.  Obviously you shouldn't be allowed to throw just any link into the bio, and have the game load it for you.  That would be dangerous and foolish.  So, here's a possible scenario - 1) You can put in raw text, as how things work now.  2) you can click a button to spawn your browser to your character thread, with either the post for your character displayed and an Edit button featured, or (if blank) a new reply to that character thread, with a blank text box ready for editing.  I would expect the rules for what could go into such a thread would be very restrictive, likely text only, or if images were allowed, limited to size AND hosting domain so no adult pics were featured.  

 

There's still a lot of risks, as people who know HTML, CSS, and the like can tell you.  But it might be a possible solution.  YMMV.

I noticed that as well-and it does so in rather odd ways (as an example, when you doublespace it seems to add   but doesn't update the character count until after you save, reducing the number of characters you have considerably over time.)

The question would be- assuming this is a real html engine-  what version of what browser would have been incorporated to handle html around the time of the city's launch- and could it be updated?  There are games with in-engine web browsers so it's certainly possible.  They've unfortunately been used to create things like "lag-grenades", doxxing incidents, and just general harassment, too. It would have to be very locked-down in function and keeping it up to date may be problematic- you could eliminate the upkeep if you could call your OS's default browser up in a frame, but you'd likely lose some ability to lock things down.   Certainly an interesting path to take.

Until then, I'll plug for people to link to the FBSA DATABASE in their bio's.   Relatively short URL, easy to get started, unlimited length.

[TwoDee]

On 1/6/2024 at 9:34 AM, Latex said:

I've struggled with the bio limit too, but I think it's fine as it is.

Reason being is that it forces the writer to keep things concise, straightforward and to the point, the rest of the key information can be articulated in Roleplay or through some quick quips. For an example of how it can get out of hand look at World of Warcraft's Total RP addon where you can write as much as you want about your OC and it's often nightmarish unless people have written things in a concise and easily digestible manner.

Links in Bios are copy-pasteable, if you really want to go ham on exploring limitless character bios with art, pictures, fully fleshed out backstory and all the rest you could link to a googledoc in your character bio, and continue to keep things concise in-game, I usually do this myself just to remind myself about the intricacy's of the characters I'm roleplaying, theres a ton of free googledoc templates to make it look super good too.

 

I gradually came to this same conclusion over my time with City of Heroes roleplay.  Shakespeare said that "brevity is the soul of wit," and nothing gives you a better sense of the fundamental core hooks of a character than trying to compress their entire appeal into a mere 1,000 characters.  A character with twenty gimmicks is never going to be as interesting as a character with two very well-executed gimmicks.

 

A dirty little secret of not just City of Heroes roleplay but all online roleplay is that people generally aren't in it to care about or read bios.  Sure, I like a well-written bio, but that's a tangential side-appeal to the actual main appeal of engaging in active roleplay with an interesting character written by another player.  The less wieldy a bio gets, the less likely it serves the purpose it's intended for as a facilitator and entrypoint for roleplay.  If other players already know everything about your character, why interact with them?

 

 

Edited January 30 by TwoDee
added a sentence