Overhearing whispers, your opinion

[SekoETC]

I think I'm going to change it to 2% per location rather than 2% per person and then we'll see if people are still thinking it's breaking the game. The only problem is that with a chance that small, no one's going to see it in action.

[Ryaga]

The problem with that is chances are you could plot a mass murder, have public sex, and then tell the other person about the warts they gave you and no one would see a message of it.

[Debsy]

I think some of the negative predictions about the result of this change are probably a bit exaggerated. While perhaps it won't be a positive for everyone, I just don't see how this is really that dramatic a change, or will ruin the game.

I think with some creativity it can indeed offer some new opportunities for roleplay, especially among characters who might otherwise keep to themselves.

It's at least worth a good trial period, and may end up being a good chance to open up new ways of roleplaying.

Agreed. I don't think it should be lowered.

[Caesar]

Either 0.5%/person (the same check on every person, not; 0.5%, 1.0%, 1.5%, etc, etc.)

Or five-fifteen percent for the whole location.

But perhaps those chances are just too low as well.

[Gran]

Most players are in citys with, I average, 60 chars.

60 chars = 70,245% of chance that you'll be heard. Yeah, this needs some fixing. You'll be lucky if you *don't* get heard. Maybe making a location limit?

[Evelyn]

I don´t want to see it in action. I definitely don´t like it...

How I can make my secret conspiracies, and still working on my outdoor projects. Being inside a room? Such a waste of time.

How did I made my masterly assault to a ship to kill a guy that was always bothering my partner and me? with 3 days of stress and PRIVATE MESSAGES.

Whispers had served me a lot of lots, I know how and when I have to use it, so I will support Private Messages always

For the privacy of roleplayed conspiracies!

[amika-babilfrenzo]

I don´t want to see it in action. I definitely don´t like it...

How I can make my secret conspiracies, and still working on my outdoor projects. Being inside a room? Such a waste of time.

How did I made my masterly assault to a ship to kill a guy that was always bothering my partner and me? with 3 days of stress and PRIVATE MESSAGES.

Whispers had served me a lot of lots, I know how and when I have to use it, so I will support Private Messages always

For the privacy of roleplayed conspiracies!

You could write notes if you don't want conspiracies be overheard.

[Evelyn]

Private messages are quicker than notes. Notes are evidences of plans, and there are some plans that can not leave any evidence.

[amika-babilfrenzo]

Otherwise your character could make a speech code with the person they're talking with, so that even if they speak out loud no one would recognize their plans.

[Evelyn]

Speech code does not serve when you have to do plans to be done in the moment... like my assault.
Speech code = waste of time

[SekoETC]

Yeah, turns out this one guy had an elaborate language of gestures, he never had to whisper to his slave because of that. When I found out about in in-game I was like wow.

Anyway, if it wasn't clear from my previous post, I also think that the chances of being heard are too high in highly populated locations, so I'm going to make it so that it rolls for being heard in general, then only rolls for who heard if the first check returns true. But since the people hearing it are selected at random, there's a chance that none of them will hear it after all.

[Evelyn]

I don´t like that kind of risk, in my assault there were only 3 people involved, if you say that hearing conversations is random, he could hear my conversation with my partner anyway because we were only 3 (50% of hearing my conversation, 50% of hearing my partner´s conversation, 100% of plan revealed )

[frenchfisher]

I'd be much happier with an eavesdropping feature.

[amika-babilfrenzo]

It doesn't have to be an elaborate code, it could be a thieves cant. Different words for crimes and places, to add some cultural flavor to their speech if nothing else.

Edit: spelling.

[ornithopter]

Using joo's math (which I have no fault with) a 10 whisper convo in a city of 20 people other than the two involved in the whispering (which seems a much more realistic average than the sixty people mentioned earlier in the thread*) gives the following odds of having at least one message overheard:

2% per person: 98.2%
2% per location: 18.3%
0.5% per person: 63.3%

The same convo in the large city of 60 other people:

2% per person: 99.9995%
2% per location: 18.3%
0.5% per location: 95%

*2426 English-speaking characters on the stats page works out to roughly 40 cities at 60 toons/city and about 121 cities at 20 toons/city. I don't care to count locations on the map, but I think there are 80ish on the Treefeather map, and assuming a roughly equal number of places on Hobbes Island minus a rough guess 25% uninhabited comes to 120.