Accessibility Changes, Bonus Equipment Improvements

Equipment Bonuses Enhancements:

• The object bonuses are a little (just a little) more weighted towards DR over other stats and the base bonuses are upped a little.
• Items will now also have a chance for lower level when the bonus kicks in. This is on top of the regular level randomizing so it’s possible you get one that looks no better than usual if it repopped higher then the bonus lowered it, or one even lower level than previously possible.
• The max stats an item can get is now based on the item’s default level not it’s actual level. This means that a level 181 item repopping at level 178 doesn’t get penalized with lower potential max stats at level 178.
• It is harder for items with already close to max stats to get bonuses. I’ve changed this so the difference isn’t quite as high.
• Bonus items that are donated or sold will now last much longer. They will stick around for about 6 hours on average compared to just over an hour for donated items and average 45 minutes for sold to shop. Would like to make this even longer but need to balance with clutter in the shops and donate rooms so let’s see how it goes.
• Items with the ‘nodrop’ flag can now get bonuses. If there are “bad” items imms particularly don’t want to have bonuses there is a separate flag we can set.
• The amount of weapon base damange a bonus item can add has been increased slightly. There is also a minimum amount of damage that will be added to lower level bonus weapons when a percentage doesn’t really do a whole lot for it.
• Arrows will no longer get stat bonuses. They can still get bonus flags though and will get the added damage. Also a reminder that tempering arrows greatly increases the number of uses.
• When a bonus item gets player stats (str, con, etc), the stats will now tend to more weighted towards the first stat it picks. This means that items adding lots of stats will generally (not always) have more of one stat than completely randomly spread which makes them more useful to people trying to optimize for one stat. It is also possible for these stats to go a little higher than before.
• Items that get a bonus will also fetch a higher price when selling to a store or fencing them.

Other Changes this Reboot:

• There is a new command called ‘bonusloot’. Setting this flag will cause you to loot items that load with random bonus stats even if you have autoloot turned off. This defaults on ON.
• There is also a new command called ‘lootnext’ which will cause you to loot the next corpse only. The idea is that you can keep autoloot off but use this command to loot only the next mob you kill. You can also make an alias to turn this on then attack your target if you are going to use lootnext often.

There is a little extra complexity in how autoloot, bonusloot, lootnext and skipnext flags interact. You should get a message when the flags contradict each other. If you turn on skipnext it will cancel lootnext and vice versa.

• When you loot an item it will now get a hidden ‘looted’ flag. You can do ‘inv filter looted’ to show the items looted and, once the items are shown, it will clear the flag. This means that you can use the command to look at items looted since last time you checked. This only happens when you autoloot an item. Manually getting it from a mob corpse or acquiring it any other way does not count. Dropping the item, putting into a container or any other action that takes it out of your main inventory (including wearing) also removes the flag.
• Using ‘shelp’ will now show how many times a social has been used since reboot. Something I wanted for my own reasons and figured there was no reason to not let everyone see it.
• There is now an ‘inv filter bonus’ that also works with ‘lbid filter’ but, unfortunately, will only work with bonus items loaded from this point forward.
• The ‘poison’ and ‘disease’ flags on a character will no longer prevent the full ‘Green Death’ from working, in terms of other skills only the green death skill effect itself will prevent it landing again.

Accessibility Features:

We are working on some features to make the game more accessible for players using screen readers. There seems to be some debate on which term is appropriate and I am told people are moving away from ‘vi’ and just going with ‘blind’. We can figure that out later but I don’t want it to get in the way of improving the game for screen reader users so I’m just using “blind” below.

• There is now a ‘blindmode’ command. Setting it to 1 means that other players can use ‘who blind’ or ‘who vi’ to find you. Settings it to 2 means it is private. Setting 2 doesn’t actually do anything yet, but over time the game will output commands to you differently based on that setting (see below).

After some discussion with a few people on the personal board, we are trying to figure out the best way to present some of the Aard commands that output tables of data into a format more friendly for screen readers.

To help get to some answers on that, I made a few new versions of the ‘stats’ command. I picked this command because it’s a short table with a lot of data and totals at both row and column level.

I would appreciate it if the players using screen readers could try these out and give feedback on the ideas board on which works best for you and why. Please use ‘note replay 39108’ for that thread.

• The “stats vi” command is fairly verbose and describes each column each times it reads the data.
• The “stats vi2” command tells you up front what the columns are going to be then just gives the numbers.
• The “stats vi3” command is a combination of the two with a definition up front then a short letter prefix. I did this because if I were using
  only a screen reader on longer more complex tables I’d probably forget what each column was by the time I got to the end.

The inconsistent labeling of stats is intentional to see which works better for you.

If there is a better format than any of these then please post examples along with why. We need to get this as easy as possible for screen readers before converting many of our other commands to use the same format.

Thanks to everyone who took part in the early discussion on this as we would have definitely not gotten this far without you. I want to move the discussion to a public board now and involve anyone who wants to take part.