[Rathik]

Most mudders use mud clients like zmud, mushclient, tinyfugue, etc., and many of them take advantage of the clients' features to create aliases, triggers, and scripts to assist them in gameplay. Most of the time it isn't a problem-- an alias to cast an ice spell, or trigger to alert the player of an event, for example. However, some players go above and beyond, creating complicated scripts in order to automate parts of combat, gain experience automatically, etc., in order to create an unfair advantage My questions are this: how concerned are you about scripting or "bots," and what are some steps (if any) you've taken to discourage botting and/or catch players?

[Mabus]

I find that I am with many others when I say I can aceppt triggers and scripting but not accept afk triggers and scripting. I do not fault someone for using triggers and scripts in normal MOB hunting (or other forms of XP gain) if they are alert, at their keyboard and responsive to the game environment.

The main thing I currently do is message a player that has been reported (or is suspected) of being afk while gaining experience and ask them a game question. Usually something to do with an idea, forum post, bug etc. that they themselves have brought up.

If I am in a strange mood I may create an aggressive MOB of an appropriate level to the character (and appropriate to an area) and transfer it close to the character. Assigning combat behaviors that force choices to be made beyond what an observed script is capable of is not that hard with the correct tools.

I understand that even if a MUD is role-play encouraged/required a player's concept of a character usually has them doing more then hunting rats or slaying viscious squirrels. Most combat systems have a great amount of repetition and it is up to a game designer to make experience-gaining tasks neither overly repetitive nor boring while allowing a player to build their character toward their envisioned goals.

With the power of scripting it would be very hard to make a game that both provided proper event messaging and randomized that messaging to the extent that it could not be scripted.

One method to cut down on triggers and scripting could be to force usage of a game-specific client. This would likely lose players, and within a short bit of time some enterprising player would hack the client and have a "triggers and scripts mod".

I guess it just comes down to presenting the rules on this type of player action in a manner that noone can say they did not know, trusting that most players will follow the rules, then finding those that do not and consistantly applying whatever penalty you wish.

[cratylus]

I'm a fan of obligatory questing.

The mud I used to play on had many quests with varying points
depending on difficulty. If you solved a simple quest, you got
a few quest points. Solve a major one, and you get much qp.

The "obligatory" part was that you ccould not advance levels
without sufficient quest points. Your abilities were limited by
your level, and your level was limited by the amount of
at-keyboard, actual playing you did. Sure, people would cheat and
give away quest info, but scripting a quest would be
a monstrous task so difficult you might as well just do it
the old fashioned way and *earn* the qp.

If you want to stop a behavior, take away the reward. If a
country is *seriously* against illegal immigration, then they
should make hiring an illegal immigrant a felony. This makes
it unprofitable for everyone involved in the activity. If you
want to stop botters, make it unprofitable to bot. Make
advancement dependent on activities that require human
intelligence.

My opinion is that bots aren't bad. If people want to bot,
and that's how they have fun, who am I to tell them they're
wrong? To me it's like telling someone how to drive the
car you built. Unless it's causing harm to other people, it's
not really my business. So long as they aren't increasing their
PK ability, or lagging my mud, or depriving others of
fun, I don't care much.

-Crat
http://dead-souls.net

[shadowfyr]

Where I play, the rule is, "You must be at your keyboard for "anything" to happen "period". The only exception being some triggers to help keep members of your party informed of spell failures, etc, and maybe some communication based things, which don't directly effect the game itself. But it it makes you "do" anything to the game world, not just the client end, you better not try it. Getting suspected means teleportation to a jail for questioning. Having the staff conclude that you are unresponsive or something is suspicious about how you are doing things, can mean everything from suspension of the skill you botted, to out right nuking and a ban on your personal IP (when possible).

Its taken quite seriously, maybe too seriously at times. The honest players can work within the rules. If they are not honest... do you really want them anyway? The prior staff used to let more stuff slide, they eventually got coders telling secrets to players, people hacking acounts and a team of super players that knew every bug in the game and how to take advantage of all of them. One very scary day dozens of people started dropping like flies and disappearing of the player list. Not the sort of thing you want to have to do because the rule benders keep bending things until something is outright broken.

Now, we only get the occational fool that doesn't "get" that they can't use looting triggers or ressurrection triggers and is, most of the time, just told to stop. A few still don't get it though, and at least one discovered that his ressurection spell stopped working.

It really depends on how serious you feel it is. Frankly, I wouldn't mind being about to keep connected and gain 25M exp in a day, without doing anything myself, it would get me my next divine power faster. lol However, I spent nearly three years to get where I am, and its not fair if someone else came along, botted for a month, and was suddenly my equal in exp and skill, while not actually having the slightest clue how to "play" the game.