Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » searching for characters

Hey,

this is a little something I've been thinking about today. It might already be on the website and I missed it, so I'm sorry if that's the case :')

As we all know, there's a search engine to find different kinds of stuff on the site just by typing their name or part of the name, and there's also a list of characters in the order of their appearance on the website.

Now here's my idea. Could there be a search engine, almost like the RP finder, but to search different kinds of characters?

For example, I want to look for a specific character and you could then fillin [male/female], [0-10 / 10-20 / 20-30 years old and so on], basically things like that

EDIT: this would be without typing in any kind of name whatsoever

I can see why this is something you'd really like to see!

Unfortunately, this isn't a feasible idea simply because there is no uniform way to setup a character sheet. The text is stored as plain text - not as 'age=20' or 'sex=female'. It's whatever a user inputs on their page, exactly the way you see it on your character profiles and anywhere else. And it doesn't necessarily have to be the "Basic Information" widget either. A lot of people use a plain text widget.

This means the search engine wouldn't just have to find a match for 'age=20', but it has to go through EVERYTHING on your character page - basic stats, description, stories, everything. Anything with the number 20 could be tagged as 'age', when it might have nothing to do with age. Same goes for 'female' - how many character backgrounds and histories, as well as descriptions use it as a regularly occurring word?

If the site has to look through every bit of information on any character ever (which is 15,000 characters with each at least one to two pages, some going up to 12+) which will pretty much make the server implode. Okay, maybe not that dramatically, but it will impact server resources immensely.

The only way to get a proper search feature like this is to force every person to use the same setup, which will greatly inhibit the potential for creative profiles.

If you're eager to find a proper match for your characters, the only way right now to achieve this is to browse profiles manually. Encouraging people to use descriptive titles in 'Looking for RP' or make relevant prompts in the RP Finder will make this much easier though!

I see, well I really don't want to have THAT big of an impact on the servers xdD wouldn't want the RPR to implode :p thanks for the fast reply though!

Basically what Sanne said. Our database is very poorly optimized for search at the moment. When setting up the RPR, I deliberately made a choice in favor of greater flexibility and creative options for players, sacrificing custom searchability.

This seemed like an okay trade-off to me, since successful RP matches also include things like a person's interest in adding another game to their roster right now, and I always planned to have other types of matchmaking tools -- which are now finally taking for on the site.

In terms of character searches, I have an idea -- give people the option to list their RP preferences on characters for magic, tech, and combat, the same way they do on the 'Find RP' section. They can put it within a certain range (the way you can when searching), and people can search for characters within a certain range. This way it's opt-in, it's building off an existing function.

That would be extremely helpful for characters of mine which can only operate in a no-magic universe, or a high-magic universe, or who have a certain level of tech that people might not suspect. It would also, I'm sure, really help people who can't stand combat, or want it to be in all their RPs.

As part of this, the sliders could have specifics -- for example, under tech, the markers might go from "Tribal/Stone Age" to "Druids and Obelisks, swords and centurions" to "medieval" to "clockwork" to "steam" to "modern" to "near-future" to "space-age" to "extravagant space-age tech". Just ideas on where the percentages might lie ('medieval' might be around 50%).

Wouldn't it make more sense to just propose a game concept in the RP Finder and use the Search option of it there? Game concepts exist indefinitely at the moment and are always displayed when someone's been online for the past 10 minutes. If you're going to actively search for a character, I can imagine it would be desired to know that the character you like and get excited about playing with is also available for a game.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to create a feature to save game concepts for future use for a specific character, so that you only have to activate it and don't have to create it over and over again.

Perhaps even allow an option to search inactive concepts, although that could also defeat the purpose of the Find RP feature.

I think, at least for myself, that the 'Online in the last ten minutes' feature is slightly part of the problem. My trouble is, that it is always the same five to eight people online at the same time as me, some I have been interested in playing with, and I have contacted them, what remains though, are the ones that don't interest me all that much, and it's those ones I see over and over again.

I have honestly had more luck finding potential rp, just searching random characters and sending out messages, then when using the finder, simply because of this fact.

I would love to see an option where we could search offline characters that are up for play as well, so that I may broaden my search to include people who may not be in the same time zone as me, and thus broadening possible RP experiences!

I'm curious, is there any particular reason why forums don't fulfill this criteria? I always feel that people who don't put effort into having their character be found on the RP Finder or the Forums will bother creating settings that allow their character to be found through specific search criteria, which makes me wonder if going out of our way to setup a feature like this will be worth it.

I'm not against the idea at all - I would spend hours searching and browsing if we had this! But the site is already becoming quite an undertaking for new members to explore and use because we expand and grow so much in a short period of time, and making them go through more loopholes after loopholes to find roleplay seems unfriendly and counterproductive to me.

Finding RP partners shouldn't become a chore because the site becomes complex to use, after all, and I feel this thought shouldn't get lost in the awesomeness of ideas for features!