Meta prefix for GM activities in the room

[Dennis]

The color of a GM declared room activity is really similar to the color of the spam I get during regular play. They can be really easy to miss. Can a meta-prefix be added to these so I can bring them directly to my attention and not miss them during action spam? There are also times where I have locked my output log so I can read something that happened in the past, and therefore miss anything incoming if I'm unable to catch it in my "LOOK HERE" side panel.

[Rias]

Granted the metaprefixes are, by definition, meta ... but I'm trying to think of what the prefix would actually be without seeming too horribly blatant. Any ideas?

[Rilulth]

I'm personally not a fan of this. I like to sometimes sneakily do things that make people ponder "Was this always here? Should I investigate? Am I being messed with?"

It can also be used by people to trigger a response when we are trying to work out if people are AFK Scripting which is against policy, yet still done frequently.

[Alicron]

I would imagine that GMs would have an option to hide said prefix if they are doing something stealthily and that it should be known to players that the prefix is not a 100% accurate method of determining if a GM is actively doing something in the area.

For example, If a GM is running a custom item merchant then they would of course want it known to everyone who passes by but if they were controlling a super secret NPC of power and deep lore and wanted a natural reaction from all those in the area, then nope.

[Navi]

From the early days of CLOK,
I do seem to recall many times Rias and friends talking about how people wonder on by ignoring prompts sent to them by GMs. I've always had a fear of this. I don't believe I have ever missed any messages from GMs. I also don't think it's very fair to punish players for being inattentive to one line of text when many activities generate hundreds, if not thousands of messages. Do you really want us to be scouring every message that's sent for some alternate text? That's a path towards self-fulfilling prophecies.
If you want to send a player or a group of players some GM activity, then you should probably really want it to stand out to those players. I don't understand why you would want your time and effort to potentially go unnoticed. Perhaps I'm missing something fundamental from the GM perspective. Feel free to fill in my gaps in understanding though.

[Dennis]

I believe that one option is to commit a metaprefix similar to roomid. Something like ::EVENT:: would clearly indicate and notify the user that some sort of notable event is occurring in their vicinity.

I try to be present, but have missed GM prompts while present and attending because my main prompt is filled with the same lines repeating ad nauseum. I admit that even while present, I often do not pay close attention to my main prompt as it hurts my eyes to do so.

The way I do so is by using meta-prefixes to shunt pertinent key information from my main output to a side window that I can pay close attention to, such that I can react in a timely manner to them.
For example, if someone SAYS something to me, commits a SOCIAL, or if I receive something on the network, I can react quickly. However, with in-room events I can easily miss it even while present if not actively reading my main output log. With certain repeating actions, my output log is cleared within 20 seconds. Combat is often even quicker as every action in the room generates 3 to 5 lines of text.

I believe that a metaprefix is appropriate and could be considered an accessibility feature. I understand there's a desire to hold an air of mystery, but I do not think that indicating that this is something fed by a GM would foil that.
With reasonable suspicion, a GM should be able to punish someone if they're suspected of using the metaprefix to evade an AFK scripting check. For example, if someone consistently stops all of their actions after seeing an event flag or if someone speaks to them and goes AFK, or logs off, or samesuch, it seems suspicious. Canned responses that are not situationally aware could also be suspicious.

I suggest that this benefits active players more than it does policy-breaking players.

[Karjus]

As someone who likes exploring and finding stuff, I can't say I'm a fan.

If GMs want to announce things, and highlight them, they've already got various methods of really doing so without having prefixes. Ranging from colour coding, announcement texts, board posts, BBS posts, and so forth.

People will always miss stuff, it happens, but its like when people complained about missing Merchants because they only announced on global ESP, and wanted BBS posts to forewarn them. And announcements. And board posts. And people still missed it and complained.

This is overkill.

[Volinn]

Not really a fan of this for reasons similar to Karjus. It's a bit much.