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Old 07-24-2008, 12:17 PM   #32
shasarak
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Join Date: Sep 2007
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Re: Triggers, scripts, and bots

Well, okay, that's true; indeed, I said something very similar myself a few posts back, by way of arguing that one should sympathise with the plight of 'botters rather than condemning them for what they do.

However, there are still a lot of assumptions here.

Are players really so pathetically, pathologically driven to "keep up" with other players that they are willing to severely compromise their own gaming pleasure to do it? Is that a common MUD player trait?

And much more importantly, even if a player does have sufficiently deep-seated emotional problems that he cannot bear to have another player on the MUD be more advanced than he is, why single out 'botting as a trigger for that behaviour? A person like that would be equally driven to 'bot in order to catch up with players who have been playing the MUD longer than he has; to catch up with players who play the game for more hours a day than he does; to catch up with players who are simply better at the game than he is. You cannot reasonably argue that any of those other factors (e.g. "being better than I am" or "having played the MUD for longer than I have") should be against the rules, so why single out 'botting for special treatment? Other players not 'botting would remove only one quite minor "competitive" pressure.

Unless you're suggesting that 'botting should be banned so that this psychologically-damaged, compulsively-competitive player can be "saved" from 'botting himself on the grounds that he'll be too scared to break the rules and do it. But I don't think that makes much sense either: if he's that driven, he'll 'bot anyway, regardless of the rules; and even if you did manage to prevent it, all you'd be doing would be taking away the one thing that might allow him to achieve the dominance he wants and make him less miserable. I think it's hard to argue that he should be prevented from 'botting "for his own good".

The problem is that if the more experienced player is more experienced because he plays more hours a day than you do (or simply because he's better at the game than you are) the gap will simply get wider and wider. So our pathologically competitive player will get more and more miserable as time goes on. Players who are not pathologically competitive won't care - they'll be too busy enjoying the game.
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