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Comments
Regardless though, technical feasibility isn't the biggest problem with that. Our biggest source of new-to-IRE players are still existing MUDers, and a good chunk of them like to use the client to which they're accustomed.
No, those are part of the game. External scripting programs aren't, or wouldn't be in that case.
If you're chastising automated curing and triggers of all kind, then well, you're talking about breaking the game open and starting brand new. Because those things are just part of how we play. And you're going to have shake the earth to change that.
But yeah, I'm more than up for discussing the implications and solutions to the real problems, but to all the extremists screaming about how all automation, alias, macros, and triggers are evil...I think I'll just tap out and let y'all have that one.
Orzaansyn, what are you getting at? I mean, it's good to start from the strictest definition of automation and work from there to define different levels and categories of it and then talk about what is and isn't too much (and whether anything can be done about it). I'm not totally sure if that is your point or not.
Also, even as a non-combatant, it's exceedingly clear that automation is absolutely huge. Forum discussions constantly confirm it, even this one. Just to pick on Kuy for the moment because he happened to be the guy that most clearly confirms it here. At the top of the page Kuy insists that people who consider offensive scripting a serious barrier (which interestingly, Santar singles out as the most serious problem while maintaining that he uses a fairly minimal amount of scripting in general) are "spewing biased vitriol". A few posts later Kuy insists he'd actually leave Achaea if admin got serious about reducing the role scripting plays in combat... (this is typical of Achaean discussions in general and is pretty much why RNG forging that produced uber weapons lasted for about 10 years longer than it should have).
I don't have any experience in business though, I can only express my interest in such a game!
It's probably assumed that's an external scripting program too, though.
And be certain that server side curing has been a blessing for me, I am even able to fight and defend raids from my phone with it.
Achaea is a text game, involving nothing but text. It's literally designed as "Learn2Code" on a basic level. Hell, even the novice guide teaches you how to make aliases / triggers on the HTML client.
If queuing is 'Automation', then I - and virtually anyone not logged in from Telnet - are all 'automated' to an extent.
There's two massive trains of thought on that term. What I presumed on first reading is that you, like the majority of the playerbase, don't like an offensive system being a 1-key press and kill metric. There needs to be some tactic to things.
With that in mind, however, unless you're manually typing in every single action (outrift bloodroot, eat bloodroot, envenom scimitar93493 with curare, jab dave) - you're using some sort of 'system' that you've made. Most people have 'bashing' attacks that often stand, and then stab your enemy.
This has gone from an alias that does
send("jab dave")
to
send(queue add eqbal stand|queue add eqbal jab dave") -- and just snowballs to compound to larger attacks.
Most monk combos used to not be able to be done without sending 3 different commands minimum. (SDK Dave, UCP Dave, UCP Dave)
Since the early days of zMud, and MudMaster, Aliases and Triggers began to take a stronger foothold on things. By typing LU, I can now stand, lunge, and engage my enemy all at one time. I can pre-envenom with a second alias, envenoming both of my weapons with a pre-set list of venoms that I've picked, and attack with macros based on limbs. The turning point for most people isn't even affliction tracking, as all that is doing is catching what I haven't coded into blocks of color : afflictions and cures. It's all just information.
With a quick glance, you can see what afflictions your enemy has - and more importantly, what they don't. I don't view this as automation at all, but I am 'on the wall' about auto-envenoming based on a pre-set list of desired afflictions and their priority. This one is arguable.
What most of us are against, however, is the one button press kills that slip into Achaea. The problem, however, isn't one of technical ability - as why SHOULDN'T you be able to code your own actions? The problem is, instead, distribution of said systems to other people that YOU didn't author yourself.
Achaean combat these days relies entirely on your opponent making a mistake, versus you levering your own ability to yield an advantage and ultimately victory. That's the point of classleads, as to balance everything out.
You're absolutely insane if you think I'm going to type out MANUALLY:
"dsl Jinsun curare gecko" or whatever venoms I need, every 1.7 seconds.
"You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else."
-Albert Einstein
So, making the point that having to type out manually everything your system/serverside handles for you now won't get you very far.
This has a really important point in it and reminds me of discussions on how to make sure that pilots using autopilot don't get bored (and therefore complacent). And yeah, Achaea would be pretty tedious without some automation.
Santar, that's pretty incredible. I tend to believe you, but I also think you're a freak. That said, I wish you'd gone more into why you single out aff tracking as most problematic/harmful to the game as a whole, unless you detailed that already in the flurry of people posting.
I will not play Achaea Combat Lite. I will just go back to MateriaMagica.
I don't think anyone's gotten far enough with combat scripting to come close to replacing player skill, and just about all automation has its trade offs, even if some forms of automation are just outright better than most people could ever get manually.
Curing is the primary example of "outright better" because it's a task designed for automation rather than human interaction. Let me break it down:
1. It requires understanding what about a thousand (closer to two or three if you include PvE, if not more - I've never bothered with most PvE lines except for places I hunt at) different lines of text do in abstract terms. This is a job for a dictionary.
2. It requires parsing those lines with extreme efficiency. Most affliction classes dish out one affliction per second, so you'll be reading lines at that sort of speed. This is the job for a text parser.
3. It requires keeping track of what afflictions you currently have, and what you've cured. This is a job for memory. Variables and such.
4. Curing priority is a matter that could be considered within the domain of human skill, but honestly, you could consider this a matter of hierarchy or rules parsing, two things computers do very well. The part that's in human domain is often handled by switching hierarchies or changing factors or whatnot.
There's not a lot about curing that isn't handled exceptionally well by computers. Even anti-illusion and silent affliction tracking (do I have recklessness?) is handled better by computers than by people, given that the logic is usually simple (+1 for computers) and the time to perform it is very, very tight (-1 for people).
I prefer my Achaea like a game of speed chess, where emphasis is on developing tactics under pressure, not typing fast.
My statement in no way belittled you or anyone else, nor have I once condoned a single person in this thread for enjoying the game in their own way. For you, of all people, to say something with the sole intent of insult is very surprising to me.
Except curing systems, of course. That's a huge benefit, since it does about half the work for you, and does it better than almost any human ever could.
God damn, I wrote this giant wall of text on my phone and accidentally touched the wrong link. Okay so here it goes again:
I started playing and getting into combat a little after @Kez 's first character and I feel very much the same as her in regards to PVP and exploration. This was around the time people were making a shift to zmud and queued curing. It was also just before the advent of ACP for zmud, which was (as far as I know) the first broadly distributed system (or the framework of one), and also later followed by the proto-SVO, vadi-system which was (I believe) multi-client and favoured by MUSHclient users such as myself.
On my part, my 'system' on MUSHclient as a newling Jester-turned-Magi consisted of a sipper/mosser by... either Larkin or Iocun I can't remember who, a handful of aliases with rudimentary targetting and a badly cobbled together pipe management thing that I had to manually refill via aliases because all the pipes looked the same and I didn't know how to differentiate them, and a carefully accumulated bunch of triggers that were unqueued so basically I was eating and smoking double of what everyone else. The triggers would pick up whatever I had and I had to manually pick up and cure the rest.
I actually had a lot of fun back then. I liked going back to look at old combat logs and slowly pick apart what I did wrong and how I could have responded better. When 'reviewing' such spars, I could genuinely ICly say that I'd panicked or I screwed up. Or that I'd *gasp* actually never seen that attack before in my life. I was responsible for every action I took, and every decision I had to make in those moments. I could actually tell you what cured what and would still be able pick up on things enough to cure myself and run away while doing so if things went southwards.
It was enough that I could have been considered a combatant. I wasn't fantastic or anything mind you, I was easily in the bottom 30-40%, but it was still enough that people could still say 'that's a Tempest' or 'I'd like you to get more involved in combat', or even 'ohey wanna be our MoS'.
Today, I couldn't do any of those things. Each time I've gone dormant and come back, the PVP scene has evolved to the point where it's very nearly unrecognisable. And every time I've tried to dip my toes back into it, I'm immediately repelled by how script heavy it's gotten and how fast paced everything moves. It's gone from "do you understand how this shit works" to "do you understand how to break that guy's shit". I'm pretty sure that by now, the most IC reason you could give for dying in combat apart from 'jumped me while I was bashing' is 'I didn't leave the room on time' because the only other thing you could possibly say is 'my system broke'.
I've been wondering since I created why I keep getting miss-messages, pretty much daily. One day I'm going to get something good.