Given the recent discussion in the Lack of Rants thread, I thought I'd go through and make a list of emotes in a few categories. Note that these placements are my own personal opinion, and some of them can be debated. An alternative idea would be to make certain forcive emotes require that the target AGREE, but that would likely be a fair bit of excess effort. That said, here goes!

OOC Emotes:
nowai
orly
pastries
pants <--- not on emotionlist, but still exists.
woot <--- not on emotionlist, but still exists.
yarly

Forcive emotes/actions likely needing change:
When someone levels, you shouldn't always congratulate them. When someone loses a level, you should not always reach over to console them. Levels are often gained / lost in group vs. group combat when fighting enemies.
Shinkick (the third party view is something about "choking back a laugh as x painfully kicks y in the shins").
Deepkiss. If, for example, Kalodan was to to DEEPKISS ARIX, Arix's tongue would passionately dance with Kalodan's (or something along those lines), no matter what Arix's personal opinion is.

Emotes which don't live up to their potential:
thatssweet <--- I expected something a bit more sappy, to be honest.

Forcive emotes, perhaps all right:
Wrestle, pounce, waltz, dance, etc. These are ones which exist, which add a bit of flavour/possibility, and changing all of them would be prohibitive (and not worth adding in an AGREE flag). I'm just not going to bother listing the rest.

This is a very quick runthrough of the list. I also don't have a lot of the third person / targetted views, I'm going off my memory. If any of you have more comments on these lists, or additions, feel free to join in.

Edit: As an aside, most of the emotes are wonderful. The list is huge, and this is just a very small selection of them. However, refining the list cannot hurt!

Personaly, I don't find pastries OOC

I fnd it entirely IC, the rest I agree with you on.

I vote for the removal of the zerbert emote on the grounds of being the most ridiculous and irrelevant emote ever created.

And we could really use a cleaning up of some of the "silly" emotes.

Keep one thing in mind, that many emotes are stock emotes, meaning without a complete rewrite of things they are not going to be changed, simply because the admins who deal with emotes can't.
We will keep in mind new emotes and emotes that have been added in that you feel are to forcive and work to make them less so, but again some emotes just are not going to change.

If Kalodan deepkissed me, he'd get a mystic cudgel to the crotch, regardless of his guildrank

It wouldn't change the fact that, currently, Arix the character would reciprocate for a moment.

and if anything, I would be deepkissing HIM. Arix is nobody's bitch

How is PASTRIES OOC? That's, like, classic aetherspace.

EDIT. And WOOT. Expression of excitement. Not every character is staid and stoic.

Yep, the Gingerbread Men yell it out. As they're on the Pastries side.

Edit: Bad Xavius!

If PASTRIES is OOC, then so is FAIGLOM.

Ok, one more pass through.

Blinking incredulously, you exclaim, "No way!"

Arching your eyebrow and cocking your head you exclaim, "Oh really?!"

With a wide-eyed gaze, you pipe in, "Yeah really!"

I hadn't actually tried those before. There are no owl references. Aside from the Owlish syntax, those look perfectly fine.

The owlish syntax is the problem, actually.

And further-- woot was removed from the emotionlist (Gwylifar linked to a thread about it in the Lack of Rants thread). However, despite not being in the emotionlist, it's still useable.

I can see the dislike of some of the "forced" emotions.

However, who really cares about the owl syntax. It doesn't change the actual game. It was a recent addition by Morgfyre anyway who just wanted to have some fun. It doesn't really ruin immersion. Certain exclaims like Woot, Yo, etc...it shouldn't matter. Heck, I wouldn't even mind Dude.

Anything not on EMOTIONLIST cannot be changed, as Charune has stated, because they are part of the stock set of EMOTEs that came with the game before it was even created. We will not touch these with a ten foot pole.

If you have a problem with anything on EMOTIONLIST then that is a different story as such emotes can very easily be changed, removed, etc and we are willing to listen to recommended changes to this list.

If you have an emote you think should be considered for a change or update be polite in your request and concise in your suggestion. Comments like "I think SOANDSO emote should be changed." without a reason why or suggested changes to make it better can and may be ignored.

Okay. Well, of the things I mentioned above-- the "owl" things should probably be reworded to "noway", etc, instead of "nowai".

I also mentioned the deepkiss bit, which likely shouldn't have the target reciprocating. Beyond that, most of the ones I mentioned were the stock ones, beyond my dissatisfaction at "thatssweet"-- as I said, I expected it to be a bit sappier. "Aww, that's so sweet..." or something, instead of "That's just sweet!"

I also find myself somewhat curious as to why the forums don't register that last post as a post... they are insisting that the last post here was Viravain's, at 6:33. Interesting.

For the record, I don't mind the owl ones since there's nothing in what actually comes out that's owlish, OOC, sophomoric, or forcive. And I agree the pastries one isn't OOC.

The whole "forcive" aspect over on the other thread got out of hand. Another MUD I played once went overboard with removing anything forcive and it just meant people had to do custom emotes instead of using socials. Nothing changed but a mild extra annoyance.

I think it'd be a bad idea for Lusternia to start getting restrictive on the ones like dance, kiss, and snuggle, because I think Lusternians already are pretty good at self-policing inappropriate uses. Once in a while a novice will come along and randomly snuggle a stranger who would never tolerate that, but they learn that lesson quickly. Of course, it's all a matter of perspective. Maybe someone whose character is far more stern might feel violated or humiliated by those emotes being misused regularly, and would be in favor of their elimination.

As for ones like pounce, shinkick, and bitchslap, all I'd do if I were Supreme Tyrant is change the wording a little to remove any assumption of the outcome of these actions. If I had unlimited coder resources I might find a way to flag those (and other aggressive/violent ones) so they were impossible to do to anyone you couldn't attack, but I doubt that'd be worth the coder time. Finally I'd encourage people to react to these appropriately rather than ignoring them.

All in all, though, I don't think there needs to be any big overhaul to emotes. I only saw one that was in dire need of revision. While I appreciate the thought being put into it, it might be making a mountain out of a molehill.

Forum belch double post, delete me please.