Your cheating 'bot

Seems some people are playing Clan Lord in a way Delta Tao feels is inappropriate. Seems if you automate certain behaviors for certain lengths of time, you are "cheating." The punishment for cheating is "bad luck."

Personally, I don't care if people script or don't script. You pay your $10, you play the game anyway you want. And frankly, if there's something to be gained by scripting, it's not the fault of the scripter, it's a fault of the game. Let's face it, money hunting is dull, dull, dull. One of the premises behind Clan Lord is boring things shouldn't be rewarding. Unfortunately, money hunting is a necessary evil, and it's just not that much fun to do. I don't blame people for trying to automate it. When people do that, they are playing a meta-game: trying to write a good script. I'm probably in a minority, but I really don't think it's such a bad thing.

I suppose Joe lies awake at night worrying about a server crushed under the load of dozens upon dozens of money hunting bots. All that CPU power and bandwidth being consumed... What to do?

Admittedly it's hard to make money hunting un-boring. Personally, I advocate an entirely unrealistic but fun solution. Instead of having a critter worth X coins, and splitting it among N people, scale up the coinage based on the party size. Obviously the relationship can't be linear, the potential kills per hour of a group tend to be higher than an individual. But the way the coinage split is done right now, it encourages anti-social behavior. I'll get more coins per hour by myself then I would with 3 buddies. I think coin return should be tweaked to reduce this gap, even if there's no "realistic" explanation for why you get more coins when you hunt in a group. Sometimes realism should take a back seat to fun.

But, I doubt we'll ever see that happen. Such an approach would increase the money supply, and Delta Tao likes to keep a tight lid on that, and for good reason. Though, I think they tend to err on the hugely conservative side.

So there will probably always be some incentive for some players to try to eliminate some of the monotony of money hunting by scripting. I think what Delta Tao is doing is walking down a dangerous slippery slope. It's dangerous on several counts. One is defining the behavior that is forbidden. The other is how they deal with these infractions.

Since scripting isn't a black and white thing, it requires a judgment call on the part of a GM. This policy now turns GMs into cops. And, they are totally unaccountable cops. Let's say I'm doing laundry. When I go downstairs to deal with it, I park my character in a safe area, and inform my friends I've got my 'bot macro running if they want a heal. Is it right if a GM is going to come along and maybe interrupt my macro so I timeout, perhaps screwing my party, or even worse, spawning a few death vermine to kill me? After all, let's be honest, that's what "bad luck" means. It means a GM taking action against a player in a way in which they are totally unaccountable for what they do.

Does Delta Tao really want to get into the policing business? Why are they so eager to police scripters, when they wanted nothing to do with harassers? Don't GMs have better things to do?

In my mind, if Joe is hugely worried about 'bots loading up his server and eating into his bottom line, then make the rule simple: $10 gets you one month access, but that's not 24/7 access. If your character is online for more than a certain amount, using a rolling average over a certain period of days, you get warned. DT could even offer special accounts, for $20 a month, that could be used for 24/7 access. If I want to log on for two hours, and watch my character hunt on auto pilot, why is that bad? I pay my $10. I don't hurt anyone. Why are GMs now abusing me? Because I'm not playing the game the way they want me to?

The whole "cheating" gets punished with "bad luck" sets a dangerous precedent. Helpful has made it clear he feels ICQ is cheating. How would people feel if a GM caused "bad luck" if you mentioned ICQ in Clan Lord. Seems pretty silly, doesn't it? It's really not that different a premise, and it highlights how absurd the idea of enforcement is for scripting. It's only a matter of time before safe areas are modified to automatically interrupt looping macros, and that would be just capricious. And doing things like that won't make much of a difference anyway because players will figure it out and engineer around it.

The whole scripting issue seems somewhat facist to me. Imagine if Delta Tao sudden decided to enforce roleplaying, and punishing OOC behavior. It wouldn't be the first online role-playing game to do so. I think it would diminish the game. I think a game as diverse as Clan Lord can support a wide variety of types of play, and for some people, they get their fun from clever scripting. Why not? Why are GMs allowed such a free hand to do things to players because they suspect they script? I would hope that GM grievances regarding player conduct would be handled in an aboveboard manner. Personally, I get nervous at the idea of invisible enforcers, who are judge and jury, and who can bop me with their nightstick of justice without any accountability for their actions. Sounds like a formula for abuse.

Admittedly, it's a tempest in a teapot. It's not like there are tons of people doing this. I don't script, hell, I barely have time to play these days. But frankly, I can't understand why Delta Tao is getting their knickers in a twist about it, other than the resource consumption issue, which I think they could deal with in a much better, simpler, and upfront way.

posted 5:41 PM | link |