New Giftgiving Option

[Cherek]

Ogre:

We're talking about extreme behavior here. Like the Irk teams where he drags around two idle players a whole day without them ever being responsive.

Not your regular triggers that assist in a team while you surf the web and glance at the screen. Or running a herbing script or killing script while have your cMud window open at work.

But if you leave your computer for hours to be dragged around, or leave your scripts on while working and not looking at the screen for hours, then I think it hurts the game in the long run.

And thats when I think we, the players, should say no. As Chanele says, dont agree to drag them around, dont team up with those who lead on unattended scripts, and even kill them if you want.

[Laurel]

ain't it funny how it is players with grown characters being eager to perform the Judge Dredd role? Straag - I'm all with you on this one, dumb ogre!

[Booger]

Why do you keep making this a question about whether it's ok or not to bot? And whether it's ok or not to kill botters?
If Pharaxes had been killed by someone beating him to death the normal way, do you think there would have been any changes in the code? Would anyone have bothered to bring up the possibility of him having been restored?
Of course not!

The code change was not made to help botters. It was made to fix a bug. Whether it helps botters or not doesn't matter. Bugs get fixed. If you were helped by it for years, be happy for the help you got and move on to abuse new bugs.

So why did it get fixed now? Equally obvious. Apparently everyone seems to have known about it, except maybe some immortals. But even if you do know about a bug, it's easy to not bother about it if nobody complains on it. And for that to happen you either need a sick bastard like me, who enjoy reporting bugs, or you need someone to end up on the bad end of the equation. Considering how almost everyone is angry about the change, I guess not many complained about this, so of course nobody has bothered to fix it, if they even knew about it.

Again: It's a bug! It got fixed!
Keep complaining about Pharexes maybe getting a reimb if you like, but this bug fix does not mean the imms want people to bot. It's just an unfortunate coincidence that this makes life a little safer for botters, since one way of reaching them when in saferooms has been removed.


However, since so many people hate botters, how about coming up with some ideas to make it more fun to not bot, or more dangerous to bot? Here's one that would give everyone a possibility to make life nasty for people. It's not foolproof and would probably need tweaking and stuff, but see it as an example to brainstorm around. I'm sure you can come up with better things, and maybe some ideas will be interesting enough to actually be implemented?

Item devils:
Small, nasty creatures that feed on items. Close connections to platinum and road crossings. Anyone can summon them. To do so you have to stand in a 4-way crossing, carry at least 100 pc and chant "Item devil, I summon thee!" three times. This will "use up" 100 pc, which the devil will use to take form (its body in this world is made of platinum).
Once summoned you can "send devil on <name>". The devil will then teleport to this person's inventory and be a major annoyance:
* The player can no longer remove items from his inventory, nor can he quit.
* Once every 30 sec or so the devil will say different things like "Yum yum. Lots of nice items here to eat."
* After approx 30 minutes, he will eat the most expensive (normally droppable) item held by the player and grow a little. Then a new item will be eaten every approx 10 minutes.
* Once he has eaten at least 10 items, whenever the total value of items eaten exceeds 10000 cc, he will be big enough to go home, by devouring (killing) his host.
* To get rid of him, you have to look at him. Apart from seeing his description, it will also make him say: "The only way to banish me is to say 'go home' three times while standing on a crossing with exits only <EXITS>". If you go to a room with matching exits and do this, he will be banished, his body reverting into 90 pc. (to make ak players able to benefit from people trying to mess with them).
* If you have no idea where to find a room with the exits needed, you can always go to a 4-way crossing and summon a devil yourself. That will replace the devil you have. You can't send it on someone else, but with some luck the exits he requires will be easier to find. You lose 100 pc on this, but if you manage to banish this one, you still get 90 pc back.
<EXITS> is eg "north and south", "east and north", "west, east and south" etc. The order in which they are shown doesn't matter.

Not foolproof, but if you really put some work into it, I'm sure you can come up with something that will work well.

[Cherek]

Booger:
What we argue, or me atleast, is that I dont see it as a bug. To me its a choice of game design, should you be able to give someone items or not? The admin decided to change the game design so it is not possible. Fine, they can do that. And I can disagree if I liked the old design better.

A bug is when something does not work as it was supposed to. This was a design that has been in the game forever. Not a bug.

I completely agree that we should try to make the botters not bot. I have suggested a number of ideas for this. To make grinding more fun for instance.

What you are suggesting is making it more annoying to bot. I think its the wrong way to go. Again, it is about punishing those who bot. And again, players dont respond well to punishments. However rewards for NOT botting on the other hand would have a greater chance of success. If you would gain more XP in a non-bottable dungeon than by the usual botting, players would want to be active to get the reward. And since it would be designed not to be a repeteive process it might as well be more fun too. Fun and rewarding.

Anyway, I have suggested alot on this. Up to the wizards if they feel they are good ideas and would like to code it.

Also, more players would also help against botting, since there would be more people around to do something ELSE with, instead of botting.

Almost everything boils down to the "more players" solution imho.

[OgreToyBoy]

* Once he has eaten at least 10 items, whenever the total value of items eaten exceeds 10000 cc, he will be big enough to go home, by devouring (killing) his host..

I like your idea a bit, but if I got that devil on me when idling in let's say Ogre guild. He eats ONE of my items and then I'd be killed.
Ogrestuff very expensive, we are to stupid to understand the value of items so the smart ogre in guild trick us. He has the intelligence of
at least a greenhorne, dwarfing the rest of us bad in that department.

[Booger]

Cherek:
A bug that has been in the game forever is still a bug. Time doesn't change this.
Yes, you can still argue that it's a design feature, but I don't think the immortals will agree with you.
Yes, rewards for not botting might be a lot better than punishments for botting, but it's immensely harder. Can you actually make a non-bottable dungeon? I saw a try in another mud, where people got stuck, removed from the group, walked/slipped in random directions, teleported, blinded, petrified etc, rooms where magic couldn't be used, or any spell you cast would hit a random target (friend or foe) etc. Took several months for people to fix decent bots, and years to get them perfected, but in the end we still got the dungeon fully bottable.
I don't know what suggestions you have given the immortals. Perhaps you've given them things they could actually work with? But usually when I read suggestions to make ak-play more fun, there's just the wishful thinking and no actual suggestions.

OgreToyBoy:
Sorry for not being more specific. I just knew someone would misunderstand that part.
"Once he has eaten at least 10 items"... so the check is not made until 10 items has been eaten, no matter what the value of the first items are.
And to grind it in: The demon has to eat at least 10 items before he can kill you. And once he has eaten 10 items, he will still not kill you until the total value of eaten items exceeds 10k cc.
And, as I said, this suggestion was not put too much thought into - it would need more thinking through before it could work.

[Cherek]

Not unbottable Booger. But instead I would like to see grinding being more fun that it is. If it is more fun to begin with, you'd see fewer people using bots. And most likely more people enjoying the game too.

If I play a game of Starcraft 2 online, I play it because its fun to play it. If there was a way to turn on a bot and watch it play for me, I would still not do it. Why? Because the fun part is to actually play yourself.

Thats what I want. Not some super-clever way to make it hard for people to bot. The thing you describe from the other mud sounds similar to your own suggestion but more advanced, a way to punish people who dont pay attention.

Some of my suggestions have been something like:

- Assault / Defend a Fort/Castle/City/Whatever

Example: You and your friends walk up to a castle, when you arrive a soldier tells you they badly need help to hold the castle against an army that is attacking it. Reinforcements will arrive in 1 hour, but you will need to hold it for that long.

So you and your friends agree to do this. The attack starts. Itts random every time where the enemies strike, maybe there are several levels to defend, and they can attack through the main gate, or come over the walls, or other places. You gotta adapt to this, maybe split your team to hold several points at at same time, etc. The attacks intensifies and random times, giving you a hard time, but also weakens at random times, giving you a chance to rest, usually it becomes more intense the closer to the end you get.

If you manage to hold out the whole hour, you and your team is rewarded with a nice general XP-boost. If you dont, you still get XP for your kills, but no extra reward.

The XP rewards for this hour spent should if all goes well be more than you would get for 1 hour of normal killing.

You could also decide to join the assulting force instead, and then you need to take the castle before the reinforcements arrive. One army is "evil", one is "good". So you can pick the side that suits you and depending on which army that hold the castle you will either be defending or assulting.

Either this would be in the form of "instances" so if another team arrives when an assult is in progress, they will have a copy of the same castle to defend. So there is always a castle to defend. Or it could be one place. Where anyone can join the attack or defence, adding a PVP element as well.

That sounds like fun to me. Something else to grow by except the usual grind.

Another suggestion would be to add HUGE bosses to the game. That require a team to slay, and also is very rewarding XP wise. Basically it could work like repeating team quests with general XP.

Example:

A village is terrorized by an army lead by a great demon. You, and your friends, agree to help the village. Now you need to slay the demon. If you succeed and bring his head to the village council everyone who helped gets a substantial general XP reward. Slaying the demon will require preparation and the gathering of a team. Perhaps the local village witch can conjure up some potion that will make the demon weaker, but she requires some (random) items for it. So each of the teammembers needs to set off gathering what she needs for the potion, then meet up for the actual slaying.

The next time you do it, the demon will be different in some random way, perhaps he throws lightning this time, fire the next, etc, so you would need to adjust your counter. Perhaps he stuns one time, and breaks weapons the other. (The village council will tell you this before you begin of course). Also the items needed for the potion will also be different. So it will be a new challenge every time.

Perhaps it would take an hour or two in average to complete, and give a total XP of more than the average XP people usually get from the normal grind.

Botable? Well perhaps. A more fun way of getting progress? I think so. I rather join this instead of watching my script kill the same old trolls over and over again.

It would also have a time limit, which I think casual players would enjoy. You know it will take about an hour or maximum two to do this, and can set off time to do it. Or decide a day and time with your friends. "Hey, lets kill the demon tomorrow at 19.".

[Booger]

Cherek:
The dungeon I described were loved by active players and hated by botters... until the botters got working bot-scripts, then they became indifferent to it

Your suggestions sound very interesting and fun (let's just hope some immortal with coding skill & time thinks so too). Sounds more like quests, but making them non-quests would be better in the long run. Or repeatable quests that only gives qp first time you solve it. Bottable, sure (at least for the followers), but ak players would probably enjoy it a lot more than standard-grind. The only flaw as I see it is the great workload needed to create them.

You won't get rid of any serious botter this way, but you will increase the fun for ak players, and prevent some of those half-interested people from turning towards the TV.
I don't know if you understand the severity of real botters? Not trying to be condescending here - their minds baffle me too. I've had several friends who bot all the way to highbie, not even able to walk from church to shop. And once there, they either keep botting to grow some more, or lose interest and create a new character and start all over again. If they could turn on a bot on Starcraft, they'd do it and do something else until the computer beeps and tells them they've won. Then they'd cheer and be happy about it and start a new game with a new bot. Seriously!
You will never get them by rewards. But perhaps they can be ignored.

Don't know how life is in the upper divisions. Huge bosses needing several people would definitely be fun, if it's possible to balance them so that they can be done with perhaps 10 rather high players, and still not killable with 2-3 huge players. Then they could be fun targets to aim for. Don't make them xp-interesting, just give them some neat item to make them interesting - boots of wanderlust that makes you able to walk without losing mv-points, darkvision goggles, wand of wonder (random spell each time you use it), immhood (if you die you instead get half health and the hood is destroyed), etc.
Might actually be nice with mobs that you can't kill until playerbase increases (needing 20-30 highbies), to have something to work for. In another mud (here I go again), one mob wasn't killed for several years. Big groups tried now and then and got closer and closer until one day they were powerful and numerous enough to make it (70 highbies). He really added a lot to the fun, until players got so powerful you could kill him with just 20 or so people.

Sorry. Getting off track...
* Glad that the give-bug has been fixed ;-P
* You won't get rid of botting without things that punish botters, but you can reduce it by making it more fun for ak people.
* Good suggestions. Probably won't be implemented this decade, due to the work needed, but let's keep hoping.
* Keep beating these dead horses. Even if just for the fun of it!

[gorboth]

The last few posts have been fantastic - great work guys!

I actually do really like a lot of the ideas here. Some sound like the sort of thing it isn't too hard to code at all.

G.

[Booger]

Some sound like the sort of thing it isn't too hard to code at all.

Prove it!