I treated the ID space as a character background summary. The big stories, which are much more involved and in-depth, will be posted at a later date someplace everyone has access to (like this forum).
I've found this irksome as well -- my character bios usually take the form of newspaper articles, news reels, and the like, and the current limits on space make it hard to write a bio with any real panache that still contains the relevant facts.
So basically, I've given up. I cram what I can into the bio, and everything else just has to come out in the course of conversation. It would be nice if they were a bit longer, but it's not the end of the world -- for every bio I read that I wish was longer, there are ten that I can't even get all the way through at their current length.
Honestly, I'd be happy if they'd just fix the formatting -- the typesetting on the character info pop-up is crummy.
yea mine are around ClearNinjas size, and i always have to edit and cahnge the story to fit in to the space.
The lack of space is impacted by several issues. I will try to explain them briefly.
1) Server Storage - All of this information has to be stored on the server side of the game. If everyone had, say, 10,000 charaters to work with as their bio's, imagine the storage needs for this.
2) Bandwidth - You are going to have to download that at some point to read it....
3) Memory - once you download it, it has to be available for you to read it in the graphical environment. Text in a game is still a form of graphics and takes up more space than just Word Processor text.
So as you can see, they had to decide where to draw the line so that that the game would be playable. Hope that helps fill in the blanks.
Thought I'd post the following here, and not in the Main section of these forums as I'd like to hear your opinion on it.
Now, I consider myself a roleplayer of sorts. Meaning I don't stick to my chosen character at all times and happily drop in and out of character as I please. What I like most about RPing is writing an elaborate background story for my characters. Adding layer upon layer to make them into believable beings in their own right. These backgrounds count numerous pages, 10 pages is a good start but nowhere near finished in most cases.
So, last night I got a request from one of my fellow superheroes to finally put the background for one of my heroes in his ID...and I did. A few seconds later I get told that there's a big chunk missing, probably because there's some sort of limit on the number of words/signs.
Not sure what the limit is, but it appear to be 850 signs (exc. spaces).
I'm at a loss here. It's gonna be hard condensing sevral pages into maybe 10-15 lines of text and still have enough depth and explenation in there about the character.
How to resolve this? Two solutions pop up, one good one bad. The bad one, in my opinion, would be to just upload the full story to some forum and give people a link to it in my ID. A better solution would be to expand the number of signs to something a little more reasonable, say 10.000.
Not sure if that last option is really an option, I'm no techy when it comes to these things, but would it matter if people had 10.000 signs in their desciption? does it effect the servers at all and with that performance?
Basically I'm asking how you all went about dealing with this.