[AC] Rulebooks

[Dumbo52]

So, this is an idea I brought up in Creative's planning thread which I'm posting in a separate topic for visibility. All too often, I've heard complaints from players about how we have 77 pages of rules, asking how we expect players to read them all. While I normally ask them to get to the table of contents on the third page in order to see that the rules are only a fraction of the book's contents, I can understand that before being told that, seeing a 77-page book named "The Rules" might be a bit of a turn-off. The problem and possible solutions were briefly discussed in this thread, but with no resolution. Here's the text of my proposal from my original post:
 

Books
The current rulebook on C is 77 pages long. While only 12 of those pages contain the actual rules (the rest is about banned items, commands, mod requests, FAQs, and useful links), I've seen too many people open it, look at the number of pages, and throw it out without getting to the table of contents. It's too long, and I think our current system could do with an overhaul. I suggest we create a setup that is more friendly to both the users and the admins.
 
I propose that each server should have a list of available books. Admins would be able to edit this list from in-game; for example, running the command /book publish <name> while holding a book would add the currently held book to the list under the specified name. Players would spawn with a "simplerules" book which contains four or five pages of basic explanations of the rules. Players will also be able to use the /book command such that:

• Running /book <name> will give the player a copy of the specified book.
• Running /book <name1>,[name2],[name3],... will give the player a book compiled of the multiple specified books, complete with a dynamically generated title page and table of contents at the beginning.
• We would additionally have a couple of aliases defined. For example, /rulebook would alias to /book simplerules, and /guidebook would give a compilation of all available books aside from "simplerules". This would also give text from the book "rules", an expansion upon "simplerules" which details all of our rules and their basic corollaries. We may also want players to spawn with this book as well, to make it easier for new players who are legitimately interested in playing to get started.

All in all, I think a change like this would make the servers a lot less intimidating to new players by cutting down on the amount of information it's necessary for them to read at first. This should also make things easier for the server admins, eliminating the process of having to go through the techs to update a rulebook, in addition to making our rulebook format more consistent (I've noticed that all three of our rulebooks look very different.) I'd be interested in hearing what some of the other server admins' opinions are on this.

 

 

Any thoughts on these ideas?

 

I'd also like to consider eliminating the book cooldown, at least on Creative. Particularly since the cooldown timer is obscenely high (48 hours), it doesn't seem to serve any purpose on C other than preventing players who accidentally threw their old book out from getting a new one.

[kitcatbar]

Breaking the rulebook up and removing the cool down sounds best for C, especially since you guys don't have to worry about free books being used for villager trading. 77 pages can be overwhelming to see, plus the break up would make it easier for players to find exactly what information they need. I think P will be alright with our current system since we're down to 24 pages, but the changes you suggested do seem ideal for C.

[Mumberthrax]

This seems like it wouldn't be too hard to do with commandhelper.

[jchance]

I'd love to have this command.

 

On C we already reduced our rulebook to 22 pages from 77, but in reality only 9 of those pages are rules and policy.  If we had an easy way to create /commandbook or the like we could split those out and make it even less daunting to new players.

 

Also, as new commands are added (like the recent /prain personal rain command on C) we could update the books as needed.

[Mumberthrax]

https://github.com/NerdNu/nerdCH/pull/24

 

It doesn't have the feature requested of being able to combine books, but it does meet some of the suggestions here.

[Mrloud15]

Closing and moving to the archives.