Post:Adjectives With Two Words - 07/08/2020 - 08:51

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Adjectives With Two Words · on 07/08/2020 08:51 1854
>>All current non-crafted wood shapers in game has the adjective "wood." During an assist, I was told that this crafted shaper has an adjective of "jagged wood" meaning that it cannot be interacted with with its full adjective because of the parser. That, in my opinion makes it a bad item creation.

>>Single word adjectives of the single word in front of the noun have been the basis of item creation because it allows users to quickly identify and interact with items. Diverting from this randomly (ok fine it's not random, it's all crafted shapers and who knows what other crafted items) is problematic.

Without commenting on the original suggestion of being able to use cleaning cloths to change the adjective on crafting items, I wanted to elaborate on the use of two-word adjectives (e.g., "a,jagged wood,shaper").

As you have observed, the parser only recognizes a single word as the functional adjective in commands to interact with items. So if an item is "a,jagged wood,shaper," you can interact with it as JAGGED SHAPER or just SHAPER, but the parser will not recognize JAGGED WOOD SHAPER or WOOD SHAPER (because the functional adjective is the first word in the adjective slot).

Those familiar with the 15/15/15 rule of alterations (15 characters for the article, 15 characters for the adjective, and 15 characters for the noun) may recall that nouns, the third component of a "base" item name, cannot have spaces. This isn't merely a stylistic preference to make items more intuitive to interact with. It's a hard rule, because putting spaces in nouns can break things.

The same is not true of adjectives; spaces in adjectives do not break items; it's just that the "functional adjective" ends at the space. You are right that as a practical matter, most adjectives consist of only one word, because that makes the command syntax more intuitive for players to identify and use.

However, sometimes there are compelling reasons to include a second word in the adjective slot. In the case of crafted wood shapers, it is because there are three types of wood shaper: wood shaper, beveled wood shaper, and jagged wood shaper. If the adjective were just "wood" for all three shapers, you would have no way of choosing a specific wood shaper except with ordinal numbers, which change as you interact with items in your inventory. Placing "jagged" in the adjective slot (rather than in the article slot) makes it possible for you to reliably interact with your jagged wood shaper when you have multiple wood shapers.

Similar use of two-word adjectives occurs with other crafting tools that have multiple variations (e.g., straight/curved/slender/tapered/serrated wood saws).

In the same vein, shops may have multiple variations of the same item on a single surface. For example, if a merchant were selling five silk dresses with an adjective of just "silk," it would be easy for players to inadvertently buy the wrong dress. (The only ways to buy a specific dress would be to use ordinal numbers or a clickable shop interface.)

Lastly, some materials require two words when used in the adjective slot to fully identify the material and to differentiate it from other variations. For example, a crimson lava samite satchel with a sungold clasp would need to be "a crimson,lava samite,satchel" and not "a crimson lava,samite,satchel." Otherwise, when you interacted with the satchel, everyone would see a mere "samite satchel" in messaging that used the short name of the item.

With alterations, we will try to accommodate base name preferences ("article,adjective,noun") if the player tells us about them, although we must still follow the standards for material names. (Nouns can only be changed under certain circumstances at the discretion of the merchant.)

I hope this explanation clarifies things about how adjectives are used in item names.


GM Cordulia

This message was originally posted in Lore/Suggestions - Lore, by DR-CORDULIA on the play.net forums.