Banning all scripts

[Arcon]

I agree with most of the things you mentioned but I don't think that making the specials automated would be a good thing. Make it instead so it has more randomness to the fight so you must have more interaction than just typing "special" over and over. You mentioned some cool special hits that could happen, I think that sounds like a good beginning, more bleeding. Do it so you have to keep checking your wounds or you might might die even if you win. Make it so you can "target" areas on the body but also that you would have to change it during the fight or the enemy would know where you would try to hit him and it would be easier to block/defend.

Oh, and remove death penalty alltogether to prevent title grinding.

I don't agree with this, death has to be real or there wouldn't be any excitiment in battle. But I do think we should change the way we recover from it. Make it time based. You die and you will be weak for two weeks, you would be recovering slowly and after two weeks you would be fully recovered and it doesn't matter how much you would be grinding. You would recover stats and not xp so you can't use it to raise titles etc.

[Rhaegar]

I agree with most of the things you mentioned but I don't think that making the specials automated would be a good thing.

I never mentioned that they should all be automated. I only stated that it's unfair that some have such feature while other's don't. It should be made equal for everybody, either way if you ask me, but if you're going to have all the specials automated then add more stuff to do during the fights.

I love the idea of targeting different areas (monks used to have that) and mobs defending better when they get hit from the same direction often (reminds me of shield system in Age of Conan).

The idea of being weaker for a set period of time, where you're taking this time to recover is also nice. I guess it shouldn't get cumulative though (ie: another period of recovery can't be applied to you before you finish your first set) or it might spin out of control or get people upset (when they die often and never leave recovery for instance). You should be able to fully recover before you can be sent into recovery again and if we're talking weeks here than it could be a bit of a pain. I believe that 33% hit to your stats would be nice and recovering 11%/24h for a total of 3 days recovery after death would be reasonable (and losing 1/3rd of your size would be quite a blow at the same time).

You could use this weakened state to do the quests you hate so much and never have time to do otherwise

EDIT: And one other idea for stopping scripters came to my mind today. Can't it be solved server-side? I mean, most people use speedwalking etc. (which is frustrating during pfights) which means that their client is sending a lot of commands in a very short time span (practically instantly). Wouldn't some form of flood protection (like in IRC) or DoS attack protection stuff solve it? If the server is receiving too many commands in too short of a time from the single IP it closes the connection and won't let it open again for another 5 minutes.
Another idea is to include inherent delay between crossing rooms, but this would slow down everyone. This could be done in form of "animation":
There are two obvious exits: north and east.
>e
You head eastwards...
(2-3 seconds later)
You're in another rooom.
There are three obvious exits...

This way, spamming directions wouldn't make you move faster (disable command queue/cache or however it's done).