Posted: Wed Oct 18, 2006 6:17 am
I don't know if I'd consider the ability to work around author abuse as a factor in keeping the 'add new option' feature enabled for old episodes. In general, the episodes we are talking about have been around long enough that plenty of time has elapsed to allow people to work around any author abuse that is present. If there is author abuse that is present that hasn't been worked around by now, I'd argue that perhaps it isn't bad enough to warrant working around.Lots42 (in another topic) wrote:I say, KEEP the Add An Option option. If that makes sense. The positives outweigh the negatives. It allows one to go around author abuse, it allows one to extend a story that some authors have not, it allows someone like me to go back to an old, old episode I wrote and extend it if I have an additional plot bunny.
As for the ability to go back to an old, old episode and extend it with an additional "plot bunny" as you call it, I would ask the following: Where do we draw the line? I agree with both you and JH. The ability to make use of the 'add new option' feature is an important option that authors need to have available to them. I have no desire to remove it completely. However, I'm slowly coming to realize that allowing its use indefinately is not an ideal situation.
I agree with WolfRun, in that I don't like episodes with tons and tons of options. When I initially wrote Extend-A-Story, I intentionally limited the number of options an author can use to ten, in response to a deficiency I saw in Addventure where there was no apparent limit to the number of options allowed, leading to episodes like Endless Perspectives, episode 103 where 16 options were used. I remember that there are episodes on Addventure that go way beyond this, but this was the best example I could find with a quick search.
I tend to feel that anywhere from two to four options is ideal for most scenarios. I picked ten as the limit for Extend-A-Story, as that seemed a good compromise between what I felt the ideal should be, and allowing authors flexibility to use additional options if a situation warranted it, without allowing a complete option explosion by those who would try to abuse the allowed number of options.
And now we have the case of 'add new option' which can allow someone to add any number of options to an episode where it is enabled. There currently is no limit to the number of additional options. I have sometimes considered adding a limit to prevent vast numbers of options being added, but have never felt a need to do so in the past.
This brings us back to my original question. Where do we draw the line? I personally don't feel comfortable with saying options can be added with no limit whatsoever. A numerical limit feels like it would be ripe for abuse, as I imagine some people would be tempted to create options soley for the purpose of hitting the limit.
I keep thinking about a time limit, similiar to how we handle allowing episodes to be edited. There is a period of time where the original author is allowed to freely edit the episode. There is an additional period of time where myself or (more typically) JH can be asked to edit an episode. However, there seems to be a certain unwritten limit beyond which we don't go back and edit episodes. This seems to happen because after a period of time, the content of the episode (even if it contains grievous errors regarding point of view, spelling, or whatever) is used in child episodes, and editing the episode would cause problems with the child episodes. See episode 3508 for an example of this.
The option we are considering at the moment is similiar to a time limit, although it is based on how many levels deep an episode is in the story tree, as opposed to stricly time based. While being a low-level episode typically means that an episode is older, this isn't strictly true as new episodes can be created at all levels in the story from level 5 onwards.
So... Perhaps using levels deep in the story tree as a basis for disabling the 'add new option' feature is not such a good idea, since this can lead to recently created episodes having the 'add new option' disabled without giving sufficient time for authors to add options as needed.
Perhaps going with a time limit would be a workable option? Would allowing the 'add new option' feature to work for a year or two after the creation of the initial episode be sufficient for allowing authors to add options as needed? I feel that it certainly allows sufficient time for working around author sabotage. As for adding new story ideas, one could always argue that they have a perfect idea for extending some specific episode. I feel that given the nature of a branching story, as supported by Extend-A-Story, allow limitless points where any sort of idea can be applied. Again I'll agree with WolfRun on this point, and quote his statement, as he states is clearer than I can:
And again, this is still just my personal opinion. I am not dictating policy, but instead am merely exploring the various options to see if there is some common ground we can reach.WolfRun wrote:I don’t buy this argument. Of course it's possible, but if a person has a really good idea for a new direction in a storyline, they should be able to work it in at almost any point of the story and not just that one episode that Sir Toby just happened to delete “Add New Option” from. It might be more convenient if they could just add it in as a new option, but it most certainly isn't world-shattering if they can't (especially since, in so many cases, if they can't add their idea later in the story they can usually go back to a previous episode in the thread to add it in with little or no difficulty.)
