imo I love spells. Please use spells on me. I want to see myself on the salt cam. Turn my post upside down! COVER ME IN DELICIOUS SQUID INK! CRUSH MY SOUL INTO BRAIL DOTS!!

alright, dorothy

thank you.......

was afraid we were gonna see a white oops on the thread at that rate

i've been told that this is the location of the fun police, and so far, i'm only minorly disappointed.

So everyone is aware, this thread and other similar complaints have caused us to rethink some of the more inhibitive spells. We are still of the belief that content on MW isn't meant to be treated with such severity, but some members feel as though they're being blocked from fully participating in the community.

Through some collaboration between the development team and a few helpful users who decided to join us on slack, we've come up with a solution that we think allows everyone to win. From now on the rule will be as follows: all spells which inhibit access to a post's content must be quickly dismissible in some way. For most existing spells, nothing will change, but for problematic ones we are going to implement fun ways to combat them.

Note that the key word is "fun". If you could make any spell go away just by clicking a "go away" button, the magic would be lost, as would any influence the spellcaster would've had otherwise. Therefore, the best solution we've been able to come up with are "cheats". For usability-blocking spells, there will be a quick, hidden action unique to the spell you must perform in order to make the spell effect more manageable. These cheats will not be included anywhere in the spellbook, spell reference, or strategy guide, and must instead be discovered through hearsay.

A few examples:

- Outta Sight: type a secret command to make a finger appear which will translate each Braille letter as it is dragged.

- Stick Around: grab the "stick around" arrow and throw it away to immediately remove the sticky behavior.

- Whoops: type a secret command to make FLUDD clean the spill for you. (Does not apply to the receiver of the spell, only to viewers)

With cheats, new players and people who think post-blocking spells are funny will still get to experience the full effect, while seasoned players will always have the option to dismiss it quickly...but never effortlessly.

This concept is still in the planning stages so feel free to discuss it here.

outta sight previously could only be accessed via exploiting (quoting to disable spells) or by having speakers so any other method to access the text legitimately is good

imo the "cheat code" one would be funnier as the actual solution and im a little annoyed that its hidden behind a cheat code

- Stick Around: grab the "stick around" arrow and throw it away to immediately remove the sticky behavior.

I definitely like this one

Stick Around is the only Spell I actively dislike, every other one I'm totally fine with because they are legit funny sometimes

i was actually gonna suggest an item drop like a sponge or a water hose that could be used on posts with whoops on them to spray away more ink but that brings up the similar issue with the suggestion of tomato item

outta sight previously could only be accessed via exploiting (quoting to disable spells) or by having speakers so any other method to access the text legitimately is good

imo the "cheat code" one would be funnier as the actual solution and im a little annoyed that its hidden behind a cheat code

It doesn't have to be

Note that the key word is "fun". If you could make any spell go away just by clicking a "go away" button, the magic would be lost, as would any influence the spellcaster would've had otherwise. Therefore, the best solution we've been able to come up with are "cheats". For usability-blocking spells, there will be a quick, hidden action unique to the spell you must perform in order to make the spell effect more manageable. These cheats will not be included anywhere in the spellbook, spell reference, or strategy guide, and must instead be discovered through hearsay.

i liked the idea of counter-items better than cheat codes. that way you could only ever be prepared for the spell you hated most, and it went with the idea of the forum better. plus you wouldn't have the solution known to everyone on earth in under a day.

- Outta Sight: type a secret command to make a finger appear which will translate each Braille letter as it is dragged.

This is funny but I feel like it would make it too similar to Size Matters

Yeah, most of your criticisms stem from being a dumb phone poster. I use my phone a lot too, but it's really more of a secondary way to experience Minus World as MW demands power for many of it's wonders.

I'd really like if there were an option to disable spells on mobile devices without also disabling them on PC. Maybe even on certain devices.

i'm no phoneposter but this sounds like a good idea to me.

Note that the key word is "fun". If you could make any spell go away just by clicking a "go away" button, the magic would be lost, as would any influence the spellcaster would've had otherwise. Therefore, the best solution we've been able to come up with are "cheats". For usability-blocking spells, there will be a quick, hidden action unique to the spell you must perform in order to make the spell effect more manageable. These cheats will not be included anywhere in the spellbook, spell reference, or strategy guide, and must instead be discovered through hearsay.

i liked the idea of counter-items better than cheat codes. that way you could only ever be prepared for the spell you hated most, and it went with the idea of the forum better. plus you wouldn't have the solution known to everyone on earth in under a day.

I still want to implement these too, but they'd make certain spells totaling invisible which is different. With cheats (not necessarily codes) I just want to have a quick, hidden, but still fun way for anyone to read what is behind even the most obscured post. I don't think it's necessary to read every post, so I'd opt not to use cheats myself, but judging by the complaints we've gotten regarding certain spells I think it makes sense to give people the option. This would only affect the three spells I mentioned (maybe not even whoops because I think that ones fine)

Actually what if we combined the ideas? Have an equippable "GameShark" item that enables cheats for all applicable spells?

make the gameshark a section in the user cp

you can find cheat codes along with items and can enable/disable them in the gameshark, similar to the "finding pages of the spellbook" idea

I love that, making people find the cheats to be able to use them is a really fun idea

The real "GameShark" is the Chrome debug tools

The real "GameShark" is the Chrome debug tools

For the longest time I told people they could get past even the most prohibitive spells via either the browser console or just clicking "quote", but that ended up not being enough for everyone

make the gameshark a section in the user cp

you can find cheat codes along with items and can enable/disable them in the gameshark, similar to the "finding pages of the spellbook" idea

this is the winning idea

give this man a medal

When we started this iteration of the Minus World, it was extremely experimental. Due to the experimental nature of it we made use of the slack because it's an easy way to get in touch with everyone and have everyone on the same page.

However, at this point in the game the community has become a lot less experimental. I think we need to transition from that experimental mindset to a stable community that people expect to use and work.

We've had plenty of discussion on the slack and how to make that work with the community and not seemingly against it, so hopefully things get better on that front.

On the other hand we should start thinking about features in terms of things we've already tried and figure out if we'll run into the same issues as before. Spells that are obtrusive are pretty unpopular, and it's easy to see why. I personally am not a fan of them either! I think there's some fun effects to them, and if we could get them to work in ways that don't piss everyone off then great! But if we can't figure that out, we should probably discuss them a lot more until they can be figured out.

One thing we could do is set up a dev forum where we test specific features before bringing them over to the real forum. There's been a lot of major changes recently that we should probably have a shared dev environment to test them on, with members willing to test and give feedback on them. Otherwise I fear one day we're going to fuck up the board and no one is going to be happy about that lol.

Anyway, the gist of it is, we started out with a very experimental mindset, and now that we're up and running with Seasons and such we need to find a way to give the live forum some more stability- this doesn't mean throwing away the experiments and such, but the stability is going to be pretty important for a lot of people.