Botting

[Arcon]

I don't like botting. It is perfectly possible to reach high levels without botting or some script beyond the basic triggers.

It is not hard to tell the team you are in that you got to go ld for 10-15 min for a smoke break or to eat something. You can even plan those small breaks 5 min in advance so you go ld in a "safe" room and going ld usually is instant unless you were just in fight so you just wait a couple of min for it.
Emergencies can happen any time but this is just a game, so when it happen forget about genesis and solve the emergency and IF you get caught during one bad luck but this is still just a game.

And I am sure that the wizards won't come and do a bot test on you because you are standing idle while healing somewhere and you take advantage of the time to go to the bathroom.

[Icarus]

If You Are Solo:

1) If you script more than one area (or the same area more than once) without responding to a bot test, then you face punishment.
2) If you kill someone with your poorly written script, then you face punishment.
3) If you steal someone's loot/kills, without responding to tell them to kindly f*** off (and thereby implying it's on purpose) and they report you with a log, you face punishment.

If You Are In A Team:

1) Your leader must be attentive.
2) If you play while being led, and you do not let your leader know of your need to be away, then you face punishment (believe me, a lot of leaders would report this. I know several who'd like to kill their own guildmates for doing this.)
3) If you play while being led and are away longer than an hour without checking in, you face punishment (again... a lot of leaders would report this, if it were an actual rule.)
4) Rules 2 and 3 above.

Current IDLE rules (automatic logout if no command is sent) is 30 minutes. "Botting" with gear: Max 30 minutes, max one time / 2 hours.
Combat Scripting: Max unattentive during script: 10 minutes (this should cover most bathroom breaks or similar, and for those bad days, the powers that be would probably accept a few minutes extra).
Combat Scripting with team: Leader same rules as above, members can here go for 20 min, but for those 20 minutes, the leader must be aware of this AND forced to be attentive for the whole period.
Combat unattentive is max 1 time / hour. If you need more / longer, go to a saferoom and get your 30 min, or LD and get your 120 min.

[Cherek]

Amorana: Yes, you are right, we do have a game that is setup to reward scripts and bot, and that's obviously something we'd have to work on too, if we don't want people to bot.

However I do not agree that just because we remove mortal levels size would not matter. If we also want a PVP game, size is also very important in that matter, and it's important in PVE too in many situations. To allow people to bot their way to huge size would still be an issue in my opinion. And would cause anger and envy from those who dont bot, and people not knowing exactly how much bigger the bots are might be just as bad as people usually assume the worst. "Omg, X is botting all days he must be at least double my size, this sucks!". Etc...

But I do agree with you that things like titles, rankings and other systems that promotes drone grinding should perhaps be remodelled, as do think it would promote more activity and socialising. And I also think it would help to remove one reason for botting. I am definitely for seriously considering the titles to begin with, I think that is what would make the most immediate impact if changed.

As for RL emergencies etc, I have never really said that I am out to stop people from leaving their computers now and then. And I obviously would not punish you if you have no history of botting and happened to be away saving your house from burning up just when I tried to contact you. On the other hand, if you always had more and more unlikely "emergencies" when I contacted it might start to feel a little fishy. I think common sense will work here, and as Arcon suggested, you come a long way with common sense when playing too. Emergencies hopefully does not happen too often, and most of the time you should really have no trouble planning your breaks. However... what if...

The cooldown on LD is not very long. Although I wonder if it would be beneficial too have some type of "sleep" command instead of hitting an LD button, so you'd KNOW when it's okay to LD. As it is now if you LD when you've been in combat recently many people are uncertain if they really LD'ed, and often ask their friends if they are etc. If you typed "sleep" and got a message saying if you can sleep or not, and if you can, type it again to go LD, I think that might be pretty helpful? Sleep would also be better RP-wise than LD. Thoughts on that? Would it be a nice feature to have?

Talking about rules, yes, the things you list, and things Icarus lists, are stuff I also started listing when considering a rule change/clarification, and as I said earlier the problem I faced, is that it made the rules so much more complicated. I dont think either of your suggestions are bad, not at all, but it complicates the rules too, and I am not sure that's better. Especially if we start to include areas and have different rules for teams and solo play etc. I think it might be messy, and very time consuming to check as well. Although some loose recommendations on times might be useful... I'll give that some more thought.

[gorboth]

This is such a hard issue. It really is. I very much respect and appreciate everyone who is posting ideas - some are amazingly well thought out!

And, this issue gets certain players *very* upset, as we have noticed. The other day, after someone decided they were so upset that that quit the game (restricting themselves) in wrath over the both check of a friend, we figured it was time to pause and have a serious discussion with the Admin, AoP, and some other knowledgeable wizards on the subject.

The resulting discussion was really excellent, and continued for over an hour. In the end, the best suggestion that I heard was one where we try to solve the problem by re-designing the game so that we do not reward botting. Rather, we reward play that botting is not very good at - i.e. risky play.

One way to do this would be to make it so that you get zero exp for killing things that are, say, more than 10% smaller than you are. This would be tricky to do right, and really punish races like gnomes (for example), so we'd need to test run it to see how it played. What it would do is reward teaming, and we could, perhaps, boost the amount of exp you get if the thing is 10% larger than you are, etc, to make things more rewarding than they are now.

These are the sorts of ideas that create better design rather than force us to go after players who don't play how we think they should. I have do admit, telling players how to play is pretty much nonsense beyond things that are downright antisocial.

So ... please do realize that all of this frustration for certain people hasn't been for nothing. We really are trying to figure out a good way to get this fixed that makes the game better.

G.

[Cherek]

I had a chat with Mercade and Cotillion about LD which resulted in the "adrenaline" vital that let's you know when it's safe to LD. Hopefully that'll help a little in making players feel they dare LD when needed. It's explained by Mercade on the common board as well.

[Chanele]

This is such a hard issue. It really is. I very much respect and appreciate everyone who is posting ideas - some are amazingly well thought out!

And, this issue gets certain players *very* upset, as we have noticed. The other day, after someone decided they were so upset that that quit the game (restricting themselves) in wrath over the both check of a friend, we figured it was time to pause and have a serious discussion with the Admin, AoP, and some other knowledgeable wizards on the subject.

The resulting discussion was really excellent, and continued for over an hour. In the end, the best suggestion that I heard was one where we try to solve the problem by re-designing the game so that we do not reward botting. Rather, we reward play that botting is not very good at - i.e. risky play.

One way to do this would be to make it so that you get zero exp for killing things that are, say, more than 10% smaller than you are. This would be tricky to do right, and really punish races like gnomes (for example), so we'd need to test run it to see how it played. What it would do is reward teaming, and we could, perhaps, boost the amount of exp you get if the thing is 10% larger than you are, etc, to make things more rewarding than they are now.

These are the sorts of ideas that create better design rather than force us to go after players who don't play how we think they should. I have do admit, telling players how to play is pretty much nonsense beyond things that are downright antisocial.

So ... please do realize that all of this frustration for certain people hasn't been for nothing. We really are trying to figure out a good way to get this fixed that makes the game better.

G.

I don't understand what this will solve, there are no areas that pose a threat for 2-3 legends/myths. Maybe I missunderstood something? It might work if NPC's, in grinding places, scale with size of attacker.

However, I think it's great that you guys put some effort in this matter!

[Icarus]

... it's up there, if you want to read it, go there ..

I don't understand what this will solve, there are no areas that pose a threat for 2-3 legends/myths. Maybe I missunderstood something? It might work if NPC's, in grinding places, scale with size of attacker.

However, I think it's great that you guys put some effort in this matter!

Scaling NPC's in a new area, with a minimumsize to provide a killing ground for larger players, leaving room for the smaller ones in the current killing-ground would be nice, but if you make it hard and dangerous, you'll also run into the problem of "why would we go there?". If this is done, some sort of incentive needs to be for them to go there. Bonuses in coin drops, gems that always have a higher value (i.e. gem drop starts from a ruby and higher valued gems rather than killing a huge myth and get a quartz), possibly also scaling. Results would need to be monitored to see the effectiveness, but the current good killinggrounds are overhunted or protected by someone.

And if there's a team there, say 3 myths, take their combined stats, scale to their combined average + bonus size for being 3, or 4 or... and keep going, possibly ignoring smallest size if a certain percentage smaller than biggest in average combined, but still added difficulty due to being present...

[OgreToyBoy]

How about we measure only INT or WIS to see if the opponent should give xp.
Those with inflated stats will have a rough time finding opponents. I'm happy with killing 300
monsters and finally get one progress. If I need to go find stuff that are larger than me
to get xp I'd may as well sit in my mancave.

Still can't see this as a big problem, unless you want to remove those with higher stats from the game.

One way could be that everyone get a statcut like we did in the past, make every statpoint require three times as much xp and have softcap kick in earlier.. Change nothing in the NPC's stats and most of us are in for a rough time.
Eventually there will be people that are huge again of course, just won't be as many of them. I can only assume many of the ones complaining of botters etc will find it even more unfair when those who got a lot of time can grow to impressive size again.

[Bromen]

I don't like botting. It is perfectly possible to reach high levels without botting or some script beyond the basic triggers.

Agreed. I hit myth without botting.

-Carmelo

[Cherek]

I don't like botting. It is perfectly possible to reach high levels without botting or some script beyond the basic triggers.

Agreed. I hit myth without botting.

-Carmelo

And it only took you 20 years too!:)