Thread: Botting - why?
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Old 04-15-2012, 02:13 PM   #12
Jazuela
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: New England
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Re: Botting - why?

(The rest of your post was part of a great discussion - so I'm addressing the specific concern above.)

Once, I played a character with the "burglar" skillset. She had some "newbie-capable" combat skill that most characters come with, and I think a craft so she could earn at least enough coins to keep herself fed. I never found out, with that PC, where a person could actually find a lockpick, so the burglar skills themselves were grossly under-used, to the point where once she was given a lockpick, subsequently snapped it on her third attempt at breaking open an apartment door.

She maneuvered her way into the good graces of a noble. He ended up hiring her, as an aide. She moved up the ladder of social acceptability, until she had garnered at least a modest amount of respect from other aides of other nobles, and was in charge of her noble's other employees. She ended up double-crossing her noble, because he wasn't paying her enough for what she perceived to be her due, and fed information about him to a clanned criminal gang in the seedier section of the city.

Ultimately, she was brutally assassinated by her criminal boss, because one of her friends - who also served the noble, happened to be double-dealing with ANOTHER clan..and THEY had an agreement with her noble.. so when THEY found out that she was selling her noble out, they hired the criminal boss to assassinate her.

The only skills I ever made use of with that character with any amount of success, was "listen" and "cook." She became well known, loved and loathed, influential, and fairly high ranking for a commoner. She had amassed a bunch of friends and enemies, arranged for at least 4 assassinations, one of whom was another noble. She began and was neck-deep involved in a myriad of plotlines, and died an absolutely gorgeous death.

There were plenty of people who, all they wanted to do was kill stuff and get loot and use their coded power to rise in the ranks of their combat-related clans. But without social skills, their coins weren't worth all that much except to NPC trader-bots in shops. They could've been the most bad-ass max-skilled warrior with uber bash and super-uber axe-slinging. But the only thing they were ever good for, was bashing, and slinging their axe. No one cared about them otherwise. They had -zero- influence over the game world, except with regards to who would get to hire him to kill their enemies. The people who did the hiring/firing/assassination-arranging had far more influence over people like Maxed-Out Max.

There were coded skills, but they were secondary to player intelligence, understanding of the world their characters lived in, and knowledge of strategy. No levels, no exp points. Skills went up through failure, but there was a time cap on that so if you failed twice in 15 minutes (for example - this wasn't the forumla, I never learned what it was) then there was no point in trying to gain a skill bump for the next hour. But if you logged out and came back an hour later, you'd STILL have to wait am hour. The timer didn't exist if your character wasn't logged in, and would begin wherever it left off when you logged out.
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