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Old 08-17-2003, 12:41 PM   #4
Yui Unifex
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Question

A game that is easily scriptable often betrays a mechanical game design where you have players repeating the same general formula over and over again with predictable results. As long as your mechanics are this poorly designed, you're going to have botters take advantage of it. You'll just end up in an arms race with botters, and you'll probably lose one way or another: The time you spend mucking around putting ugly patches on your game to 'break' scripts is not time you spend putting in real content that could make the game more fun.

Look at games that can't be scripted easily: Chess, Go, and a multitude of other strategic games. One of the most important aspects of these games that defy computation is the ability to recognize a pattern in advance and counter it. Even adding one 'level' of counters is enough to deter most scripters by making the task of scripting non-trivial. The trick is to design your game so that the counters and counter-counters can be applied effectively, which is no small task for the majority of muds out there.
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