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Comments
That's fair, there's really no way to know for sure other than hearsay.
That's a good reason to do it, it is very rewarding and fun for many people - I hear that a lot.
Come join the Achaea discord!
Lua changed the platform for text games, especially Mudlet. Back when Zmud was the most used client, attempting to code a full, automated offensive in it was a surefire way for it to completely lock up and for you to die. It just could not process that much or that quickly. As clients evolved and the remaining popular clients (MUSH, Cmud, Mudlet) all support Lua, the speed of scripting increased dramatically, allowing for more and more automation.
I used my personal definitions in automation and semi-automation, my definitions within the context of someone who prefers to avoid automation as often as possible. Perhaps someone who uses more automation (@Vaniel maybe?) could chime in with their personal definition(s)?
Hmm, It's not "press f1 and walk away", it's "repeatedly press the button that sends in the next command based on what the system has decided to use".
It is fairly common nowadays, especially with things like A.K being opened to the public. Combat in Achaea has simply evolved to this point where fighting scripts are not only encouraged but expected. You can definitely choose to not use such coded features, but you are essentially at a handicap.
the minute everyone is full (or 'semi') auto is the minute this game becomes completely worthless to fight in, tbh. fighting autobots is the most boring thing in the world beyond finding illusions that break their offense (which is an interesting nostalgia trip to back when illusions broke curing lol).
already there's too many groups that just run around auto targeting and auto deciding how to attack, and if it were somehow banned the game would be 200% more fun. of course what's funny to me is when these groups lose to groups with a lot less automation lol
Tecton-Today at 6:17 PM
If as a Serpent you're only deciding on snapping/suggesting affs, then you're automated. If as a Priest you're only deciding when to sap/absolve, then you're automated.
Semi-automated would be, for example... As a Depthswalker: you decide what instills to use, when to raze, when to preempt. If as a depthswalker, your only 'automation' is venom choices, then that would be semi-automated. Although not the most stellar of examples since instills might as well be automating themselves.
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This isn't WoW or DotA where scripting to help you do better is against ToS. Your comment is also incorrect. Case in point: A number of people in Ashtan. If someone is good enough at coding, they very much can do as well as (and significantly better than, in some cases) someone who manuals. If you're relying on other people's code, then that's another argument entirely.
And yeah by 'only rely on auto' I mean they just have a script to do their offense and little knowledge beyond that. Obv if you auto and have half a clue you'll do better than a manual with 3/4 a clue.
You can always automate further though, and eventually we'll be fighting auto tumblers and auto chasers and the pk will be pointless except to a couple of nerds who outnerd the average nerd. Automation is a crutch for people to do better than they deserve, and it's one of the reasons the game can't ever really be fully competitive anymore.
Dunn tells you, "I hate you."
(Party): You say, "Bad plan coming right up."
I think the only way PK devolves into that, is if Achaea gets dumbed down to be like Aetolia where you can see everything that someone cures. As well as knowing precisely how much limb damage you're doing to a target, and precise times of when it's getting cured by salves etc. What's unfun for you, might be a lot of fun for someone else, though. Iakimen does pretty well vs people who're "full auto" and afaik he doesn't do that. Just like there's people in Aetolia who manual vs the "full auto" crowd, and still do very well for themselves.
Yeah some people find it fun to watch paint dry but you don't see that as a mainstream hobby. There's a reason most games don't allow automation to overtake player skill, it's uninteresting except to a very small % of people who, if they really wanted a coding challenge, could just visit a few dozen sites that have actually complex coding problems for you to solve.
Lots of manual people do well vs full auto, but a lot of them hate full auto just the same (I know Iaki does)
In Achaea I also think it'd be a lot easier to abuse, though. Probably not a smart thing to have, tbqh. But I could see it screwing up a lot of people, I mean there's still people who think having a torso tracker completely shuts down disembowel lol. Or that vivisect is impossible to pull off vs certain people, when in actuality both cases are just people who don't wanna change up how they fight vs those people.
The general argument that automation can be beaten by manual combatants is pretty irrelevant to me. Regardless of the answer, that is not the source of my dissatisfaction with automation. I can best describe this with my experience in other games - when I win/lose a match against someone in Dota 2 who is scripting, I don't find it fun at all. I just find it to be cheating and am glad it is over and report them, even if their scripting was awful and could be abused. Only in here the same type of cheating is permitted and is a part of the game, so I've to live with it.
Whenever I fight a full auto team - or really anyone automating - I legitimately get sad that this is what people consider to be skill in combat these days.
This is what i consider bare minimum automation. anymore than this an i wouldnt even feel like i was playing the game to be honest. The flip side of that is im just not physically capable of doing all this stuff on my own anymore . I have to use voice to text to talk to people in a reasonable amount of time. so i wouldnt even be able to participate in combat with anything less than what i have now. Now back in the day woulda been easy to do for me but sadly im stuck with the body i have now. atleast until robot limbs. (come on science) But ive always played achaea for the combat more than anything.
So my point. a couple years ago i would have been in the automation is bad crowd. In fact i was in that camp. So i guess you could say ive been humbled a bit. I dont think low level automation is that big a deal. Im not doing any better in pk now than i was a couple years ago. It didnt magically make me the terminator. If anything its made me worse. example, Other day i was in the arena with iakimen trying to figure out how to go about the occie vs alchelmist matchup. He got my humors high enough to hit me with impatience slickness asthma and anorexia all at once. So the proper way to defend here would either to be throw fool or hangedman. but because my system sent its next attack before i was able to request a fool for the next balance it decided to hit iakimen. It made that decision in .2 seconds. if i was manual i would had atleast 2 seconds to fling a fool tarot and not die. Now obviously you could code out your human error a bit more but situations like these happen all the time and accounting for all of them in a system while also making sure it cant be tricked just isnt gonna happen. at the end of the day you the human have to make decisions or your just gonna be the strongest midbie combatant.
in closing i dont think its bad for the game so much anymore. If anything its the only reason i still play. An i think its impossible to make a system that going to compete at top tier all on its own. Which if your doing combat should be your goal else why are you doing it at all. Also people just assume those that beat them are automating. someone mentioned to me that i automated DW.....if you consider razing shield for you is automation then i guess i was. I say dont judge to harshly. If you lose to someone it's cause your not good enough to beat them yet. Not cause of how they did combat. Dont make excuses just improve and get results.
For a DW example, I had aliases like deg/mad/ret/etc for instills, and reapc/reapk/reapv/etc for venom reaps. Once I went auto, I had deg/mad/ret/etc still, but just one reap alias and an aff tracker that chose the venom. I still chose the venom order in the script, but now just had to remember less aliases. I personally don't feel like that gives some extreme advantage to automation, since it's still my mind behind the code.
A big part of combat, or any competitive game, is that your brain can only think about so many things at once. Sometimes you get hit by things that are obvious because you were made to focus on something else--automation removes that entirely.
While the fact that I have faster "eyes" and hands than average helped me learn the game to begin with, the awareness and knowledge I developed is the reason I've mostly preserved the ability to fight at a decent level without "practice," at least when something's on the line and I care. I've preferred group combat for a while because the skill of fluid decision-making and situational adaptation still weighs heavily in most cases, but I'm not sure how long that'll continue to overcome.
It's difficult to avoid automated fighting in this type of game, but I agree with Rom's point that it's "interesting" how that level of automation isn't considered blatant cheating here like in other games. I guess I look at ideal Achaean combat through the lens of what I find fun in pursuits like, say, sports.
The difference in skill knowledge (for lack of a better term) between a person who's only able to play a sport at a mediocre level and someone who's at a professional level won't necessarily be very large. To use tennis as a more specific example, anyone who's played for a year probably somewhat knows what forehands, backhands, serves, volleys, and overheads are as well as the rules of the game and scoring. These things don't change from year to year. In this sense, the barrier of entry isn't high and the sport itself doesn't "develop," but it's engaging to participate in because this small pool of abilities have an infinitely high ceiling for refinement. Most players never develop the ability required to beat a good high school player, much less a collegiate or a professional, but that makes the concepts of skill, victory, and defeat meaningful; the game remains consistent, but there's always a higher goal to reach for.
In Achaea, there have been changes to ease accessibility over the years, such as curing systems developed by players and within the game. While I'm not sure a higher percentage of people actually participate in some form of combat now compared to before, more people can somewhat competitively trade blows with each other. Whether that's good or not, I think it's created a huge gap in terms of combat learning and practice. A whole bunch of the "development" process is skipped as players become expectant of more immediate gratification or scripts do these actions and that thinking for them.
In AAU basketball, there's a common complaint that the system doesn't correctly develop young players within the system because of the focus on winning games. To borrow some past comments made by Kobe Bryant on that subject, it doesn't teach people to play the right way or how to think through the game. At a level where youth should be developing their skills, they're instead conditioned looking for the rewards born of winning and trying to showcase the abilities they already possess so they can get picked at a collegiate and, eventually, a professional level. Furthermore, coaches are rewarded for instilling such a toxic mindset into the young players, as they gain rewards as a part of shady recruiting practices. Ultimately, this creates less skilled players of the game as these players eventually rise to fill out the professional ranks.
This relationship can be extended to developing fighters in Achaea and their organisations, but unlike these sports infrastructures in the US, this game has an issue of finding appropriate training partners and competition.
I can't just delete the knowledge I already have and really experience learning Achaea from the beginning, but here's my perception. When I was coming up, there were all kinds of characters to defeat and use as reasonable steps for each level of development. I could find duels with people who also had one Transcendent skill or fewer below level 70 like me, yet had a real, practicing interest in combat and were at a legitimately similar stage of experience. Of course, I had the advantage of a playerbase that was both larger and made up of more new-ish players. Still, I feel that all the changes to lower barriers of entry, most of which were community-driven, have actually created more distinct tiers that are more difficult to jump. Because of the offensive and defensive tools that are more widely available, accepted, and employed, people turn to those to "win" instead of improving themselves in the skill of Achaean combat, because this is not a sport and that shortcut to instant gratification is available.
Winning may be what people enjoy and it may be what brings tangible reward to characters or their organisations, but the joy of development and the game/sport-like feeling that made Achaean combat attractive to me feels lost. It's like comparing Magnus Carlsen to AlphaZero; the latter will clearly win at chess every time, but the former holds the title of World Chess Champion for a reason, just as names like Ruy Lopez or Garry Kasparov have meant more in this pursuit of human excellence. And I think that that loss is a darn shame.
Combat, in general, has sped up tremendously. With full kill routes taking sub 20 seconds (in some cases less than 15), with new afflictions sneaking in that require split-second decisions for curing, and a drive for faster balance times, it is beyond hard to keep up with everything in combat, even for the trained eye. I still reel and just how fast information is coming in, my brain continuously asking me, "Was it all really this fast back when we pked more in the early 2000s?" The argument against an automated offense is starting to sound like the same argument I used to hear against the games having built-in curing systems: "Coding yourself taught you how to heal yourself." "No one is learning how to defend themselves or how cures work together if you just hand them a curing system." "It lowers the bar for combat entry and makes the work of those who had to start from scratch less valuable." All of those arguments were seen as asinine, and all of IRE instituted SOME level of serverside curing, rather than relying on a third-party system. And even AFTER the serverside went in, many of us STILL rely on assistance with priorities and switching and parrying because it is a LOT of information to track.
With those who choose to build their own automation, I don't see them entering into the combat scene as less knowdegable about their class. They had to know which affs/attacks followed ones better, how to use the logic properly, and how to set up the system in a way to apply effective logic to the problem of getting from kill route start to kill route end. The argument of speed is less of an argument these days, too, as queueing used properly is as fast as a system sending a command at balance return. The only difference is the thought time that goes into making a proper decision, which does often translate less into 'human error' in the middle of combat, such as hitting a wrong key, typing the wrong alias, smashing the buttons, all of those things. But honestly, the only time I find human error 'fun' or a true victory is when they didn't use their class effectively, and if they weren't using their class effectively manually, they won't be using it effectively autonomously either.
Last, on being given someone else's offense. I've fought people plenty of times who were given an offensive. They have one route, usually, and they don't know how it works or why it works and after a few rounds, any combatant worth their salt will find a linch pin and pull it. Sure, it does give that individual an ability to rise to mid-tier, but that's a big pool. I know I have -learned- from being given someone else's offensive to look through and play with in the past. I couldn't figure out a class, someone shared their code, and it started to piece together as I couldn't make heads or tails of the logic. Or, as the case may be, someone can't code in lua worth shit or at all! And then we return to the argument of, "Should coding ability be a requirement to engage in the game."
I honestly think what would be more effective for the game would not be removing automation or attempting to remove it, but slowing down combat overall. Stop thinking in 1.5s or 2.0s or 1.9s terms, and pull it back a bit. Not a snail's pace, but not so fast that I can go full to dead in 10 seconds and be wondering what happened because the text just scrolled too fast and I haven't coloured/echoed/subbed everything.
TL;DR: Automation is not bad, the argument against automated anything is a slippery slope into coder vs non-coder, let's consider slowing shit down overall so we're not trying to fit an entire duel in 30 seconds.
If we're talking about rate of improvement, manual obviously outclasses auto because of flexibility and adaptability of decision making and understanding combat on a deeper level.
There are definitely auto-chasers and auto-tumblers! Less now, I've seen, but for a bit there, like two years ago, there were a good few.
I agree with Ellodin. The game was more exciting when someone who beat you could actually teach you something, and you knew it was because they were quicker/better versed/more experienced, rather than it being because you're literally playing two different games (one in which they're just hitting a button or maybe no buttons, just waiting for the fight to be over, and one in which you're trying to outwit an offence that doesn't make mistakes). Automation makes me really sad for how Achaea's developing, combat-wise, to be honest. A lot of what was good about it goes away, when it becomes a matter of who wins and who loses, versus it being a more slippery slope before. For example, I could've been the greatest PKer in 2005 but if I went out, got drunk, and logged in, I'd get trashed even by a scrub, because I wasn't mentally all there. Now, I can be hammered as a skunk and still win if I remember what my attack button is. That's pretty depressing.
Let's be honest, with a favourable class matchup and a fully automated offence, you could beat most people even if you're intoxicated, and that's not a healthy state for any game. Much less a tiny game that's so niche, and requires such a huge time/effort investment.
Anyone who's pretty good at manual Achaean pvp is good cuz they practiced, and probably lost a lot, and have been playing a long time. Replacing all of that with someone handing you an XML file to import is a pretty weird thought. I can even think of noncontenders who became pvpers at the moment in the last few years, because of the more widespread use of automation.
Which isn't to say any of it is wrong. People have their right to have an opinion, and if, for some people, it lets them play a game they wouldn't otherwise be able to/have the inclination to play, and it makes it fun for 'em, more power to them. At the same time, it changes something at a very fundamental level in a hobby I really, really used to enjoy, and I think it's the same for some others around here. We're allowed to mourn that.
(also a pocket DW for room hinder but w/e)