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Old 07-23-2008, 01:14 PM   #21
shasarak
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Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: Emily's Shop
Posts: 60
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Re: Triggers, scripts, and bots

And?

Why would you care about being able to "keep up" with someone who is, to all intents and purposes, playing a completely different game from the one that you are playing? If you know that you are playing the game "properly" and he isn't, isn't that enough for you to take pride in your own accomplishments and ignore his? Like I said: shake your head, smile, and say "kid, the only person you're fooling is yourself". Are you really so insecure that, even when you know someone else is following an easier, shorter path than you are, you still can't stand for him to progress faster than you do?

As I also said before, on a well-designed, enjoyable MUD the only person being cheated is him, not you. If it takes (say) roughly 10 hours to get from level 17 to level 18, and you've accomplished that by actually playing the game for 10 hours, while he has accomplished it by playing for 3 hours and 'botting for the other 7, what that he means is that he has missed out on 7 hours of highly enjoyable gameplay that you have had the chance to experience. You should be happy that you've had an opportunity for 7 extra hours of enjoyable gameplay that he has stupidly decided to pass up, and you should feel nothing but sympathy for the 'botter because he is unable (or unwilling) to enjoy the game to the extent that you can.

The only situation in which it makes sense to resent the 'botter is if playing the game isn't actually enjoyable. If the 10 hours of gameplay is pure, tedious, mindless, insufferable grind and you hate every single second of it, and the only reason you do it at all is because once you get to level 18 you will gain access to some features of the game that are actually fun to play, then (and only then) it might make sense to get annoyed about players who "aren't putting in the work". But if you get that little pleasure out of playing the MUD then it clearly has vastly more serious problems than 'botting to worry about.

Once again: MUDs Are Not Work(tm). MUDs are supposed to be fun. Playing the MUD should be an end in itself, not a means to an end. If playing the MUD is not enjoyable, that is the problem. If the admin, instead of actually making the game enjoyable to play, just blames those people who recognise that it isn't enjoyable and want to skip to the parts that are actually fun, he is simply in denial about his own short-comings.

For that matter, why would you care about "keeping up" with other players at all? Suppose you've been playing the game for a month, and someone else has been playing it for two years. Is it a requirement, as far as you're concerned, that he cannot be further advanced in the game than you are? If not, then the fact that another player has advanced further along the path of progression than you have clearly doesn't matter to you, which means that the methods used to achieve that progression cannot matter either.

There may well be specific, practical cases where a player who has progressed further than you have can cause you annoyance, and it may well be worth addressing those specific cases to prevent them from happening. For example, it might (perhaps) be worth having a rule that says that a player cannot attack another player who is 5 or more levels below him. But, again, this not a problem caused by 'botting. It has nothing to do with 'botting! The problem there is "how do we handle interaction between players of different levels?" The question of how any given player achieved his level, or how long it took him to get there, isn't relevant.
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