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Automation: A diatribe
Sybilla
London
Per HELP AUTOMATION:
"Auto anything is a very serious violation of our rules punishable by permanent destruction or permanent shrubbing of the relevant adventurer."Scripts/triggers that apparently fall into this category are those:
1) that you automate via triggers, and
2) that you use to gain gold or experience.
Basically, if you can walk away from your computer and your character will go on without you, there's a problem.
There are a couple of camps for players: those who feel certain scripts are against the rules but run them regardless, aware of the risk; and those who justify certain scripts as being outside the parameters mentioned in HELP AUTOMATION, and are therefore "legal".
Since this can be a grey area which might be difficult to solve, I wanted to try and approach the problem from a different angle:
[TL;DR] If automation is illegal/discouraged, why are there still mechanisms in Achaea that lend themselves to the use of scripts to automate these tasks?
How can these (mechanisms?) be changed/fixed to prevent the "need" for automation?
Things like inscribing tarot cards, inkmilling, refining ingredients, butchering, etc. when done in large quantities, encourage the use of scripts or dorepeat on equilibrium/balance functions to get through the bulk.
There are those that say as long as you are present at your computer, and able to respond to things in real time, whatever script you run doesn't count as automation. Also since those items aren't netting you experience or gold (unless you go to sell them, but that's something that happens after the scripts are executed), it also doesn't break the rules.
That's fine and good.
My issue is that these things are 'dry' and a boring dynamic. While you can code to gag and delete or replace lines for yourself, they still appear to other people present, making them the sort of antisocial activities that necessitate shutting yourself in a quiet corner to spam over and over until you're done. Yes you can still usually talk to people on channels or tells without disrupting the process, but ultimately it turns into one of those things that cuts your time actively engaged in Achaea.
It is by no means an urgent priority, but I wanted to post here and ask for suggestions to cut down on the need to do so. With Battlerage improving the monotonous grind of hunting, it seems like there could be better designed methods to create these other items without resorting to the same command ad infinitum.
Can we do a "make/inscribe/refine x item" once and have a higher loss of balance cost? Maybe something similar to LISTOFFERINGS <whatever> and then RETRIEVE once it's ready? I'm not that great at suggestions, so opening it up to the rest of you.
Cheers!
9
Comments
I understand that the monotony may cut down on the number of people who do it, but I would guess that with many windows open, people who are forging, enchanting, inscribing, inkmilling, are simply doing something else at the same time so it isn't that much of a limiting factor. I'm fine being rooted to a place until whatever it is is done, but a legal "batching" mechanic would be amazing.
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
EDIT: Or mastering descriptors.
If we can get a system that can even go so far as being interesting/unique/engaging enough to be incorporated into roleplay (rather than just being the current spambot) I'd be so happy! Then we could have "oh yeah, nobody refines like Blablah, have you ever seen them during? It's an art!" and other suchlike.
Mind you, I'm not sure exactly how this would work, but something that requires more input, or participation, or attention would probably me more fun than "dowload X's inkmilling script, makes it so much easier".
I forge manually - and at times, that's meant I've forged over fifty swords manually in a row because forging is a fun hobby to me. Usually when I forge I am checking descriptor progress or doing other things related to forging rather than spacing out and focusing on non-Achaea things. I don't have any aliases, key bindings, triggers, or anything of any kind with forging, with the exception of smelting - I will type "dor smelt bastard" to smelt rather than spamming it a bunch of times, and "dor off" at the end.
I use a similar dorepeat for slice/smash when bashing so that I can do battlerage manually, but have to stop the dorepeat to manually raze shields and I have to restart with each new mob I hit (doesn't automatically change targets), so I can't walk away and leave it going - I'd walk away and get lolstomped by the next two ursu in the stack after I killed the first, or whatever. I am trying to move in the direction of less automation, not more, with bashing, especially since battlerage was introduced - I like that it is more fun to pay attention to now.
The only thing I do that is mostly automated is fishing, with triggers, because otherwise the timing is very hard to keep up with. I still bait and cast manually. It seems to me that it's virtually impossible to fish without triggers and have much success, but maybe I'm just that bad at timing :P I would love to see fishing get a rework similar to bashing where perhaps the timing is more forgiving, or varies rather than being always the same timing for teasing and jerking, etc. - anything that would not require you to rely on triggers (and perhaps would be more interactive!) but still be able to net a decent profit.
Forging and crafting are my only tradeskills so I don't have much to offer in the way of insight on how to make tradeskills more interesting, but from the outside I definitely see the issues you're talking about and love the ideas presented so far. Part of the reason I've never considered picking up another tradeskill like harvesting or gathering is because it does seem really boring and repetitive, and I'd rather be doing interactive stuff IC and just pay for herbs/minerals/refills/whatever than spend time that way. A rework would definitely be a draw to taking on more tradeskills - given the changes with increased lesson cost and tradeskill permits it could potentially mean people spending more money on the game, so win-win all around.
The rules around automation seem literally written around illegalising making money while you're AFK
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
Yes, please!!
Artemis says, "You are so high maintenance, Tharvis, gosh."
Tecton says, "It's still your fault, Tharvis."
And, in general, long interruptible things are really frustrating. Implanting and uprooting totems for instance is a huge pain what with the ability to accidentally interrupt the process with no warning or confirmation required.
I think an ideal implementation would be something like: SYNTHESIS to go into a "crafting mode" where you can specify the number of times an action should be repeated (e.g., TRANSMUTATE 200 BISEMUTUM) and STOP to stop crafting. Instead of getting spammed with messages, you just get a little number tagged onto your prompt a la battlerage that shows how far along your batch is (e.g., Crafting: 195/200). If you try to do something that would break a "channel" (anything that would stop a totem implant), you get a message saying something like "You can't do that while crafting. You'll have to STOP crafting first.".
This would also make it easier on the admin to prod people and see if they're AFK or not since it'd just give them a list of all the people who are currently batch-crafting. Checks could even be semi-automated and sent to everyone who was crafting at once. And the lack of constant spam would make it easier for players to not feel nervous about crafting this way - you don't have to worry about whether an admin asked for a response while you were alt-tabbed or distracted for thirty seconds that ended up in your scrollback.
The only downside is that you lose the immersion the crafting systems offer. Having the system automatically put in all the right herbs is convenient and having to get the herbs out after having done it two dozen times before is just tedious, but I think the first few times buys you a lot of immersion. You get a lot more out of selecting the right herbs, putting them in the pot, and making the elixir than you do typing "CRAFT HEALTH ELIXIR" as in so many other games. It makes crafting feel like a logical outgrowth of the game's basic item mechanics rather than an additional, separate system simply bolted on. Which is why I think, if something like this is ever put in, you shouldn't be able to batch-craft any recipe until you've done it by hand at least once and "learned it" (or, instead of "once", perhaps using a system similar to tekura katas).
First (Pretty much same as Tael's)- When doing whatever, if you're doing something X number of times in a row, cut it all down to one basic command. BEGIN [CRAFTING|ENCHANTING|FORGING|whatever] <amount> <item>. Assuming you're in the proper room for it, it will kick you off balance and a single room message will show that you've begun crafting. At this point, you will remain off balance and receive periodic "You continue to work on <whatever you're doing>." No room message for this one, just for whoever is doing the thing. Any time during this process you can do STOP CRAFTING or something and you will regain balance after a standard balance time for whatever you're doing, so 2-10s depending. Probably have 2 commands here, one for a full stop, one for a 'stop after this item' for things like enchanting/forging. This would cut the need for others to gag the spam, let you easily gag or track your progress, reduce it to a single command, and easily stop doing whatever it is should the need arise. (if tonumber(matches[2])%5 ~= 0 then deleteFull() end --easy self-message limiter sort of thing you could do)
Second - Stolen idea from GW2: As you're doing the above, time per item gets periodically shorter as you craft more. It builds up so you can't just say 'craft 100' then use the increased speed to make 10 and then stop it. This is 100% a convenience thing to reduce the time required to craft X things if you're doing them in a batch versus individually.
Cascades of quicksilver light streak across the firmament as the celestial voice of Ourania intones, "Oh Jarrod..."
The thing about GW2's crafting is that there is such a massive volume of crafters that no one expects to turn any real profit on anything. You can very occasionally use crafting to expand your arbitrage opportunities, but crafting is essentally never, itself, profitable. It has a false veneer of profitability because people don't think about the market fee, but you can essentially never buy something, craft it, sell it, and profit. The application of crafting skills adds very little value to raw materials. There are only two classes of items for which this isn't true: The first are the ones that are actually time-gated (where you can only craft the recipe once per day), and even those are usually sold at cost at this point now that the demand isn't quite as high as when Ascended gear first came out. And Achaea doesn't have time-gated recipes (and probably shouldn't - it's hard to figure out how that would work thematically). The second are the gathered materials where time-to-gather is linear (though the gold-per-hour return on gathering materials in GW2 is also abyssmal).
The less time it takes to produce something, the more a single person can supply. When a small number of people can effectively supply the entire economy, it only takes a couple of people who don't value their time to drive the added value of crafting to 0. And obviously no one can compete with a 0% markup (at best they can match it), so crafting becomes a universally poor investment - an expensive RP tool or a matter of convenience instead of an interesting economic aspect to the game. And exponential crafting speed makes that problem worse because it means that the larger your production batch is, the larger your advantage in being able to supply a larger proportion of the game's demand for a crafted good. Expontentially-increasing crafting speed means that the suppliers who are most influential can be even more influential.
I've actually always been really curious to hear from the designer of GW2's economy why they decided to go with that exponential crafting speed. My suspicion is that it incentivizes buying a lot of materials at once (potentially via gems) and that the game's crafter population is already so high that profit from crafting was never going to be a realistic proposition.
I'll steal an idea from a different game; FFXIV (sorry for you vets if I get any of this wrong). As far as I've seen, you are basically able to work production with a crafting profession in two ways:
1). You automate it ("craft 100x thingy, press start"), resulting in a large number of low quality items and minimal experience, and some wasted materials because each has a % of failing, so no matter if you're at 99.9% proficiency RNG is going to play a part here and there. Something you can step away from if you need to turn those 100 logs into 50 planks of usable wood; or in our case, something to get the bulk of the weapons people will be using. This is also -slower- than getting the same quality items manually.
2). You manually craft, having to perform certain actions to advance the Quality bar of an item to increase the chance of a superior quality item being crafted (granting more experience), while keeping an eye on the Durability to ensure you don't destroy it in the process. Success requires some knowledge of your crafting abilities and results in an item with much higher value to players despite being marginally better, and deemed worth paying a premium for unlike the mass-produced stuff.
With the largely normalised stats on equipment, giving some small advantage in them to people who are actually there to pay attention to it will result in their products becoming worth more than the automated, mass-produced, lowest-stat items, and this work being recognised - I suspect min-maxing instincts will readily kick in, and to the crafter it could become a challenge (part rng still) to craft a true masterpiece. In other words: for items crafted by those smiths dedicated to the craft, the difference in quality shows, and their expertise is sought out (like descriptors may be currently, some being only usable by master smiths). Though, I'm not sure how to achieve this in Achaea terms. There's always making it a timing game like fishing is, though that's evidently still rather easily automated.
Though we could also go the way of battlerage: the longer you're crafting, the more.. creative focus you build up, allowing you to use 'crafterrage' abilities (<--So has to be a thing) that will, if properly executed, result in a slightly superior item and zero chance of failure, while curbing the mundanity of crafting, like battlerage has done to bashing for a lot of people. Also opens up the door to two crafters working together by inspiring each other if they're in proximity and a party (giving each other small bits of +creative focus), or utilising a mutual boon as the peaceful equivalent of the afflictions from battlerage. Hm, that'd be neat. Also encourages RP while crafting cooperatively with other crafters nearby, I think, as long as unlike bashing you wouldn't have to constantly actively hit 'craft' - something more like an intentionally interruptable channel as @Tael proposed above, but with actions with 10s balance times and random things you're able to respond to.