Evil guilds, more or less folded?

[Cherek]

Targun: I never said you were _wrong_ in your comments. I questioned the way present your thoughts, and the tone in your notes. Basically you reviewed Genesis, and deemed it one of the worst games ever. I dont think that is very helpful.

In your last notes you at least bring up some examples on what you think is a better way of doing it. Allthough I think some more detail would be in place. Exactly how should combat, and pvp be changed then? I've basically never played another mud... I decided to try Batmud recently, just to see why they have so many players, but I thought it completely sucked...

About botting and triggers... well... Genesis has kinda always been designed in that way. Just forbidding triggers and scripts I think would do way more damage than good. You'd need to redesign a whole lot of things then. Stuff like herbing and smithing are basically made to be scripted because it would be utterly boring otherwise. Combat too, not as much, but at least partly.

I'd love to see both pvp and pve be more interactive and require more thought and socializing to be successful. But like you say, someone has to DO it. And want to do it. Genesis have changed too, it really has, some changes have been good, some have not been. I doubt your polish mud only made good choices. But if they have 100+ players I do agree its worth taking a look at what they do right that we do wrong. Same with other successful MUDs. But I think its better that someone like you explain in detail instead of someone like me try to figure it out myself. I barely have time to play Genesis, and to understand a new mud and how it works is going to take alot of time. So how do they do combat and pvp that you think works better?

[Amberlee]

Well lets look at another game then shall we.
Take Vampire:The Masquerade - Bloodlines.
Quite possible the worst game ever if you look at gamedriver and bugs.
But no other game has really captured a feeling of a story and has such a devoted fanbase as that game.

What i said about genesis is that the GAMEDESIGN is horrible.
And the community is awesome.(Well obvious exceptions are the bots that dont really play)
So no i didnt say it was the worst game ever.. What i said is that its a deeply flawed game..
And unless those in charge wakes up and smells the maple nut crunch, its sadly gonna decay.

Do you really thnk i would have stayed 15+ years in a game that really sucks?

[Kas]

A game needs to constantly evolve, therefore constant analysis of what works, can be done better, investigating alternative routes that promotes less painful methods related to gameplay/growth/death/pvp etc is, atleast today, very important.

Let's try to avoid being the dinosaur, shall we? Genesis has alot of untapped potential yet, even for a textbased game.

[Makfly]

About botting and triggers... well... Genesis has kinda always been designed in that way. Just forbidding triggers and scripts I think would do way more damage than good.

Not that I'm looking for a multiple page, in-depth review...But could you quickly draw up what damages it would do to forbid triggers & scripts?

Personally I can't see it doing any damage, except maybe Uther would come to the boards complaining that the rules interfere with his fun. But any big negative impact on the game...I can't see that?
Now actually policing the game and enforcing the rules, that's a different matter, but it is also about which signals you want to send, I think, not just about what you can control and not control.

[Cherek]

About botting and triggers... well... Genesis has kinda always been designed in that way. Just forbidding triggers and scripts I think would do way more damage than good.

Not that I'm looking for a multiple page, in-depth review...But could you quickly draw up what damages it would do to forbid triggers & scripts?

Personally I can't see it doing any damage, except maybe Uther would come to the boards complaining that the rules interfere with his fun. But any big negative impact on the game...I can't see that?
Now actually policing the game and enforcing the rules, that's a different matter, but it is also about which signals you want to send, I think, not just about what you can control and not control.

Ill answer with a question, would the game be better if we forbid scripting and triggers? Is it more FUN to type "kattack" once every 20sec than letting the client do it? Is it more FUN to type "search here for herbs" a gazillion times, instead of letting the client do it? Or do you really want to manually forge thousands of items as a smith? No I dont think forbidding these things will do anything good it all. It will make the game less enjoyable. If anything I think stuff like herbing and smithing should be automated within the game, so you dont have to know programming to play the game successfully. Well, actually making it more fun would be best fo course. But making it automated would at least make it even...

But I can only speak for myself, and I think the game would be more annoying if we had to play telnet style again. No triggers, no scripts to help with herbing/smithing. I assume the idea is that people should have to pay more attention to what they are doing. I do understand the thought behind it, however I dont think the key is forcing people to do things that arent fun. I'd rather see the best combat XP in the game comes from places/bosses where you need to be active, and where its fun being active. Make a fun dungeon instead of copy-pasting more of the same type of mindless drones to be killed. Things like that just invite to botting. If its fun and rewarding people will like it and be active.

If searching for herbs required you to be active to gain a good result, people would be active. Now the key for success in most things is to script. You gain more combat XP, more herbs, better smithing items, if you know how to script. Thats what I meant with a game designed to be botted/scripted. Make the game fun to be active in, and we have a winner.

At Genesis peak years, I personally enjoyed the PVP aspect the most. PVP was the big FUN part imho, and you cant script PVP, and its probably not very fun if you could... the fun part in PVP is the competition and the "rush" of trying to escape/kill someone. I think the lack of PVP is to "blame" for alot of our problems. No danger makes it easy to bot. No danger makes it easy to stay inactive in a team and run on triggers while doing something else. No conflicts also leads to no politics and less stuff happening in general which also leads to more botting/scripting since the game is boring.

So in short, I agree there should be less scripting and triggers etc. I just dont think simply forbidding it will do the trick, instead the game should be changed to reward activity, and be coded for active players, not bots. Bringing back PVP is one key I think. Making XPing reward activity rather than inactivity another.

Of course, I know there's lots of people who dont like PVP at all and enjoy minding their own business. So thats just what I would like to see. But as I usually say in most topics, I think one of the bigger flaws we have is that Genesis tries to be everything, and ends up a little off the target in all areas instead.

[Laurel]

you can (imagine that!) make specials AUTOMATIC! haha! and you can even go further and ... make them RANDOM recharge/execute timed!

you can (as opposed to "it's a problem") drastically decrease the forging-attempts required to forge a good quality item, but instead make forging interactive (instead of script-prepared)

you can ... EVERYTHING

you can also find excuses to do nothing

you can

[Zar]

you can (imagine that!) make specials AUTOMATIC! haha! and you can even go further and ... make them RANDOM recharge/execute timed!

you can (as opposed to "it's a problem") drastically decrease the forging-attempts required to forge a good quality item, but instead make forging interactive (instead of script-prepared)

you can ... EVERYTHING

you can also find excuses to do nothing

you can

+1

There are many ways to do it.
I know some muds that forbids assist/kill command triggers which are essence of bots.
And offenders of this rule are punished severely.

It is very annoying to see, people running on scripts cleaning this area.
And even more annoying that when You report it to AoP, they say "well, he looked at screen while his bot ran." - which wasn't the case obviously.

[Tive]

A simple experiment might help, just remove the exp penalty for pvp deaths completely for example (for a month?) and see if you have increase in player base. Why there were always tons of people online on wizdays when you did not have to worry about getting killed by others? because it was fun. make the game fun. Unless it's too late for that of course.

but again, the topic gets hijacked even more ;P

[Amberlee]

A simple experiment might help, just remove the exp penalty for pvp deaths completely for example (for a month?) and see if you have increase in player base. Why there were always tons of people online on wizdays when you did not have to worry about getting killed by others? because it was fun. make the game fun. Unless it's too late for that of course.

but again, the topic gets hijacked even more ;P

No.. No and NO.
That would actually ruin what makes playing Genesis exciting.

[Ilrahil]

Just saying you all complain about botters. When we went on a crusade and killed some last year we got bitched at for policing the game instead of letting wizards do it with their number test that can be trigger fired.

Sheesh.