Over half of my fights anymore seem to be against people using triggers for combat openers (often sleep and it's not only shapa). I know it's not against the rules anymore but god damn I want to play against player skill not computer reaction time.

This is probably a terrible idea, but it would effectively nerf the things people are complaining about:

Attach a small amount extra lag to commands when either:

1. They're used and the target isn't in the room, or

2. They're used and the target is in the room but the target entered the room "last". (*)

(*) Make an exception when the target entered the room because he was summoned or dropped by a nightgaunt.

The lag is front-loaded, i.e. before the command goes through.

This means if you stand in a room spamming "c sleep" then the target has a decent chance to walk right in and get first-strike on you.

It also means if you have a trigger set to fire on "so-and-so has arrived" then that person can get the jump on you too.

That is a terrible idea.

>2. They're used and the target is in the room but the target
>entered the room "last". (*)
>

I would look at this is an initiative role from D&D but one that always favors the person entering the room. I would limit the lag to combat starting type skills that are not inherently ambushes in nature (backstab, ambush, waylay, assassinate, etc all those could be done with no lag) and I would have no lag if the character trusts you. Lag would be a little longer then the movement lag for entering as you suggested.

To make it more robust and not completely eliminate the use of the ambush like tactics, a new skill "prepare" could be implemented. This skill could remove the initiate lag on a skill as long as you are not moving. Syntax would be something like prepare "skill" "target". Then when this target arrives you could enter that skill against that target with no lag. It would not automatically fire (like waylay) so you could still use a trigger to have it fire if you wanted to just spam it. I'd give prepare a small amount of lag so you wouldn't want to just build it into a complex trigger.

This way you could still do something like sit outside an area and lay in wait for a target if you want to but you'd need to be more mindful about it. And wouldn't just attack everything that randomly enters the room.

Disarm type triggers and triggers that fire when you are chasing someone would still be useful so it wouldn't fix everything.

I'm sure there are lots of problems that I am not considering but I think it might work on the worse triggers.

The prepare command would open the door again for "effective" arrival triggers.

Yes and no, the no movement aspect would make it impossible to have always active arrival triggers that auto initiate combat when someone enters the room. Second, the lag on prepare would make it so you couldn't build a trigger to set the prepare command all the time and it might make it less desirable to setup in the first place as you would be exposed for at least some brief lag period. So yes, you could still stand one place and use a trigger along with the prepare command to initiate on a single opponent. But that doesn't seem much different then sitting still and spamming a single no lag skill like sleep with a single target in mind so maybe that is ok?

Arrival triggers don't let you win against "e;bash" because of latency. How come you complain about things you can't even identify well? Or perhaps that exactly is the reason

> Arrival triggers don't let you win against "e;bash" because of latency.

I just ran a test and they do. At least, with normal walking lag in a city and approximately equal latency on each character's connection to the game.

They are highly latency-dependent and are on a different level of reliability than shapa's spamtrigger.

I don't see why his trigger wouldn't also be negatively affected by high latency.

And your latency should be 2 pulse worse than the target's in order to miss, which is not the case nowadays, when Martie's finally got his self-lacing shoes.

Not sure if thats a good or a bad thing, but the idea of being a necro and spamming for that villager coming right for you makes you less likely to survive. Certain things like Templars "last stand" champion thingy would be kinda nerfed or even just cabal defense.

The implications of this change would be fairly huge.

gr

Could add the stipulation that if you're in combat there's no lag. So the guy in champion's stand won't be gimped once combat starts.

Could also exempt the "murder" command from the additional lag so you at least have one option if you're standing there trying not to get cleaved (or whatever).

Note: I'm not actually arguing for this change. Just threw it out there as a way of nerfing both arrival triggers and the "stand in one place spamming a command and let your enemy come to you" tactic.

disarm triggers make a ranger's ambush disarm worthless for the most part

sleep triggers will always win because there isn't any sort of lag on the attempt. even if there was, it'd still be near impossible to beat someone that has an arrival trigger due to movement delay in most places


then on top of it you've got a-holes like Shaapa who use dash triggers

so, laxman, i totally agree with you. i only use my client for highlights and aliases, and even then they're few, just simple things like 'bt' = bash target or cc = camp

Play sneaking races or play with a ragged cloak (not as good).

It helps a lot.

Also, I probably appear to react super fast but am usually setting aliases on the fly so I can type either asd, qwe, as or qq to execute whatever command I want. But because I write them on the fly I -do- sometimes get the name wrong. I had a fight not long ago where I just couldn't engage the dude and I had no idea why, but I'd set my alias to zyztyrr not zsztyrr. Also sometimes I type "sad" instead of asd, and sniff sadly at an inappropriate moment.

If you have ever had an assassin sniff sadly as he steps out of the shadows, etc, it's probably me mistyping my alias.

Ragged cloak can actually be better if your opponent doesn't know you're wearing it.

On one hand, because I use telnet or the client on the website most of the time, playing in any set-up is easy and requires no heartbreak at the "loss of client".

On the other hand, I often feel like I'm playing a different game when I see shaapa's triggers and some of the sophisticated targetting aliases people use.

I wonder how many kills I lost because I typed bahs Ahtieli or deaths I took because I did c 'wrod'.

One day I will set up aliases and macros so I don't die to stupid ass #### like that, but today is not that day.

Huh. A few thoughts:

- The rules regarding triggers and botting haven't changed in as long as I can remember as both an Immortal and a player.

- Using triggers doesn't have to be against the rules.

- As a general statement of fact, there is not much (if any) difference between using a trigger and plain old spamming in cases where the attacker is quick and alert.

- If you're confident someone is using triggers against you, PRAY. Besides Pro, who is typically wrong, hardly anyone ever does.

- If I catch someone using triggers in PK and I can trip them up using my fancy Immortal commands, I will happily slay them.

- Understand that it's hard to catch people abusing triggers, and almost impossible via logs alone.

- Triggers can be an advantage even when the opponent knows they are being used, but knowing they are being used can also significantly reduce their effectiveness if the would be victim actually bothers to change their behavior and adjust their tactics.

- Triggers can be used against people. Be clever.

- Within reason, you are allowed to take advantage of your MUD client too.

There is a big difference between spamming and triggers.
1.) you can overspam and end up lagging yourself out
2.) someone can sneak up on a spammer and use it to lag them out.
3.) some skills being spammed force you out of hide/camo
4.) sleep doesn't matter much if you are alert you got all the time in the world after it lands.
5.) for folks using area attacks (vokers and bards but mostly bards with fiend and sleep) you simply can't spam but a trigger clears that up.



I do y know what you mean by change behavior if they use entry/is here f
Triggers. Initiative turns fights, especially where a key opener is a big factor, I can't out think/position automation.

I will pray in the future but I assumed it was "legal" since shapa openly used them for hundreds of hours.

Thanks for responding and looking over the game.

>I will pray in the future but I assumed it was "legal" since
>shapa openly used them for hundreds of hours.
>

I don't know what to tell you. It's in the helpfiles and IIRC, it's even come up on the forums once or twice recently.

Nobody has ever done us the courtesy of announcing to us that they are using triggers. As far as anyone "openly" abusing triggers, I'm sorry but that means about as much to me as saying we should punish someone because "I just know". I sympathize, so in the future yes, please do report suspected rule violations.

I will say that a well written "so-and-so has arrived" trigger would be nearly impossible for you to detect from imm land. Basically you just write the trigger to disable itself after firing, and the character's behavior will look no different than it would if he just had amazing reflexes.

If anything that's the only thing you could look for. A guy standing somewhere who is not spamming a command who suddenly uses that command immediately after someone walks into the room. But you can't know that he wasn't just sitting there with the command already typed waiting to press enter as soon as "so-and-so has arrived" flashes across his screen.

There are numerous areas where CF encourages you to play like a bot. It is very similar to the issues of aim bots in FPS and similar online games. You can try to ban the software, but it is better to simply reduce the effectiveness of things where a trigger is better than a person... which would require some out of the box thinking, but could be done.

For instance, with greet triggers, you could simply add a skill or in built command to "waylay" or something similar. There are already skills in this space, waylay, dash, thief waylay, etc, but that could be expanded if you really wanted to make it so that first-mover advantage was tactical rather than twitch/reaction time/trigger (ab)use.

I can and do make some rather complicated use of triggers in some places, and would be glad to share those as impetus to make those things more intelligent, so long as it didn't end up just making me waste more time in the long run....

I pictured this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPDZSy0MJrA

Giving every class the equivalent of a trigger is not a good solution as it creates imbalance.

His logs revealed he had triggers firing off the prompt.

But I'm not sure what you can do to disrupt that.

I don't really agree that it is hard to spot a reaction trigger as opposed to a shaapa-style spam trigger.

The reality is no one will react fast every time if they don't do at least some spams.

Also there are plenty of cases where someone is paralysed from a filler but their triggers are still firing as their enemy moves in and out even though the player knows they can't engage.

We really don't have a precedent for punishing people for admitting they did something wrong (whether they're telling the truth or not) after their character is dead.

In theory if someone admits it and continues to do it on subsequent characters they'll be easier to catch, but I think we've heard some pretty reasonable arguments for why in the case of triggers that isn't the case, especially when nobody up here has the time or desire to be a 24/7 snoop cop.

Just observing that certain players openly admit to trigger use or accidentally post evidence of it.

Proving that it is going on even if hard to prove "live".

My point is mainly that it is evidence that could make you more convinced that investing time in developing some kind of countermeasure might be worthwhile.

Part of the reason I wouldn't advocate post death punishment is there's always the chance they've stopped committing the offense. But at least you could decide where to target your efforts. For example, if you sent a rapid stream of "x has summoned you" 5 times to a char and it triggers 5 concurrent reactions (quaff, bash, or recall say), then you know you are looking at a summon trigger. (These are really common by the way.)

I don't think we've ever doubted it goes on.

We do use echoes to try and fish out trigger abuse from time to time, but we also don't want to effectively accuse people of cheating or interrupt the immersion of their session by spamming them with obviously OOC "anti-cheating" text unless we're pretty confident it's going to nail them. It's alienating and offensive. It's also not something we can do just because a player prays because players are 100% dead wrong more often than not, even if we throw out Pro.

Beyond that, I don't see any ROI in developing better tools / methods for trying to sniff out trigger use, especially when most of the people getting their mileage out of triggers are almost certainly capable of (and willing to spend the time) accomplishing their goals in such a way that any formal countermeasures would be useless. Plus, even better tools and methods largely rely on us being in the right place at the right time.

I grok what you're saying and all I can tell you is that it's not as simple as you seem to think, which is the simplest explanation for why more people don't get in trouble for it.

Since shaapa seemed convinced it was kosher, maybe more people need to see it formally announced that triggers aren't okay and they'll stop.

Won't stop everyone, but some.

.

Triggers aren't against the rules. Bots are.

Yes, but where is that line between trigger use and a bot? All bots use triggers to accomplish what they are designed for.

Is that line a sleep trigger that continuously runs no matter what you are doing (moving, scanning, eating, checking where) until it successfully fires?

Meaning you should be at your keyboard and you should be able to intervene at any moment. It does not matter then whether commands are sent by a trigger or by your hand.

But if you walk away from the screen and let a set of triggers do stuff for you, THAT is botting.

If your whole argument hinges on whether or not a person is sitting at the keyboard then I have to disagree with you, cause that is f'ing stupid.

But if you are saying that if mud client code will accomplish it's intended purpose by interacting with the mud directly, whether or not a person is interacting with the keyboard... well, that is a good argument.

But it's in the rules.

For those held by fillets, see if they still try to attack people walking into the room. This isn't something we can pray about because as players we can't tell, but I did see a log where someone held by a fillet was repeatedly triggering dirt kick on my non sneaking char each time they walked past.

For those spamming attacks on someone who isn't in the araa and hadn't been for some time, suspend their prompt momentarily and see if it stops the flow of their commands through to the mud. Spam wouldn't stop completely and immediately but a trigger reacting to each prompt would.

It's much more subtle.

If I were writing a sleep trigger that just spams sleep (as opposed to waiting for the guy to walk in and then sending the command) I would not use the prompt at all. I'd use the failure echo from the previous sleep command. In pseudocode, it would be this:

#action {sleep echo when target isn't in the room} {c sleep target}
#action {sleep failed} {disable triggers}
#action {sleep success} {disable triggers}
#action {yell because I'm attacked} {disable triggers}
#alias {off} {disable triggers}


If you wanted to be really fancy you could add some more "auto-disable" conditions. For instance, the echo you get when someone summons you. Or the echo you get when you're transferred to the ROTD.

The way to mess with this trigger would be to send several extra "sleep echo when target isn't in the room" echos. That would cause it to stack additional "c sleep" commands and it would quickly get out of control.

If he really wanted, though, he could make it "stateful" and account for that detection method as well.

unlike Shapa.

The prompt is really really useful for triggers that don't have any of the problems you described.

Not sure how using the prompt is better. An staff member could echo additional prompts and mess it up just as easily as he could echo additional sleep failure text.

"As a general statement of fact, there is not much (if any) difference between using a trigger and plain old spamming in cases where the attacker is quick and alert."
-Triggers will win every time, no matter how fast you are spamming or how alert you are. It is a huge difference.


"Triggers can be used against people. Be clever."
-The last time I did this I got in big big trouble for it, because I was saying "All the ladies swoon when they hear has arrived." to trigger their triggers. The trigger user saw no punishment even though I had proven he was using them. So please tell us how to use their triggers against them, because the "be clever" approach bit me in the ass hard.

I guess I used the wrong brackets and it cut "myname" out. What I said to trigger their trigger was "All the ladies swoon when they hear ENTERNAMEHERE has arrived."

>"Triggers can be used against people. Be clever."
>-The last time I did this I got in big big trouble for it,
>because I was saying "All the ladies swoon when they hear
> has arrived." to trigger their triggers. The trigger
>user saw no punishment even though I had proven he was using
>them. So please tell us how to use their triggers against
>them, because the "be clever" approach bit me in the ass
>hard.

That's not how you abuse triggers. The easiest way is to spamlag the target, but you can actually undress or even delete people online. And the most notorious trigger out there is definitely susceptible to that kind of attack. Be clever!

nt

~