With clients like Zmud, it's very easy for players running scripts to gain exp/level in a mud. Obviously as an admin I do not welcome this. I want REAL people playing my mud.

I wonder what you think of this problem, and if there is any way to discourage players running scripts.

Several different methods have been discussed over the years. A quick list of those I remember:

- Make it so that killing is not the only way to gain exp. It's a lot harder to script RP.
- Don't give as much Xp to people who do the same all the time. In other words - Less exp, if you kill many of the same mob/do other stuff repeatedly. After all, the repetitiveness(long word, phew:P) is what makes it possible to script.
- Make the output from the mud more diverse. Having to alter scripts for 10-50 different trigger texts makes running scripts a more tedious process. Also, this will make scripts run slower (they hae to check the text against a lot of patterns).
- state in your rules that botting is not allowed, and punish those doing it.

This isn't in any way a full list, but it should give you some ideas.

A game that is easily scriptable often betrays a mechanical game design where you have players repeating the same general formula over and over again with predictable results. As long as your mechanics are this poorly designed, you're going to have botters take advantage of it. You'll just end up in an arms race with botters, and you'll probably lose one way or another: The time you spend mucking around putting ugly patches on your game to 'break' scripts is not time you spend putting in real content that could make the game more fun.

Look at games that can't be scripted easily: Chess, Go, and a multitude of other strategic games. One of the most important aspects of these games that defy computation is the ability to recognize a pattern in advance and counter it. Even adding one 'level' of counters is enough to deter most scripters by making the task of scripting non-trivial. The trick is to design your game so that the counters and counter-counters can be applied effectively, which is no small task for the majority of muds out there.

Yeh, I am talking about botting with complicated scripts.

In our mud, one major way to gain/exp is to get "quests" from certain NPCs. The quests either ask you to find something, deliver something or go kill someone. We have about 1000+ entries in the quest list. It amazes me that some diligent player can write scripts to run all 1000+ quests. Their bots use different tactics to kill different NPCs, and have very good self-recovery scripts to deal with system or net lag. The player who did this enjoys more from scripting than from playing. Normally it should have been a problem ... until such scripts are put in website for everyone to download and we begin to see bots running 24/7. This totally defeats the purpose of the mud since a normal player can not compete with such bots.

I do not want to simply punish the one who wrote the script. Such player is usually the one who loves the mud and has spent much time on it. But it's very hard to counter such scripts. After all, the mud relies on text input/output which can be triggered by contents.

A good example is a riddle that we implemented. It askes players to achieve the number "24" with four random numbers from 0-9, using +, -, x, / and parenthesis. One week
later a script was out. Oh, my.