PvE Narrator

Thanks, I am experimenting with it and have not yet had the chance to test it extensively to see how it feels. On paper it seemed more natural and I personally did not like the extreme verbosity of latest NPC interactions.

So I am eager to gather feedback on this change.

I enjoyed the verbal portions, gave the NPCs some personality and character.

Also on a side note I have noticed that after this update they will no longer attack once the player is unconscious; though they will continue a RP. HOWEVER - If they are unconscious they will only repeat the final attack (with some minor variations)

So.. I still need to run full end-to-end test to catch the post-defeat behaviour. But within the fight I don't personally see much of an issue with personality or anything. The pattern I am observing is:

- They post a 1-3 paragraph long initial response to your actions. This one has them talking, some personality and stuff.
- Then they post their intention, describing what they are trying to do
- They take an action
- They describe how the action happened and then their next intention
- They take an action
- Repeat until turn is passed.

The only thing that might be missing is the after-actions message, but personally I like it when there's none there.

Previously their narration worked in a similar manner, however all the internal messaging and narration of their intentions and all was just combined into one post that was only shown at the end. So part of the percieved difference is that they are now just sent as they are generated, instead of waiting until the last action to send them.

In my tests I also kind of got tired of reading all of that all the time.

The total length of their responses has also gone down, yes, but it's between 1.5-2x. And previously it was just way too long in my opinion. It also affects the token usage, by the way, so we are saving some money by optimizing how much text is generated.

So... overall, I'm curious to hear what others think about current behavior. Maybe we could add an extra slightly longer narration before passing the turn that would add some personality? Idk.

Or maybe we could have them write more elaborate descriptions of their actions. I think it's 1-3 sentences right now, we could instruct them to write longer messages there.

Or better yet, I guess, the ideal option would be to have it as an attribute you can adjust on your profile, post length preference like with narration style.

After my initial knee-jerk reaction to the new update (as admittedly I am terrible with changes, so I apologize) - I have spent a bit more time getting adjusted to the new flow of how the NPCs fight and talk. It's not bad, but I think what could be enjoyable is maybe a slightly longer narration before passing the turn. It would give a good signal that their turn is over, and as an RP enthusiast give one a bit more to read.

Though with the mention of tokens and costs, I completely understand that bit. In the end my qualms mean nothing if it damages the sake of the site! So take it all for a grain of salt~

Would be nice if other's would throw in their own two cents .. but I get a feeling this thread is being overlooked.

You were actually on to something with your original reaction. I ran a couple tests and noticed a noticeable degradation in coherence, and how it would seemingly not pay attention to character descriptions, bio, ai notes, etc. Like messing up genders, races, and all other details.

Turns out only the intro had that information, but not the "big brain" AI loop, the one responsible for choosing actions and writing intermediate narration (the in-between posts). Since it now became the primary source of narration it became very apparent.

So basically all it was aware of were fighter names, stats and chat history. The fact that intro post often includes a lot of character details, and this ai loop **does** see that message was making it harder to diagnose, because it would reference some character details, but not others. And that included not just player character, but then npc too.

So when you said "they lost personality" - that was exactly what happened. Although it was not because of the way new messages were sent, not because of their length, it was because it just did not have any information about it's personality.

And you can bring attention to certain threads in the Tavern or on Discord, that would be ok.

When both Sable and Valerie bots were defeated they didn't have any responses when knocked out and definitely no responses to any sex in the narration when defeated or otherwise.