Planet M.U.L.E.

There are a lot of people who like to play a particular color (myself included) and sometimes even go as far as not joining a perfectly good game because they can't get the color they want. Here's my suggestion:

Let users choose their color make it a setting. It can even be restricted to the 4 colors we have now if necessary.  We could all choose green and on our game we will be green, but to everyone else we will show up as one of the other 3 colors. 

Maybe I'm way off my rocker here.  :-\

Heck no, that's an excellent suggestion.  I've often made mistakes thinking I was the same color as in previous games.

Also brilliant is your idea of you showing up as a different color to everyone else, to prevent conflicts when multiple bots all want to be the same color.

Yeah. A great idea, worth to implement - it should not be too hard.

Except, I've referred to players before by color, if, for example, their names are hard to type, and this would create confusion if they had a different color for everyone else.

Yes, this would be a minor new confusion that we'd have to deal with.  But I'd think the benefits of players no longer being confused about their OWN colors during gameplay would outweigh the negatives of potential confusion in chats.

I am pretty sure that making all color perception in the game subjective would actually cause more confusion. If color perception of players became entirely subjective, so each player perceives other players as a possibly different color, and thus no one knew what anyone was talking about, anarchy and rioting would break out in the streets and civilization as we know it would collapse.

I support the original suggestion!

Yours truly,
The pink packer

They could certainly add a player number to associate each player.  i.e. player #1,2,3,4

But then we may have people who always want to be player #3, then mass confusion might reign again! atch!  ;D

I think that sounds like a fine suggestion too.

I don't recall seeing this suggested previously, but along the same lines...  I may remember my color long enough to grab a plot, but then lose my place in the auction phase - especially if there is another player with the same character (and sometimes even when I'm the only one   :-[).  How about setting each user's view such that they always appear in the first position on the far left on their own client?

Another excellent idea!  Help us poor addicts out... we confuse easily, as all the games kind of blur together....

Well, duh. Everyone wants to be player #3, at least until late in the game. Nothing horrible ever happens to player #3. Being player #1 sucks!

Rather than having subjective colours (needlessly confusing) or numbers (needlessly complicated) why not have a pool of 8-10 character colours that you can select (Unless it's already taken, of course!)

However this doesn't adress the problem of 'games blurring together.' I honestly cannot count how many games I've botched the first land grab because of that.

Oh, and let people play as the mechtron too. I always played as the mechtron in the Commodore version.

/signed

I really don't like being pink and even after only playing two games I can see I'm not alone  ;D

I like the idea of introducing a new color, one that everyone always sees themselves as when they're playing.  For example, something off-white or gray (much like the color of the characters when seen in the high score list).

That way, everyone will (quickly?) get used to always playing as this new color.  And the other 3 players in your games will still show up in the original 4 colors.  Any chat references to to colors would be pretty easy to figure out:  "Nice land grab, green"... ("Green?  There's no green player... oh, that must be me").

Coupled with the idea of each player always being shown if the left-most spot (from the players individual point of view), there would soon be no more color or location confusion for us addict players, as we'd always be using the same color and be on the screen in the same position.