Sometime last year, a discussion about death messaging came up. I lamented that there is no stream to see death messages outside the game.

At that time, someone (I believe a GM), referred me to this defunct service: https://twitter.com/Lorminstra/

Here's the one I made live several hours ago, props to my first F2P account: https://twitter.com/GSIVDeathLog

Although I independently came to the idea of such an account, I definitely thought the icon and persona name of Lorminstra was amusing.

It could be unstable the next day or two (or have announced downtime depending on my server). I had to drop the leading asterisk for now since the method I'm using has a bug for including that character in the tweet.

Follow if you like! If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to post them or email me at my user handle.

Disclaimer: To opt out, don't die.

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"What Kaldonis does on his off time is totally Kaldonis's business, dude." ~Scribes

I was rather pleased that the first death when it went live was an implosion, since it convinced me it could handle multiple queries at once.

However, I just noticed one death it seems to have skipped over, but I don't have a logging system setup yet to try to understand how it happened.

Anyway, call it beta for now, but basically it works. We'll need Kenstrom to give it a run for its money I think, once I sort out the kinks.

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"What Kaldonis does on his off time is totally Kaldonis's business, dude." ~Scribes

Ah, now I understand...it's as I suspected!

I had noticed a person died within one hour. I took the latest death message and tried to tweet it:

>You have already sent this Tweet.

So I guess I found the challenging part of this engine! Yay! (The whole point of this was...for my amusement and testing my skill to set it up.)

I have some ideas how to resolve it, but it will be the 99% of work for that 1%. I guess the first step is to determine or research how long until an identical tweet can be sent. Perhaps a simpler hack is to insert a timestamp, but I feel it's kind of ugly.

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"What Kaldonis does on his off time is totally Kaldonis's business, dude." ~Scribes

>I have some ideas how to resolve it, but it will be the 99% of work for that 1%. I guess the first step is to determine or research how long until an identical tweet can be sent. Perhaps a simpler hack is to insert a timestamp, but I feel it's kind of ugly.

I think that the timestamp is going to be the only reasonable alternative to streamline and make things consistent. Otherwise, what are you going to do, add an "AGAIN?!" when someone gets killed multiple times within an hour?

Also, while the timestamp is arguably "ugly" from a Tweet standpoint, it is pretty customary for folks in game (on the assumption that other FE's show the time of death, as does the WizFE).

Out of curiosity, as I haven't been on twitter in awhile, are you implementing the different messages (death in the Talon Arena, implosion, death cries from the Rift) in the feed?

This would be fun to have on my phone, if my smart phone wasn't ... an old smart phone (Android 3.0), incapable of such fun times, without clogging up available resources. Maybe this year or the next, I'll upgrade to something better, and get back on Twitter and FB from the phone, etc.

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~ Bill, Coyote.

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.
~ Voltaire

Sorry the belated reply. The weekend and related days dropped off the calendar.

The host computer went on a vacation too, but I was too lazy to walk the vast 10 minutes to go prod it with my index finger. It's back, though.

The death messages are syndicated precisely from the game. So it has whatever is listed there, including implosions, arena, off to a rough start, or whatever the usual April Fools stuff that'll surely pop up in a week and a half.

As to the trick for multiple close-together deaths, I only have concepts right now. Timestamps is an "easy" one but is silly, as Sarah said (Twitter already stamps them). I considered something foolish like "+1" etc. This is more elegant from a programming perspective mostly because it means I actually resolved the bug and tracked it. But if I can do +1 and +2 and +50, what stops me from making a string array with wild terms?

Again.

Really?

Didn't this just happen?

...

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"What Kaldonis does on his off time is totally Kaldonis's business, dude." ~Scribes

<<<Another feature I've considered to add is locating them via lich, and including the room number. I'm not sure how difficult or easy this will be to implement under my current method, but it's also a question of how players feel.>>>

Personally, I detest locates via lich. It circumvents several in-game spells and abilities, a.k.a. "cheating." I disallow such locates (so don't take it personally if you try). We have awesome in-game locate abilities available that lend texture and excitement, some of which are not easy to come by. Ranger companions can provide a general location of a person anywhere in the realms (how many even know that?). The locate spell can find someone in other realms as well, with appropriate lore training. Then we have familiars, eye-ball carrying demons, Symbol of Sight, Cry for Help, Symbol of Need...even bard familiars and locate scrolls. I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting.

Anyway, with all the flavorful and hard-earned methods of locating the fallen so lovingly crafted within the game...the brash intrusiveness of [lnet: rejecting request from GSIV:Gnazzy for location...] simply rubs me wrong.

That said, I'm sure I won't convince anyone to stop using it. But since you asked how players feel...you got it. ;)

~ GtG

Look. Along with the these its another output generally ignored by lich users when rescues are involved.

Wow Rath can you get a little more salty about Lich users? I'm not sure who makes the decision on staff but it gets harder and harder to take the "blue names" seriously when one of them regularly denigrates a majority of the playerbase. We get it bud, Lich users are bad and awful and careless. They stole your bike when you were a kid and were AFK when they did it. Give it a rest already.

Keith/Brinret/Shiun

Brinret says, "Bring it on."
A bolt of lightning streaks down from the sky and strikes Brinret!
... 16428101 points of damage!
Powerful blast reduces Brinret to a smoldering pile of ash!

For what it's worth, I haven't solved the one actual bug in the original implementation yet, and I really haven't seen any value that might be added to (whatever it is my twitter bot aims to accomplish).

While I considered this as a possible expansion, I think the bot is basically doing what I set it out to do as intended.

So, probably I won't be adding lich located in the near future.

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Check out who's dying any time! https://twitter.com/GSIVDeathLog

>Aside from my "body" script, I also try to watch when I'm running ;go2. I don't just let it run blind. Why? Because it sucks when someone tramples your dead corpse on their way somewhere, leaving you to rot.

My characters very rarely decay without some other character leaving them to rot. Normally its just a couple of run pasts, but on one occasion it was over 40 and I've had quite a few in double figures. I'm not the only player left in the game that does IC rescues but it often feels that way.

>>There is a way to stop for bodies

Yep, but it isn't perfect, and nothing beats actually paying attention.

Doug

<<<There is a way to stop for bodies using go2.>>>
<<<;go2 --stop-for-dead=on>>>

Oh, that's new (to me). I had to update my ;go2 to get that option. I'll give it a try. But I trust my "body" script, since it also stops for stunned characters and any other conditions I might want to specify. It's not immediate, because ;go2 scrolls so fast...but it's been reliable.

Anyway...here's my script, if anyone's interested:

#BODY v2.2

if_1 goto GO2
goto LOOP

GO2:
put ;go2 %0
goto LOOP

LOOP:
match BODY the body of
match PAUSE stunned
match CONTINUE a good positive attitude
match END go2 has exited
matchwait

BODY:
put ;k go2
put wait
echo
echo Wait, was that a body? Better go back and have a look...
echo
goto END

PAUSE:
put ;p go2
put wait
echo
echo Wait, I think I saw something back there...
echo (To continue travel, type YES.)
echo
waitfor Roundtime
pause 3
goto LOOP

CONTINUE:
put ;u go2
goto LOOP

END:

Honestly I feel badly in RR if I failed to locate someone that died in 5 minutes or whatever and not actively go find their body wherever it is in the Realm. This is partly a trouble of really (really) knowing exactly who is about town. Highlighting names works somewhat, but people come and people go, or they move around.

It's a reason I've been asking for some locale information with the death messaging in the game. Let's face it: death messaging in general is OOC (and yes, you can turn it off). There are plenty of ways to add some locale info (just stuff the realm in the death message, require some spiritual lore training, make it a local/global flag like the ESP, etc). They all have their downsides but it would be a great help. It's actually one of the main reasons I considered to put an LNet locate call into my twitter bot, since if I give it a name on LNet like "GSIVDeathLog" no one is really going to think it's a rescue attempt, and then I can get realm information from anyone that allows it. Of course, even I know several people in RR that don't use lich at all, but it could be a step up.

But the thing is, if I'm playing the game, it's not like I'm going to be looking at my twitter bot anyway! In fact, I'm really excited there's been a lot of discussion on this thread that's about important topics. That bot was mostly for laughs and I still don't really know why it exists other than to entertain me and maybe serve as a minor marketing ploy for the game.

One of my own annoyances is that my paladin, as of yet, does not have the Locate spell (only Symbol of Sight) but not only is his fogging better (usually I use Aid the Fallen with a gold ring, or Symbol of Return the group and Aid the Fallen to avoid 20 rooms of dragging), he's much better able to drag, and actually raise people than my sorcerer (though I expect Animate Dead may be great in the Confluence, once being 91 doesn't screw up the MAL calculation and stun me in the attempt). However, if I want to avoid LNet then I would swap logins, cast 116, and then at some point swap back. It's almost as OOC to me as using LNet (well, my sorcerer and paladin are related, so it's not too strange that they would help each other find a corpse; under an "in-game" scenario we can pretend my sorcerer located the body and told my paladin, which I did OOC by LNet). I mean, "no duh" I can train him to learn Locate Person but he's still a ways off from that. Another paladin in my situation would be left with two options for dead bodies not in Voln: let them rot or use LNet. You can argue to meet everyone and always find out where people are hunting, but this is at best a 50% scenario, and also assume your character never wants to leave the town common areas to hunt him/herself.

>Personally, I detest locates via lich. It circumvents several in-game spells and abilities, a.k.a. "cheating." I disallow such locates (so don't take it personally if you try). We have awesome in-game locate abilities available that lend texture and excitement, some of which are not easy to come by. Ranger companions can provide a general location of a person anywhere in the realms (how many even know that?). The locate spell can find someone in other realms as well, with appropriate lore training. Then we have familiars, eye-ball carrying demons, Symbol of Sight, Cry for Help, Symbol of Need...even bard familiars and locate scrolls. I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting.

I did want to say that the Miasmal Forest is often quite unsuitable for in-game methods. I realize this is on purpose, but finding a body that's hidden in the muck manually is quite difficult. If you failed to locate immediately, you actually don't even know they are in River's Rest unless you just know that yourself. And considering the wights drag corpses, it's possible for the body to be dragged about and then hidden. This is, besides some laziness, the number on reason I cheat it up to find a corpse, because I'm not aware of any in-game method to find these bodies.

In short, I like the LNet locate owing to the ability to be sure someone is in your realm and actually find the bodies in some cases. Dying and decaying is one of the lamest parts of this game, and I'll sacrifice a little OOC to help people out and make their day better. But, I usually stick to using the in-game methods a lot of the time.

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Check out who's dying any time! https://twitter.com/GSIVDeathLog