That has usually been called a 'Mirror Match' and is interesting as a one time deal but that is about all.

The problem is that it is usually best to fight things you have a decient chance of defeating. Against youself you have only the human vs AI advantage which should be enough but not always.

Usually this sort of thing is part of a special quest, and most people do not desire a rematch once they have done it once.

A.T
(-)

I imagine the best way to handle the problem with players unequipping, and re-equipping would be for the ai to find the best available weapon and armor and use it.

The only real problem is that unless you develop a decent ai the player is going to be able to defeat their reflection to easily, simply b/c they know their own weakness and the weakness of the mob engine.

I imagine the best way to handle the problem with players unequipping, and re-equipping would be for the ai to find the best available weapon and armor and use it.

The only real problem is that unless you develop a decent ai the player is going to be able to defeat their reflection to easily, simply b/c they know their own weakness and the weakness of the mob engine.

I would imagine that, since this is the Advanced MUD Concepts forum, that anyone who actually implements such a feature will have a decent enough AI system to defeat simple PC work around tricks.

I would suggest that in creating the duplicate, the mirror automatically wears the best equipment the player has in inventory (to include containers).  What you decide is "best" is dependent on your game mechanics.  Some places value armor class over hitroll/damroll, other places do the opposite.  I also suggest that your mirror wield the weapon that has a) the best dice, or b) a decent race vulnerability exploiting damage type (i.e. if the player is a fire giant, and vulnerable to cold, and he has a cold damage weapon on him, the mirror uses that cold damage weapon).

If your players decide to start pulling other tricks, such as dropping their stuff, have your mirror immediately get everything on the ground upon creation.  They give their eq to a friend?  No problem, have your mirror create with the best equipment pulled from everybody on-line at the time.  Or, you could implement an "owner" flag for objects, and have ownership of objects cost something to change.

In the RP world, it may be easier to control your players without having to "hard code" these kinds of things.  I live in a PK world, so I don't have as much wiggle room.

Back to the original point, though.  It's really not that hard to develop a half decent AI system for anyone that's serious about having one.  Time consuming, perhaps, but hard...definitely not.

Why not have something that mirrors everything the person does? So if someone enters the room then that person's double enters the room. But who'd win the fight? Well most combat systems have some randomness, it's all a luck of the draw. Or if someone can somehow outsmart the system.

Alternatively, be mean and have mirror images to created on everyone entering a room. Friend is lugging around your EQ? Give him one of his own mirror images to fight as wewll then, that should keep him busy, especially considering his mirror image has the best stuff of both his original character as well as his friend. Add some nice no-recall and no-flee flags to this lovely situation and you'll soon run out of friends crazy enough to help you out...