Creature Handler Archive

That's a nice idea, actually.

But to be honest, I'm more inclined to give them long commands so that they're compelled to make macros and those macros might include /tellpet. Nah, just kidding, but I'm thinking it. I only do pets for friends and I'll teach them whatever they want.

It is a nice idea - especially as I suspect the majority of problems people experience with pet commands and /tellpet stem from a slightly buggy command parser.

Most people I've encountered with command problems cured it by making macroswith 'long'commands and retraining with them. The commands are case sensitive and if the parser can't fully 'resolve' commands (through pattern matching, which is why short commands can cause problems) it doesn't resolve them at all. I'm not claiming this fixes all the command problems BTW - but it certainly seems to eliminate a lot of them!

It's a nice thought. Except that the tendancy (at least on my server) is to use commands like f/a/s/s1/s2/l/m/n/o/p/BAH! If I am going to have a pet, I am going to train it like I would a pet. I use things like heel/sic/kill/protect/guard etc. I like to call it role playing. The thing that gets me is when I see somebody spamming:

d00dGuy yells "f"
d00dGuy yells "f"
d00dGuy yells "f"
"f", d00dGuy shouts


For that there is tellpet. I have a PA mate who has the short commands trained, and has macros set for all of the commands he uses, attached with words he can alter for the situation:

/tellpet a;/shout Kill that %tt and bring me its head!!

and you see:

Galacium Baldur yells "Kill that Toxic Merek Battlelord and bring me its head!!"

etc.

It adds flavor and puts the "RP" in "MMORPG".

Long commands are better, because they're more intuitively obvious than the one letter commands, that are taught mainly to speed up the training process.

When I was engaging in TTR, I'd train commands as numbers, just to get the train out of the way, then release. If I intended to keep the pet, it was a one step process in changing "7" into "group" or whatever the permanent command was to be. I have my own set of standard commands for creatures being transfered to someone else, but I will ask the client if they want any custom commands for their pet. Some defintely want RP type commands for attack or follow me, others don't really care. With the addition of the full list of commands, this isn't as great an issue as it was earlier, when some of the commands taught were hidden in the datapad.

I also have customized commands for particular critters; all my critters are trained with "trickone" for their first trick, so I can use a macro. There are two exceptions to this; my dewback's trick 1 command is "Huey trickone" because I created some RP macros for him, same for my savage humbaba. I also have three different commands, tied to macros, for "attack" to use with combos to send a particular creature in to attack while holding others in reserve.

Some commands are deliberately tied to the pet's name so that I can tell one pet to stay while not telling the others, or have one pet follow a target around while others stand by for a command.