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Old 07-22-2008, 10:08 AM   #12
scandum
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2004
Posts: 315
scandum will become famous soon enough
Re: Triggers, scripts, and bots

I once experimented with removing all rules on my MUD, and it wasn't a success, pretty much destroyed the player base in fact.

The bad news is that you can't stop the really good scripters, or proof that they're scripting if they stay and watch the screen. Keep in mind that a good script is generally four times more efficient than a player because the player picks his nose, stares quazy puzzled at the who list for a minute, checks his email and gets distracted, etc, etc. So even non afk script leveling causes a huge imbalance in the game, and the more complex the game becomes, the less people script due to added complexity, and the bigger the gains of the people who actually script. There is however a cut off point where the combat is so complex that people will start buying or being given scripts and the scripting becomes an extention of the game. From what I gathered Achaea is a good example of this trend where everyone scripts. So once you add enough complexity, the game will come full circle, and end up back at Diku's automated combat - though it will obviously look cooler and give people the idea that some scripts are better than others - which could however be obtained by letting people train a limitted amount of modifiers that unclearly impact combat.

The good news is that even though you can't really proof if someone is scripting, you can simply ban someone who plays too efficiently, or even better, use someone like that to make the game harder to script. Stopping speedwalks is one of the methods to add unwanted complexity to a script while not affecting the non scripting players.
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