The Mana World Forums

Dear sisters, dear brethren!

Did you notice the ever-growing amount of poor players in TMW? People starving for a nice green apple or desperate to get a nice mug of beer? Don't you want to share some of your wealth with you other fellow players?

The Church of Mana Maniacs can help you ease the guilt of living an extravagant life by taking care of distributing all your unused items among the poor. Just talk our friendly member DonationBot near the sign post south of Hurnscald and trade your items to her.

All items will be distributed in a regular drop party in the same map, and any money will be used to buy food and drinks -- we do not take profit from the donations.

Be the mana with you,
lostinjapan and Hagen von Tronje

Bot proposal

Name: DonationBot

Function: Collecting items and money to be used for organizing a regular drop party

Location: Stationary on the map south of Hurnscald (i.e. 007-1 at (64, 52))

Code: Modified mana client

User interaction:

• Accepts incoming trade requests and stores items
• Replies to each whisper with a short descriptory message
• (Drop party with collected items will be carried out regularly by manually playing Donation bot by either lostinjapan and Hagen von Tronje)

Future ideas:

• Introduction of a reward system for donating items
• Add commands to show some statistics on the donated items
• Create a top ten list of donators

Please let us know what you think about our idea. DonationBot will be online for coding and testing purposes in the next days at its designated location... If you like the idea and the admins approve, it might stay there

nice idea.......but i rather tell the Noobs to go Bat Hunt

Hagen von Tronje wrote:Just talk our friendly member DonationBot near the sign post south of Hurnscald and trade your items to her.

Do you have permission to run this bot? Running a bot requires a permission from the GMs.

Nope, we don't have any official approval yet.

We came up with the idea shortly and wanted to have try it out first, because we don't know how all of you other players think about it. So we hacked a standard client and added necessary the functionality to give you an idea on how everything could look like

The bot doesn't do much besides trading, so it shouldn't be much of a burden on the server. As all the items donated will be used in drop parties, we (the owners of the bot) don't gain anything from running it... Well, besides the fun of organizing these events

We'd be happy to get permission to run the bot. If there's anything special we have to do, please tell us ^^

Crush wrote:

Hagen von Tronje wrote:Just talk our friendly member DonationBot near the sign post south of Hurnscald and trade your items to her.

Do you have permission to run this bot? Running a bot requires a permission from the GMs.

I thought that the Friendly Bot status was more of a privilage then a requirement, but this clears my mind. Thanks

LOL, so who do we know you are going to drop all the items you collect?

And why should people help you gain popularity off their items? Or are you going to store the names of the poeople that donate to your bot, and personally thank them when it is done?

What items do you expect to get?

Third, drop parties are not help. The vast majority of drop parties go to the people that have mods/knowledge to exploit the system. For example, if you move to a higher level on the map makes are higher in the pickup function.

How is giving people items that already know how to exploit the system helping anyone?

Finally, nothing should be free, except for keys and advice.

Hi DarkWater and thanks for your opinion!

DarkWater wrote:LOL, so who do we know you are going to drop all the items you collect?

If you want an honest answer, then of course there's no feasible way for you to check that we really drop all items just because everything happens very quickly during a drop party.

So the only thing we can do, is to give you our word as fellow players enjoing the same online game that we won't take any items or money out of the bot for our own purposes. In fact both lostinjapan and I have been donating quite a lot ourselves (accounting to more than 80% of the donations for the first few parties).

If you had been to one of our previous drop parties, you could also have seen that all rare items donated found new owners and didn't end up in our own inventories

And why should people help you gain popularity off their items? Or are you going to store the names of the poeople that donate to your bot, and personally thank them when it is done?

The bot registers the name of the donor and the items donated in a log file. Before any drop party begins, we mention all the donors and try to emphasize those who made exceptional donations (rare items or big donations).

Besides being the guys who came up with the idea for the bot and who implemented it, we don't really get any popularity "off somebody elses items".

What items do you expect to get?

It's a trash can. Drop off what you like (or rather don't like anymore) and we'll distribute it for you. If you don't want to donate anything it's fine as well, you're still welcome to join the drop party.

On the other hand the drop parties become what everybody makes them to be, so if there are only cactus potions and arrows inside it'll get pretty boring.

Third, drop parties are not help. The vast majority of drop parties go to the people that have mods/knowledge to exploit the system. For example, if you move to a higher level on the map makes are higher in the pickup function.

How is giving people items that already know how to exploit the system helping anyone?

I don't get what you mean with the second sentence, but I know there are modified clients with additional features like auto-pickup. Might players using such a client have better chances to get items? Yes, might as well be. But TMW is an open source game and everybody is free to modify the source code as they wish, and as long everybody sticks to the rules I don't see a problem with that. Actually, being able to modify the client is what makes this bot possible in the first place ^^

DonationBot only does what it promises: It distributes all the donated items in a drop party. Whoever ends picking up a specific items is still determined by the server, the players and quite a lot of luck

Finally, nothing should be free, except for keys and advice.

Nobody should be paying for advice -- we don't need to talk about that.

But why do you care about what items one player decides to give to another? It's up to those players. Why shouldn't I be allowed to give my 100th leather shirt to a newbie who'll have a lot more fun with it? A lot of time is spent on item grinding in TMW and I think everybody is happy to sometimes get a little help from a fellow player. It's not a single player game anyway

Lol, ok.

Just a warning, there are several bugs in this game, in which anyone that is sitting in the same map, can get any dropped item with out moving regardless of what the other players do. So the guy that comes to the drop party but is not moving, is getting most of your items you drop. Sorry, but that is they way the system works.

The developers have tried to fix it several times, but it is always exploited.

DarkWater wrote:Lol, ok.

Just a warning, there are several bugs in this game, in which anyone that is sitting in the same map, can get any dropped item with out moving regardless of what the other players do. So the guy that comes to the drop party but is not moving, is getting most of your items you drop. Sorry, but that is they way the system works.

The developers have tried to fix it several times, but it is always exploited.

is it only on this map or everywhere?