its time to call the development team to task

[prsm]

I for one have thought the development team on tmw are second to none (and still do).

But its time they concentrate and a huge trouble, no its not new hats or quests, its the abundance of cheat tools in the game!

We have the manabot, 4144 patches all automate the game to a level that i can't believe was ever intended. If you cant hit ctrl a to attack or z to pick up the drop, what the hell are you doing here and before someone says "What about the physically challenge?" , they can have automation ... its the others i am talking about. I am level 99 and have a level 95 also, i dont play 24/7 but i do play a few hours a day, if i can! i hit ctrl a and z all by myself. I dont see the need for all the extra freebies for the lazies, why should they benefit!!

Conversely, if you cant address this issue ..... please make 2 new magic commands...
#instant99 and #givemeverything so the rest of us dont have to play with these insensitive rude players!

Thanks in advance

[skipy]

i hope that adding some big boss fights will help....but idk-- ---skipy

[Coolkid 782]

But its time they concentrate and a huge trouble, no its not new hats or quests, its the abundance of cheat tools in the game!

+1

"What about the physically challenge?" , they can have automation ...

I dont see how physically challenged people would be able to play or enjoy the game.

To solve the client botting issue, couldnt code be put in place to check what client a person is using and if the client is not any of the accepted clients then they wont be able to log onto the server?

Thanks.

[Kurtz]

I for one have thought the development team on tmw are second to none (and still do).

But its time they concentrate and a huge trouble, no its not new hats or quests, its the abundance of cheat tools in the game!

We have the manabot, 4144 patches all automate the game to a level that i can't believe was ever intended. If you cant hit ctrl a to attack or z to pick up the drop, what the hell are you doing here and before someone says "What about the physically challenge?" , they can have automation ... its the others i am talking about. I am level 99 and have a level 95 also, i dont play 24/7 but i do play a few hours a day, if i can! i hit ctrl a and z all by myself. I dont see the need for all the extra freebies for the lazies, why should they benefit!!

Conversely, if you cant address this issue ..... please make 2 new magic commands...
#instant99 and #givemeverything so the rest of us dont have to play with these insensitive rude players!

Thanks in advance

This time I agree with you. Unfortunately I think the development team can do very little.
If there was a way to determine with certainty if a player is using a bot I would opt to ban him though he is at the keyboard.
Basically I do not care if they gain experience, items or money that way, I'm not in competition with anyone (except in pvp ) but for sure these are people that do not add fun to the game.
When someone is too tired or bored to play it should just avoid playing and do not let a bot do the job for him, or at least that's what you'd expect from a sane person

[noelleionscowl]

I'll argue. What if you are using 4144 to see levels without inwilt? What if you are trying to see what party people are in? Or where a door is? Or where a drop is hidden behind a tree?

And for those cheaters, think about it. The sudden influx of rares would immediately counteract everything that the devs have done to reduce inflation.

I don't like the idea of having to get so much money for some quests, however.

[Kurtz]

To solve the client botting issue, couldnt code be put in place to check what client a person is using and if the client is not any of the accepted clients then they wont be able to log onto the server?

I am no expert but I think that the identification of the client can be easily faked

[prsm]

i stand corrected, i accused 4144 of being automated! that was wrong, and i apologize. I am against automation, not making the game better.

[Coolkid 782]

To solve the client botting issue, couldnt code be put in place to check what client a person is using and if the client is not any of the accepted clients then they wont be able to log onto the server?

I am no expert but I think that the identification of the client can be easily faked

It kind of depends on how you identify the client. You could have the server check the coding of the client and if it matches the accepted clients then it could work...

[Freeyorp101]

The server can only know about what the client sends it. You can't check what a user is running in any other way, and this is easily spoofed; even more so with FLOSS.


---Freeyorp

[Crush]

Any of those anti cheat tools you see in comercial software are a farce. They rely on security through obscurity and on Duck with the users system. They are easy to circumvent and invade the privacy of honest users. They also need to be very platform-specific. A solution like that is out of the question for TMW for both technical and ethical reasons.


The only way to stop automation in TMW is to make the gameplay itself more complex so that it is harder to automatize.

So when you have any ideas which make the gameplay more complex (please no ideas which are just annoying, like showing him a captcha every 5 minutes), feel free to suggest them.

[Reid]

8months without an update
Dev team never here and just wearing a cap in the city to show 'im the best, and not you'
You should stop to accuse 4144 of killing the gameplay, the inexistence of this one and the 'why automation' appear is in most case the fault of the dev team, he just gave some fun to 'some' old player that was lazy to play at the mana world.

He gave more fun him than tmw devs. (and NO, he is not automated! )

[Jumpy]

hello

still playing in game
one char lvl 96
3 level 50
2 at level 1 )

3 of chars are for collection issues

i'd like to thank Prsm for this post
for many reasons

first of all it gives me the oportunity to say thank you

thanks to 4144 to make a better client with more features and interesting informations
thanks to the GM Team that has been going (imho) the right direction in terms of moderation and giving some life in the game
thanks to the players that play the game such as Prsm, sugar, Ginaria... list would be very long and that dedicate some time helping newcomers in completing quests by giving or selling items to reasonable price or helping them with advices and knowledge they aquired playing the game

second i would like to enter in the automation "problem"
automation has been is and will be certainely important in pushing client issues and serv issues in the development of tmw
pushing issues to the limits of what people can do with it and how it can spoil the game
spoil the game of players
spoil tmw

those games are a question of power, being the richer, the higher level the best mage, the best ... etc etc whatever... the best is the question

what is the best for tmw ?

game is what players make it
and what admin devs and gms make it

this is a game in test situation

question is : what is the best for tmw

do admin devs gmteam and players participating in the test, do they all know what is the best for tmw ?
what, where, all thos question ?
anyone answered to them ?
defined them (further than the moderation rules ?

how many chars, alt a player should be allowed to have ?
etcetc
etc
etc

many questions i don't see much discussed in forum
and that are so greately thrown away by answers like

you're not a dev
this is a tes
we are working on it
etc
etc
or the traditional

this is only a game

no this is not only a game
this is a serious project that started years ago and in which all the people that participated at any position have a word to say (players included)

this is not a laboratory test but, from a social scientific study is made on a nonequivalent control-group design study in a real game environment

so as a conclusion

what is tmw willing to reach as a game comunity ? (image, values, principles)
what the developments in term of serv and client issues will tend to in order to fit to this tmw mission statment ?

Willing to reading you soon

yours

Jumpy

omg just realized it is my post number 500 GaK gAk

[Alons]

I think that we all are searching for a way to ballance that aspect of the game. The rule #7 was a try for it, but IMO it had some black holes that made it impossible to enforce for a GM... What if 2 people under the same IP are family, and not the same person, or just 2 people on a cybercafe, playing tmw under the same roof? What if the 2nd player on follow was not from the same person, but from another under the same roof? Then we punish as multiboxing or as AFK botting?

The problem is easy. Those situations I pointed out before maybe are only the 5%, the 1% or the 0.1% on the cases of automated multiboxing we can find. But if we punish someone for doing nothing wrong, then the system is wrong, isn't it?

Trying to find a solution to ballance this is really hard. We are oppened to suggestions, but as a GM, I think there's not much we can do about it.

[Jumpy]

+1 AlOnS and once again +1

i am convinced that admin devs gms and players will find out some solution in the futur

yours

Jumpy

[bcs86]

Crush is right, though.

Harder game play. Really, a different kind of game altogether.
For now though, "More reliance on quests".

Len, in his Whispers of Avalon thread pondered how WoA play would be different.

Manufacturing is a favorite of mine. Ingots are good. Those aspects of play have been coming together.

Engine-wise though, It disappoints me a little that Manaserv seems to be a broader re-implementation of eAthena.

Collision tiles are still dumb. Dumb collision layers deserve to be botted. I'd bring up
Fother_J's work on interactive tiles
which shouldn't be forgotten. The more ways of interacting with maps the better.
HOW? : His info.txt explains an "interactive" layer. eAthena only cares about collision though. Opening a .wlk (an eA server map file) in a hex editor shows zeros and ones, True or False for collisions. No "speed reduction when walking in mud" or such.

GNU RPGE, just a prototype left-for-dead, had already designed for smart collision tiles.

Better and better game play is always interesting to plan for, but accomplishment is left to the heroic.

Everyone should, and does have the freedom to modify the mana client.
A client is just a shell, a "browser" mostly handling graphics and music.
The client doesn't get to decide attributes. It is the server that "deals the cards" and "makes the plays" on behalf of the player, so to speak.

There's no way to stop modified clients even if they were a problem. Any barrier can be worked around. Manabot acts in place of a client.
If the server asked for the version name and number of a client, and checked it against a black list or white list, all a manabot has to do is tell the server what it wants to hear, and log in. Thus it is left to the discretion of a human with GM permissions. (Blah blah you already know...)

A developer is just a volunteer, the old-timers have had this task since ever. I think they agree on more complicated game play, because we are not like the greedy, hasty industry rushing to defend exclusive property with BS anti-cheating or treacherous DRM schemes.

...
...
...

Currently there is the translations and the rebranding of mana-0.5 into tmw-0.0.30. After that things should be more interesting. Having a more usable client will make the project advance a lot faster because it will be easier to test new ideas.