You tell Traveler (monster) 'hi' You tell Traveler (monster) 'hi' Can not tell: Traveler (no such player exists) You tell Travler (offline) 'hi'

Ignoring for the moment the bug of not being able to use & with a capitalized
name, this behavior of tell seems backwards. Shouldn't tell always assume that
you are trying to talk to a player UNLESS you escape the name? necessary to tell to mobs.

Can we get these behaviors switched so they make more sense?

I disagree.

The way that tell currently works is that it first tries to tell to a mob. If
no mob exists, then it tries to tell to a player. If no player exists, then it
gives an error message that no player exists.

Because the vast majority of tells go from player to player, it should be
presumed that tells are intended to go from player to player. Working from
this assumption, I would expect that player tells would first go to a player.
I would also expect that I would need to modify my command in some way in
order to tell to a mob, e.g.: 'mtell traveler hi' or 'tell &traveler hi'. To a
lesser degree, I might expect 'tell ramona hi' also to work if no player named
Ramona exists, and I wouldn't be surprised if 'tell traveler 2 hi' managed to
tell to the first mob named traveler (though I also would not be surprised if
it simply resulted in You tell Traveler (offline) '2 hi').

I can think of a handful of mobs which respond to tells: special mobs in
cities and guild masters primarily, perhaps a few quest mobs. Most of these
names are already locked out from player usage, and presume that most of the
rest will get locked out if anyone ever tries to use them. This means that the
most likely time for name conflicts to occur is when a minor mob shares a name
with a player. Further, I presume that when mobs get imbued with the ability
to respond to tell messages that some care is taken to prevent the new mob
from using an existing player name and probably adding the name into the
banned list. Whereas, no such care is taken with regular mobs (as illustrated
by my example).

In summary, mob names preempt player names in tells. Tells are mostly intended
to be sent to players. A few mobs do respond to tells. Players are not allowed
to create new characters which use names of the mobs which respond to tells.
Therefore, under the current policies and systems, the only times when the mob
namespace should overlap the player namespace is when the mob is too minor to
respond to tells. Therefore, the player namespace should take precedence over
the mob namespace.

Beliar