Use of player's first name initial in News Stories

[Eugene Church]

You need to fix the use of the player's first name initial and last name being used often in News Stories. I don't remember seeing this before. It looks like it showed up in 1.0.3.

"A. Pujols hammered a home run" just isn't used in the body of a News Story.

I didn't even remember this being a token.

We had one for "last name only", "first name only" (which I didn't use except when a manager commented about the performance in a News Story quote)...and "first and last name".

Something needs to be done about the [%string]...many times the same verb is repeated over and over in "3 homers" and "opening day schedule".

[M's rule]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

You need to fix the use of the player's first name initial and last name being used often in News Stories. I don't remember seeing this before. It looks like it showed up in 1.0.3.

"A. Pujols hammered a home run" just isn't used in the body of a News Story.

I didn't even remember this being a token.

We had one for "last name only", "first name only" (which I didn't use except when a manager commented about the performance in a News Story quote)...and "first and last name".

I remember reading somewhere (sorry, can't find the source) that when a news message calls a token that returns a player's name, there is an x% chance that the output will display the full name and an x% chance that it will display only the first initial and last name. If my recollection is accurate, then I think this is the source of the problem. I agree that it seems strange to see just the first initial used, and I hope we can get this fixed for 2007. (I suspect that this random thing has been a feature of 2006 since before 1.0.3, and the reason you didn't notice it sooner is that you didn't play the game very much until after the final patch was released.)

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

Something needs to be done about the [%string]...many times the same verb is repeated over and over in "3 homers" and "opening day schedule".

As you well know, there's nothing those of us on the text team can do about the content of the [%string] messages, because all this text is generated from within the game code. If you can quote some specific examples, then we can get them into TT and see if they get tended to. One of my dreams for 2007 is for the text team to get access to the content of all the hard-coded messages so they can be edited and refined just like the text in the database can be.