[Molly]

The same can be said about botting, of course. There will always be some players who try to take shortcuts. If you don't want to spend all your on-line time playing Mud Police and chasing botters and multiplayers with a torch-lamp, you have to prevent it through careful design. Whether it is done by hard code or scripts, you have to set up the feature, so that it isn't possible to carry out with repetitive commands, or by just waiting out an auto-run script.

And that doesn't just apply to farming in the agricultural sense, but also to the common Mud meaning of the word 'farming' - where a player squats in a certain place with a script to kill the same mob for the loot each time it respawns, often while watching TV in real life.

It's all in the design. Because there are repetitive elements in all competitive mudding. And even the most well written feature or quest is only really interesting the first time you do it. If you want it to be repeatable, you have to spring a nasty surprise on the player every now and then. Or a fantastic opportunity, that they will miss, unless they pay attention.