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cloudymind · 08-17-2003, 02:08 PM

Yeh, I am talking about botting with complicated scripts.

In our mud, one major way to gain/exp is to get "quests" from certain NPCs. The quests either ask you to find something, deliver something or go kill someone. We have about 1000+ entries in the quest list. It amazes me that some diligent player can write scripts to run all 1000+ quests. Their bots use different tactics to kill different NPCs, and have very good self-recovery scripts to deal with system or net lag. The player who did this enjoys more from scripting than from playing. Normally it should have been a problem ... until such scripts are put in website for everyone to download and we begin to see bots running 24/7. This totally defeats the purpose of the mud since a normal player can not compete with such bots.

I do not want to simply punish the one who wrote the script. Such player is usually the one who loves the mud and has spent much time on it. But it's very hard to counter such scripts. After all, the mud relies on text input/output which can be triggered by contents.

A good example is a riddle that we implemented. It askes players to achieve the number "24" with four random numbers from 0-9, using +, -, x, / and parenthesis. One week
later a script was out. Oh, my.

08-17-2003, 02:08 PM	#5
cloudymind New Member Join Date: Aug 2003 Posts: 2	Yeh, I am talking about botting with complicated scripts. In our mud, one major way to gain/exp is to get "quests" from certain NPCs. The quests either ask you to find something, deliver something or go kill someone. We have about 1000+ entries in the quest list. It amazes me that some diligent player can write scripts to run all 1000+ quests. Their bots use different tactics to kill different NPCs, and have very good self-recovery scripts to deal with system or net lag. The player who did this enjoys more from scripting than from playing. Normally it should have been a problem ... until such scripts are put in website for everyone to download and we begin to see bots running 24/7. This totally defeats the purpose of the mud since a normal player can not compete with such bots. I do not want to simply punish the one who wrote the script. Such player is usually the one who loves the mud and has spent much time on it. But it's very hard to counter such scripts. After all, the mud relies on text input/output which can be triggered by contents. A good example is a riddle that we implemented. It askes players to achieve the number "24" with four random numbers from 0-9, using +, -, x, / and parenthesis. One week later a script was out. Oh, my.