@jules You're going a touch too far in the long-winded descriptions.
Here's current masochism as of this moment:
Affliction: masochism Cure message: You no longer enjoy pain. Diagnose: masochistic. Cure: orphine Physical: No Mental: Yes Can be purged: No
Periodically causes damage and strips shield and rebounding defences.
From what you have posted, a fully accurate file would be as such:
Affliction: masochism
Cure message: You no longer enjoy pain.
Diagnose: masochistic.
Cure: orphine
Physical: No
Mental: Yes
Can be purged: No
Periodically causes damage and strips shield, rebounding, and prismatic barrier defences.
There's an entire philosophy of documentation to be discussed, but really you want to get down to displaying the accurate information in as concise and clear a way as possible. I'm pretty big on the documentation thing.
For your backflip suggestion:
Rampage - Backflip
Syntax: BACKFLIP <direction>
Leap over walls and exit-blocks. Does not work into or out of water rooms or flooded rooms. Is affected normally by all other movement-impeding effects.
I'm not certain if this is accurate as I don't have the ability, but you can see how some generic statements about exceptions really boil down the information into something consumable.
Your actual submissions for changes should go through BUG (although you can post here for feedback, or to draw attention to an issue, or both).
I was pointing masochism out as an example of a very, very big change thing that didn't make it into a file - because classleads were about to wrap up and I wanted to make the point that "we should take this more seriously in general". I was trying to say "this is a rampant issue, let's direct some attention to it since we're doing that classlead thing", rather than trying to correct a single file.
The flipping stuff is from awhile back and wasn't complete, so I was hoping people would chime in so I could flesh it out. I wanted to get all of the info and then make a complete draft.
That said, this is probably a good time to mention something I saw from MKO (I know, I know), that I really liked. They have two levels of detail in a lot of their files. Opening the initial file gives you a succinct overview - and often refers you to a "detailed" version of the file that has a lot more... details.
@Jules I'm more talking theory on this end. Overall I'm really impressed with the amount of detail that's been added to the ab files and other aspects of the game I've so far experienced. The in game documentation feels significantly better and the omissions that I have so far stumbled across seem to be over very dynamic aspects of the game.
I am tempted to try questing now (since I hear so many have been fixed). On a super sekrit character so no one can judge me for being super bad at questing
One thing that would be nice is a help that lists the names of broken quests (unless they are broken in the "woo, another 100K, I am sure this is not shrubbable, right?" sense), so you don't spend hours wondering if something is broken, or you're dumb (you're dumb, probably).
We are doing are best to get through the broken quests, our systems have changed so much over the past few years that we are a bit behind on updating everything, but we're hoping to get some of the more broken quests up and running.
Honestly it has been close to a year since I have tried any of the quest that is new to me so I could be wrong in saying there are still a ton of broken ones.
Comments
The passive curing abilities usually cure anything that's marked as physical or mental on AFFLICTION SHOW <x>.
Cure message: You no longer enjoy pain.
Diagnose: masochistic.
Cure: orphine
Physical: No
Mental: Yes
Can be purged: No
Periodically causes damage and strips shield and rebounding defences.