Citizens of my deed are unable to rename branded horses

[Kikinaak]

We cant rename tamed animals, only branded ones, and it seems only the mayor of a deed can rename a horse, not the citizens. my citizens are throwing a minor animal rights riot. Animals are people too! They have the right to names!

...OK seriously, we have tried giving citizens all permissions for animals at the settlement token, as well as setting all permissions on the horse itself, and still only the mayor can set the name. In fact, citizens cant even see the name field.

I am also wondering why there is no permissions menu for a tamed, unbranded animal?

[Keenan]

This is all working as intended.

http://www.wurmpedia.com/index.php/Permissions#Animals

You would need a custom mod to change this functionality.

As for no permissions for tamed/unbranded - simply put taming is temporary ownership. Branding is more permanent. The system is also pending a future update, which will introduce ownership papers for animals, but there's no ETA on that as the features are still in development.

[Kikinaak]

The feature I speak of, that of being able to rename a branded horse, is already in place. The bug here is that even with full permissions set, citizens cannot rename a settlement owned animal. Yet the mayor can. When manage permissions are set on a boat or cart, the player can rename it, why then are horses different? They use the same permissions system.

[Keenan]

It's not a bug... the mayor is the technical "owner" of any branded animal. Just as the owner of a boat or cart can rename their vehicle. There is no way to transfer the ownership of a branded animal to another player at this time, therefore only the mayor can rename them.

[Kikinaak]

Well, I cant see the code in question, but the in-game effect of having only the mayor able to rename animals prevents having another member of the settlement act as the shepherd/breeder.
It seems trivial to allow anyone with manage permissions to also rename an object or mob.

As for having ownership papers for animals down the road, for the love of sanity PLEASE do not make them as undroppable as a settlement deed, otherwise any settlement with more than a few animals will reduce the mayor to a walking filing cabinet. We have 3 players and almost 30 animals. This number is expected to grow wildly as we get into breeding.

[SprigusK]

I thought we were moving away from the whole papers idea, when they removed Writs from use. I honestly dissagree with having the papers option. The whole (being able to manage from character section) was a Huge step in the right direction. I feel "papers" is a step back.

Being able to bring animals to a location on the map and "sell" them just buy changing permission from the manage screen is where its at. But yeah, I was wondering myself why my villagers couldnt name them.

[Keenan]

It's not a feature I'm working on, but the way I understand it is you'd be able to use parchment to create an ownership paper for any animal you own. So it wouldn't be something like an old writ - more like something you can create that will contain details about the animal in question and be linked to it. Trading the paper - which the other party could read and be able to verify that it is what they are purchasing - would then transfer ownership. The paper could then be destroyed after the ownership was transferred.

Again, in development, so actual features may vary in the long run and there's no ETA when this feature will be completed.

It's not so much it being trivial though, as it is a question of security and such. Here in the world of WU, where we pretty much play with close friends only, the idea of giving more control to people seems obvious. When you consider that these systems were developed for both WU and WO, the need for a little more restriction comes in.

This is where mods come in for WU. A modder could make this change with relative ease, and give you the choice to allow it where others may not want it to be so open.

[Kikinaak]

Originally posted by Keenan:

It's not so much it being trivial though, as it is a question of security and such. Here in the world of WU, where we pretty much play with close friends only, the idea of giving more control to people seems obvious. When you consider that these systems were developed for both WU and WO, the need for a little more restriction comes in.

This is where mods come in for WU. A modder could make this change with relative ease, and give you the choice to allow it where others may not want it to be so open.

I'll argue this on 2 points. Firstly, bind renaming to management permissions, and all previous security is maintained. If they are not given management permissions by the owner, they cant rename the animal. Why this is even a security matter is beyond me.

Secondly, if theres a feature requested or sensible in WU that you dont want rolled into WO, make it a server settings option. Options are a good thing, denying one a useful option for the sake of the other is not.

[Keenan]

I do understand your concerns. I manage a large deed on Exodus with many animals, and my mayor has to go back from the Chaos server as I don't have any premium alts left there. You can understand that I'd rather enjoy more rolled into the management permission myself, not just in WU.

As for security, it's more of a "can't win for losing" situation. If it gets added to the management permission, you'd also have a near similar number of people who cry out that it's too much. The permission system redesign was supposed to make them better and easier, while keeping things similar in the process. Before this, you couldn't rename animals at all - nor gates or doors on a house. All you could do is set the name of the house you held the writ for, and holding the writ made you an owner.

It will be brought up. I actually bring a lot of suggestions I see across the community to the attention of the devs that are working on those features. I even know it's been mentioned before, but at the time the priority was getting the new system working smoothly, so you can understand that might have been more important.

We actually do separate the code quite a bit, but we also try to keep things as similar as possible. The goal is to create a pleasant experience in WU for the single/private server player, but keep it similar enough so that if someone either comes from WO or decides to try WO, they're not left wondering. The portals code I'm working on is an example of something that will likely not ever see use in Wurm Online. :)

As for "security matter", I can think of one friend of my own whom I would trust to manage my deed... but I also know he'd find it absolutely hilarious to rename everything on it to something that might get a GM to come knocking on my chat tab. Since I own it... I'd have to assume I'd be responsible for it. :)

[Kikinaak]

That scenario isnt a security risk, its at best a prank, at worst a minor case of griefing. In which case if the GM had half a clue how to do their job, they could check the management log for the renamed animals/objects and know it was your friend, not you. And said GM, after they finished laughing, would be tapping on your friends shoulder and saying "good one, but dont do it again". Yes, things can be used to cause mischief or outright abused. Thats why we have GMs to begin with. This is not a valid reason to keep a cumbersome system cumbersome, and if the odd prank here and there turns into actual griefing, both the mayor and the GM have ways of dealing with that can of worms if and when its opened. As GMs of our own servers, we have these tools. Trusting us to make use of them when appropriate would leave more of the devs team time for developing the actual game, rather than trying to head off potential abuse.

Through the history of gaming, compromising gameplay in the name of security has been a bad move every single time. Even a passing glance over the WU server list shows the vast majority of servers that are either single player or friends only. You can probably afford to be a little more lax with the security shackles in that environment.

Seriously, allowing mayors to choose whether a citizen is allowed to rename an animal isnt a security risk, and claiming it is as the grounds of disabling a useful option is the perfect combination of short-sightedness and heavyhandedness that drives off players.