Instead of Whispering

[Genevieve]

I still think my ORIGINAL suggestion is even better -- have whispering be a project, or at least let other people not hear it, then it won't fill up the page. Sometimes whispering is the best way to communicate.

[playerslayer666]

\ Sometimes whispering is the best way to communicate.

like when two people are acting suspicious and you whisper to the town leader about it.....

[SekoETC]

I think it would be silly if it was limited to a single person hearing it. That way anyone could claim they heard the contents of a whisper and there could Never Ever be a second witness to back it up, so if two people were scheming, it would always be their word against one if someone ratted on them.

We could do a poll on this and the percentage can be adjusted if it turns out it's too big, or it could even be made so that the likeliness per person decreases as the population increases based on the assumption that it's more difficult to hear anything in a crowd but for now I suggest we wait a while and see how it goes.

Of course the original suggestion would be better but that would require much more coding.

[Henk]

Make a new button just like the 'edit multiple notes' one, but then whispering to the people around, whch you can check by clicking in one off those boxes that appear

You could try that, for instance, when someone collecting wood whispers, everybody who is collecting wood hears that, and the same with the one he is talking to.

[joo]

To put some perspective on the matter:

The probability of being heard by at least one person is equal to inverse of the probability that nobody overhears. The probability that one person does not overhear is the inverse of the probability of them overhearing (2% or .02):

1 - .02 = .98 (probability of a single person not overhearing a private message)

The probability of nobody overhearing is equal to the product of the probabilities of all possible people in the location not overhearing at once, which is all of them multiplied together, or:

.98^(number of possible eavesdroppers)

When a message is overheard at least once, that means that everybody in the location did not fail to overhear, or the inverse of the last calculation, i.e.:

p(n) = 1-(.98^n)

Where p is the probability of being overheard by at least one person, and n is the number of people who could overhear the message (number of people in the location minus two; or minus one if the person is talking to themself)

p(0) = 0; No other people in the location, no chance of being overheard.
p(1) = .02; chance that one person overhears
p(2) = .0396; chance of being overheard with two other people.

Using the previous formula, the following can be deduced:

In a location with 12 people, and one person whispers to another, there is a chance of approximately 18% (p(10) = 0.182...) that the message will be overheard, meaning that one in every 6 messages will be overheard on average.

In a conversation in the same location, which involves 10 messages, then chance of at least one message being overheard by one person is 87% (p(10×10) = 0.867...), which means that on average, private conversations with those parameters will be overheard almost 9/10 of the time.

[SekoETC]

Or the same in a picture.


If there's 35 or more people in a location, it becomes more likely that at least one person heard what was being said.

And I can add an event message for if someone heard what you just said, although honestly I think if the outside listener chooses to ignore it, you shouldn't worry about it. And always noticing the listeners also makes it impossible for people to pretend they heard something. A person could be all "I heard what you said there!" and another person was like "nuh-uh, my events log doesn't say that, I know you're lying!" Maybe the best way of implementing it would be that the "You have a feeling someone overheard what you were saying." message would only appear half the time when someone hears it, and sometimes it would appear at random to make people a bit paranoid.

[*Wiro]

Maybe the best way of implementing it would be that the "You have a feeling someone overheard what you were saying." message would only appear half the time when someone hears it, and sometimes it would appear at random to make people a bit paranoid.

LOL! YES! But still, it doesn't change anything at all, does it?

[joo]

It wouldn't make much sense for people to know when somebody overhears... as "hearing" something is not a visible or audible action.

I do think that chance of being overheard should decrease exponentially with the number of people who hear it.

I.e. when going through each other person in the location to decide who overhears the message, do something like halfing or quartering the current probability every time somebody overhears successfully.

[Cogliostro]

Yes! I would like to propose also that if the location is == town, then there should be a 0.0023% chance of sudden death for each 10 whispers.

Death to town whisperers.

[Joshuamonkey]

This is a very different game, but at least I found out about it from Cantr members on this forum. Feel free to totally ignore this post.

http://wiki.epicmafia.com/index.php/Whisper

Quote: "Five percent of the time a whisper will leak."
"One percent of the time a whisper and the recipient will leak."

When a whisper is made (with a group of usually 8 or 9 people) there's a chance that some of the players will hear, usually more than one person.
You don't expect your whispers to be heard, but it's common for one to be heard, and it's considered dangerous, since it's usually important that the two or three "evil" people don't know who sent the message that the recipient tells to everyone. Although a big difference here is that if the whisper isn't heard, there's no sign that the two people whispered. Also, a more recent feature is that the whisperer has the option to make everyone hear the whisper, without them knowing they did it on purpose, but this probably isn't important for our purposes.

Also, I know we're not doing this, but I don't think anything involving whispers (or anything) should be based on when people log out. It's not the kind of game Cantr is, and it would be annoying if someone logs out for whatever reason. It would make it too OOC.

[SekoETC]

joo, but if the chance was halved or quartered each time someone overhears, that would give people at the top of the list an advantage unless the list was scrambled. But you're right about it being unnatural that people would notice someone hearing what they said, unless the person outright perked their ears and stopped to stare and that can be rp'd.

Also we could make it possible to choose the intensity of your voice so that people could do fake whispers that are heard 100% of the time, while the people who really want to keep things a secret could use an actual whisper, but I don't think there is such a thing as being able to avoid being heard with 100% likeliness. It could be taken down to 0.1% in which case even in Vlotryan there would only be a 10% chance of someone hearing a whisper, but it would be unnatural to bring it down to 0%. If someone wants perfect privacy, go to a locked building or pass notes.

[Cogliostro]

Once this chance of overhearing is in place, will you remove the current "you see X whispering to Y" messages? I think they should go, if people can get "you overhear X to Y:..." messages.

[SekoETC]

I doubt people would want whispering messages to disappear entirely since it would make it possible to plan a coup or something without people even noticing you were awake, but if people want, some of the "you see X talking to Y" messages could be randomly filtered out.

[Genevieve]

It would be REALLY nice to not see the whole convo....thus my original suggestion

[SumBum]

Would it make the process easier if it were just whispers sent within x amount of time that were condensed to a single line of you see A and B whispering? That would at least cut out the rapid-fire messages.