[shadowfyr]

Some might insist this is irrelevant, but in CCS (Community Combat System) in Second Life, we are looking at a complete redo, where you have to be actively practicing skills to actually learn them. A similar sort of thing works for Eve Online, where you have to line up a skill or group of them, if you have room in the queue, in order to learn the skill in question. The former one currently just ticks, for as long as you are on, and has a time out, and a now a captcha test, to prevent disabling. You have to turn off the meter to stop it, then, as soon as you click it on again, you usually get hit by the captcha (which I find slightly annoying). This is going to change, once they make it so you have to actively train a skill, and lose levels with it.

While this isn't exactly "mud" tech, it solves the main issue. You don't have to beat anything up to gain XP, and in fact, except special quests (in CCS), like the guy that kills a specific NPC, or the last one standing in a competition, etc., you *can't* gain XP from killing anything. It makes for a rather different way of managing things. Though, the Eve system is, imho, slightly fairer to people that can't be on 8 hours a day, since it constantly ticks, you just have to make sure you have something for it to tick towards.

And, yeah, the whole reason why CCS is going to go levelless and change how its skill system works, and why the timout and captcha was added for now, is **precisely** because, even in a graphical client, someone can manage to find a way to cheat it. In this case "camping" - Being online with the character, with the meter running, while talking about things other than the RP environment, or just not even at the keyboard at all.

Mind, it was funner, sometimes, when a high level "fixed" the problem by pounding the buggers doing it into the ground. The GMs though.. didn't feel this was a good way to handle it. lol