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Old 08-10-2008, 12:56 PM   #78
Zhiroc
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Join Date: Jan 2006
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Re: Triggers, scripts, and bots

Personally, I've always felt that botting was the inevitable outcome of any game where the gameplay was so simplistic, the rewards so necessary, and the experience so boring that a person decides they'd rather not be bothered to play through that part. That also presumes that there is some sort of "endgame" that makes it desirable to continue (otherwise, why play?).

But whether or not you agree with that, the other issue that's been mentioned here and there in this thread, but hasn't seemed to evoke much discussion, is the use of intelligent assistive scripting. By this, I mean systems that are meant not to bot, but to micromanage a combat. When this is applied to PvP combat, the question becomes: just how much more efficient/powerful can a person be if they let a script shave time off of any "dead time" (e.g. between a cool-off time going off and their next action), or react to specific injuries/effects?

In any competition, the question in my mind is: what is the competition about? Intelligence? Dexterity? Who has the most time (i.e. grinding)? Who has the most money (i.e. pay for perk)? A combat system where a person can become twice as good adds in: who has the best client/who is the better programmer?

None of these is essentially "wrong", but a game that wishes it to not be about the client/script could be upset about such things. It would be like bringing a chess computer to a match.

I'm not sure what can be done about it, if anything. I've heard of games obscuring letters to make it harder to trigger off of, but I think that's not very successful, and at some point, even the humans can't react.
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