As was stated previously, bots have no concept of time so botting that works consistently (ie, hitting low level monsters that are non-aggressive and allow for an easy and small automation process to 'harvest') is more desirable then a bot that gets more experience through 'riskier' botting - those scenarios in which the bot has a chance to fail and must be reset by the human running it, because the bot gets no experience when it is offline.fate wrote:Ceros,
yes, for bots that are `smart' enough to walk across several maps and interact with a simple NPC, this isn't good enough. But at the end of the day, anything we can do can be automated with enough effort, so there is nothing we can do with game mechanics that can't be subverted with clever enough mechanisms.
Your point about nonaggressive monsters is a good one, though. At this point, aggressive monsters are considerably more rewarding, XP wise, so my hopes are that the slower XP progression for bots will make them less appealing and give GMs more time to identify them before they `pay off.'
Can you elaborate on how this mechanism would be annoying for players, though? The way I see it, casual players wouldn't be affected much at all, and only heavy grinders would `suffer' (which I personally consider a bonus, since motivating people to not spend all day standing in a virtual cave, holding one button pressed, seems to be a good thing in the grand scheme of things.
-- fate
For example, a bot that kills bats with relatively no risk or crashing vs a bot that kills red slimes, snakes and spiders but has a much better chance of dieing due to being overwhelmed, etc.
I think your attitude towards grinding and 'hard core grinding' is disturbing. While not everyone is going to poopsock the hours away grinding to level 99, at the core of the game you have grinding. There is about a week's worth of quest content (much of that is grinding, by the way - 'Bring me 50 Grass Snake Tounges", 'Bring Me 50 Bug Legs' etc) and after that you are left with pretty much just grinding for items you need with extremely small drop rates (or buying it from someone who has).
For example, Jean Chaps. The drop rate is extremely low for the effort required to kill the creature that drops it and for a player to collect the 10 skins required through combat takes hours and hours. It actually probably takes days of playing (there have been posts bitching about the snake skin drop rate previously). The reason I can sell Snake Skins for 10k a piece is because of the extreme amount of grinding required to get them. Even when players elect to go to the bat caves to earn the money to buy the item or components instead of killing the creature that drops them, they are still grinding for it. It is just easier, safer, and quicker grinding.
But the point is, after your week's worth of quests, your core game mechanic is grinding, followed by a lot of socialization. Someone once said that they considered TMW to be 'IRC with hets" [IRC with hats] - I would propose it is "IRC with hets (and grinding)".
Secondly, while casual players are nice, the heart of any gaming community are the hard core grinders. Those people who show up every day and put in the effort. The people that log on every other day for 20 minutes and then go outside for a walk aren't your target audience here. No one knows their name, if you know what I mean. People like Sugar, freya, wayne etc who are constantly on and are constantly grinding are your core audience.
Lastly, the point of proposing this 'anti-botting combat system' is to remove the human element (e.g. GMs) so saying that safer botting will "give GMs more time to identify them" is a moot point. If we keep GMs then there really isn't any reason to create a system of combat to foil botting because the GMs would be able to identify botting based on reports from another player and by talking to them.