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Old 07-29-2008, 05:47 AM   #49
shasarak
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: Emily's Shop
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Re: Triggers, scripts, and bots

That argument would hold water if 'botting were the only mechanism by which one player could gain a competitive advantage over another, but that is patently not the case. One player can have a competitive advantage over another if he has played the MUD for longer, or if he plays for more hours per day. If players are so pathologically competitive that they feel driven to 'bot in order to compete with players who would otherwise have an advantage over them then a player who plays more hours per day than they do will drive them to 'bot just as powerfully as a player who 'bots.

You can't establish a "level playing field", so why bother to try? (And yes, that is my attitude to doping in sport as well: see previous discussion of professional bodybuilding).

And, frankly, these sentiments are a bit rich coming from a person who runs a pay-for-perks MUD where players gain a massive competitive advantage over other players simply by paying money to the MUD admins. Are you trying to claim that doesn't create a pressure to 'bot among players who can't afford to pay as much as some of their wealthier colleagues? How is that a level playing field?

Edit: that last paragraph sounded a little more aggressive than I meant it to. Of course there's nothing intrinsically wrong with pay-for-perks MUDs, and if people want to play them, that's absolutely fine, more power to them; but the entire concept of pay-for-perks is founded on the idea that a "level playing field" is not merely impossible to achieve but actively undesirable: the purpose of a pay-for-perks model's existence is to make it impossible for players to compete on an equal footing by means of MUD-gameplay alone. So I am perplexed that a pay-for-perks MUD admin can (with no apparent sense of irony) argue against something else ('botting) on the grounds that it supposedly prevents players from competing on an equal footing.

Last edited by shasarak : 07-29-2008 at 08:32 AM.
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