I'll kick your bot!

[Makfly]

Draugor: My point has nothing to do with that, the point is, if a player is logged into the game 40 hours each week, and spends 30 of those botting and 10 playing actively, interacting, and RPing, we will lose those 10 hours of active play too if we decide to delete him/her for the 30 hours of botting.

All I am saying is that has to be considered too. You cant just say there is nothing to lose by deleting someone who bots, because most bots dont always bot.

Cherek, in your post, you list nothing negative. You paint a rose-coloured picture of the effects of bots, and forgets to list all the negatives.

Genesis is a Free-For-All Player vs Player game.
Gaining stats gives you a MASSIVE advantage against other players, who play Genesis the legitimate way.
So big is the advantage that even a team of some of the best equipped players cannot even kill the most well know bot Irk.
If a player spends 30 hours a week botting and 10 hours playing. That 10 hours can be used to grief the rest of the legitimate players. Nobody is saying that any time spent at the keyboard is actually spent in a way that have positive effects for the community.

If new players try out Genesis and realises it will take them years to get on an equal footing with the rest of the community, that problem is a direct result of players using scripts to grind stats to heights that the game is not even remotely capable of supporting.

There are plenty of negative aspects of botting, and no positives from what I can see. Your argument hinges on the notion that we should be nice to players who violates the rules, because the community is so small now. Maybe the very reason why the community is small is because of the bots!


The bigger underlying problem, I think is that most of the remaining long-time community members are tainted.
Everyone knows who bots, nobody reached Myth status without either scripting or being dragged around by someone elses bot.
What is the Admin to do then - Cut the small community is half by enforcing their own rules, or say "Okay no more!...Please." and have the vigilance last a few weeks and then everything is back to normal?

Also is killing a bot really much of a punishment?
The gain was made by leaving a computer on, running scripts. A death only cost the player a tiny bit more on his electricity bill* to keep his computer running the script a bit more.

*if it's not a work or university computer being used

[Laurel]

stats to heights that the game is not even remotely capable of supporting

quite wrong

[Cherek]

Makfly: You really did not get my point either I think. Or maybe I was not clear enough. To clarify:

No I do not like botting, there are tons of negative effects about it. This thread has listed most of them so I felt there was no need to list them again. My only point, was that very few players ONLY bot. Most players who bot combine their botting with actually playing the game. Everyone who had written in this thread seemed to think that a bot is like an NPC so removing them wont be negative at all. All I am saying is yes, it will be. By deleting bots we also delete active players who contribute to the community and game.

I understand and agree with the problems of botting, but as Laurel said earlier, and as others have said in the past: Botting is rewarding. That is the main problem. Yes we can police botting, but as long as botting is more rewarding than playing actively people will keep doing it, and they will improve their scripts to make it almost impossible to detect them botting. While punishing botting may be the only thing we can do now, I think long term we need to provide a way to play the game where botting is NOT rewarded, where instead being active is.

For example: In most of our guilds you advance simply by gaining guild XP. Very bottable. In a few guilds you advance only, or mainly, by doing tasks and by roleplaying. The first type of guild rewards notting, the second rewards activity and interaction.

Thats just an example, I am not saying an RP guild is better, and I dont think all guilds should be like that, nor is it realistic with our playerbase. But it was the first example I could think that rewards activity instead of botting.

To really solve the botting problem, and make the game more fun in general, I think we need to come up ideas for changes that are fairly easy to implement but reward players who are active rather than those who know how to write scripts.

For now I agree with Gorboth that the best thing is problably to try to find botters and hopefully somehow turn them into wanting to be active and helping the game out instead of carrying on with their botting.

[gorboth]

Uther's hijack has been moved to its own thread in the "general" section.

G.

[gorboth]

I think long term we need to provide a way to play the game where botting is NOT rewarded.

Any suggestions? It is a fine ideal that all would agree with. The ideal is meaningless without an effective implementation. Is it even possible to make botting not worthwhile? I don't see how so long as we allow players to grow endlessly against a soft rather than hard stat-cap. If you, Cherek, or anyone else has a viable suggestion for how we can remove the incentive to bot I am all ears.

G.

[Cherek]

Gorboth: Well... I always have tons of ideas. Realistic or not, here are some ideas that I think would make activity more rewarding, some that would make botting less rewarding, and some that would do both.

Fairly easy ideas to implement.

- The obvious one, and the one that probably would have the most impact, and already mentioned. Stat cap.

- Recalculate stats. Dont cap stats, but make the stat difference less. I think someone talked about this before (Strider?). Anyway, the idea is that the step between for instance greenhorne and veteran is pretty big, as it is now, however the difference between a legend a myth will be much smaller. In short, the bigger you get, the less stats matter.

- Add a daily limit for how much you can grow by combat. Your body simply cant handle more! Will it lead to people playing less? Or will it lead to people actually doing something else when reaching their limit?

- Remove the concept of guild XP, or at least make is less worth it to commit suicide a bunch of times and then bot yourself to huge GXP. The hunt for GXP is a big reason to bot for many.

- Players in guilds can decide to make RP count again. Returning to application systems, apprenticehood etc. The goal should be for the applicant to have fun. Actually, this approach does seem to work pretty okay even with our current player numbers, as guilds who try to stick to at least some RP and application process seem to do fairly well.

- More events. Re-run old ones if its not possible to have new ones. Anything that breaks the usual grind is good, it makes players do something else than what they usually do.

- Rethink death penalty and PVP. Could a different approach make players enjoy fighting other players again, thus focusing less on grinding? I think a lot of people simply grind because they got nothing else to do. Not because they actually enjoy it that much.

- If PVP once again becomes fun, guild leaders can work against botting by taking up politics and wars again, keeping their members occupied with other things.

Harder ones.

- Add creative battlegrounds that are considerably more rewarding (and funnier) than normal grinding. For instance my idea about a "defend/assault" area, or "big random bosses" areas, etc. We could come up with a lot of fun ideas here. The key is them being: 1. Fun. 2. More rewarding.

- Finish the Krynn war system, maybe create one for ME too, or create a more global war system where more guilds can hold areas, and be rewarded for doing so. That gives their members something else to do than just grind and still be rewarded. Attacking and defending areas is a more interactive type of grind than the usual way, especially since members from the opposing guild could arrive.

- Give all guilds in the game access to a global coded politics systems where they can declare different statuses towards other guilds. War / Peace / Alliance / Neutral. That gives guild leaders something to play with, negotiating with other guild leaders. Or making demands. Etc. again, it gives players something else to do than just grind.

- Either remove smithing entirely from the game, or redo it completely so it's more of a quest-like approach than write "forge X" 10.000 times.

- Remove the need for carrying thousands of herbs, thus removing the need to create scripts and let them run all days. If you need a smaller amount of herbs maybe you dont even need to script it. And people who dont script can also be successful spellcasters.

- Make special PVP battlegrounds where you're rewarded with XP when winning battles. The Holm for instance, since the RP story is already in place more or less.

- Allow useful XP rewards for other things than grinding. And no, not herbing and smithing which are even more bottable. I am thinking of more creative ways. Like... playing fireball in Calia and winning could give XP (more than once as it is now). I think its fun. Or an automatic PVP tournament with XP for winners... or maybe a Magical Casino where you could gamble to win XP (You need to bet your XP to have a chance to win of course)... Or more automatic weekly quest-like things similar to the wednesday market... a weekly treasure hunt perhaps, where random stuff is hidden during a day and whoever finds the most wins... or the gnomes set up a weekly "hunt for cash", where people compete to gather the most cash, or gems, in a set amount of time... or... well anything that is something else than "kill x" and does give a substantial reward.

Okay, enough brainstorming for now.

[gorboth]

The above post is fantastic. It really only gives one single idea that would make botting less rewarding by way of a hard stat-cap. Unfortunately, this would also make legitimate grinding just as unrewarding, which many players enjoy and log in to pursue.

I think given that we don't want a hard stat cap, perhaps the best thing is to focus on the positives as you've very creatively worked brainstorm here. A lot of these ideas we're working on at some stage of development already, but some are very creative and new. Good stuff!

Thanks, Cherek.
G.

[Amberlee]

daily growth cap = horrible idea..
Welcome death penalty version 2.0

[Althyrian]

**

[Draugor]

One way to make botting alot more of a bitch is to make NPCs able to give you wounds, we had it on demonsgate, the wounds depending on the severity makes you loose health at different paces, the ony way to fix it is to get to one of the wandering healers, should make people check themselves. And the healers should have a wide list of questions to ask the player so that its hell to automate. And yes, if you only bot and dont run to the healer... you die, simple