Messages, Mortal Kombat Message Drones, and More!

So, as much as I love getting new skills and abilities to play with, it seems to me that there is room for improvement in an area that will improve the quality of life for all players.

Datapads and Message Management
I have so much feedback on how to overhaul datapad messaging, because my character is a bureaucratic paper-pusher, but I’ll just start with a few, starting with the most useful:

datamem delete – Please add a delete function to allow us to delete messages contained on our datapad. Do not force us to eject a disk and throw it at the wall repeatedly to destroy it.

Autolabel Message Disks when Ejected – When you eject a message disk, instead of having it appear as ‘a message disk’, change the shortdesc to include a label with the message subject, this way we won’t have to constantly load/eject a ton of message disks in order to find the one we’re looking for (e.g. a message disk labeled ‘Arkanian Incident Report’)

Digitally Signed Messages – include a command to allow one or more characters to ‘digitally sign’ a document. The signature would ‘lock’ the message contents, preventing further alteration, and would appear at the bottom of the message body as something like: This message has been digitally signed by <charactername>, with each signature appearing on its own line, allowing multiple people to sign a document. This would be great for contracts, diplomatic agreements, order that need to be ‘in writing’, court evidence (signed statements), etc.

Mortal Kombat Message Drones – wtf?
There needs to be a simple way to get rid of drones that doesn’t involve me having to break character by challenging the message drone to single combat. Either a dismiss command that drops everything and sends it off, or a self-destruct command.

I like all of them, except autolabel because then everyone in the room will see what your posting, and perhaps to who.  No thanks. But YES PLEASE delete option. And drones are way to overpowered, and most people receiving them are engi’s or senators who sometimes can’t handle them even by spamming kick. Kudos to you, alyssa.

Awesome ideas!

Question – what if the droid just died upon arrival?

Some people are not capable of calling drones, so if they had to return something, say credits for an item delivered, they would be screwed. =[

I don’t think teach should be a level 1 ability.  i think call should be.  you should be able to teach at like 30+  otherwise, there is no reason to teach.

What if it self destructed if you caused it to stop following you after it had delivered a message

Miros, drones don’t drop credits either. So if a drone blows up on arrival, you are out a shitload of credits.

By blow up I mean turn into a corpse.

Good ideas for everything.

My idea for dealing with Super Saiyan 3 Drones

New command: Drone <syntax>

Drone dismiss – Self destructs the droid, creating a corpse, in case you don’t want to use the drone again.

Drone drop <all/item/credits> – Would force the droid to drop whatever is added at the end of the command. Could be used if you want to send the drone back.

I’m down with all of this. Stuff that should’ve been implemented long ago (this was sitting in a buffer earlier, just now pressing post hours later)

As long as you don’t lose anything from it, I’m completely fine with the drone turning into a corpse upon arrival.

Also, I’m in favor of calling drones being available to people at level 1. It seems dumb that the majority of galactic commerce is conducted by an ability that not everyone has access to. When I hear someone say “Yeah I can’t call drones” I’m just like “Wow. Sucks to be you.”

One more suggestion on the subject of messaging:

Shared Mailboxes and/or Clan Mailboxes

Self explanatory, really. The inspiration for this comes from working at an engineering firm where orders are sent to a specific person who distributes them to others, it sucks when that person doesn’t log in for a while. Would be nice if there was a shared mailbox @Telgorn or something where such orders could be sent and processed by engineers. The mailbox access would be an empowerment, so only those with authorization could access its contents.

I was actually about to bring the clan mailbox up in a separate thread. I think it needs to happen.

I really like the idea of community/clan mailboxes, it makes sense given the direction the economy has gone. I think it would compliment clan vendors quite nicely.

The easiest thing to do about drones is to get rid of whatever ridiculous AC bonus they have…if any. If they don’t have that, then maybe there’s some way to code it in where they actually drop everything, including credits….maybe code in a “drop all credits” that would work for both players and drones so you could actually force them to drop all the credits they are carrying.

If that isn’t possible, then I suppose making them turn themselves into a corpse would be a temporary fix until something else could be worked out.

miros – don’t have the drones die upon arrival because not everyone is ready to get to a bank or whatever when they get one. some peple are either afk (idiots send them) or in a ship (more idiots send them) and when they get off the ship they might not be at a bank/locker/etc