I may regret posting this, but...

Some skills are so easy to bot spam that it punishes players who either don't use a mud client or don't know how to automate the one they use. Examples: hide, sneak, mark of the prey.

There are probably others, but those are the three that came to mind. Basically it's any skill that has very little lag associated with it, lacks a timer that prevents it being entered in quick succession, costs no mana, and doesn't require combat with a mob.

One solution would be to add a small mana cost (5?) to such skills. This would require the would-be spammer to at least rest between spam sessions. Unfortunately, it would also penalize players who execute these commands in "redundant" situations, e.g. entering "hide" all the time purely out of reflex. As a workaround, the mana cost could drop to zero once the skill is mastered.

Thoughts?

and not let me spam hide/sneak and other such ridiculous skills, that's the day i quit playing CF forever.

That makes me bleed from my eyes and anus if I ever use the -->!<--
Key.

Dude, I maxed my Hide/sneak withg a duergar on a Raw telnet in no time.

Just leave well enough alone.

Which means that there is no way to see if you are hidden or not (without an outsider telling you). I was a bit lazy with Fungor and didn't spam it to 100% at level 4, which I compensated by spamming hide about three to twenty times or so each time I wanted to hide, just to be sure. sneak is similar to hide in this, but you can see if it affects you by checking affects.

In short, people are going to spam hide and sneak at low levels, mana cost or not. So why make it more difficult? All such thing encourages is botting.

If I can just overload the buffer with 10 commands, and just sit there hitting up arrow, enter, I'm fairly content to spend an hour while I'm only half concentrating on CF. If I have to take into account my mana pool, I'd probably end up writing a bot to sleep at the appropriate time, wake up, spame, rinse-repeat.

I don't know how to automate the client I use. I've never bothered to learn. I've played assassins before, and never felt myself at a disadvantage. It's still ridiculously quick to learn those skills. To me, that's one of the reasons I love playing morts. At this stage in my CF career, the young whippersnappers know where the good eq is better than I, know how to get around better than I, know where preps, protections, ect are better than I, and I still don't consider myself at a disadvantage when I play morts. It just makes it more fun.

Granted this doesn't directly answer your question, but I don't particularly think that kind of change is needed.

You're just as bad as the guy who wanted skills to be forgotten with disuse and gear to have to be fitted.

Jesus, the game is chore enough as is.

Let's focus on fun.
I don't think finding ways to make sneak take longer to master makes the game more fun for anyone.

>I don't think finding ways to make sneak take longer to master
>makes the game more fun for anyone.

Get off your high horse. I wasn't attempting to make it take longer, I was trying to even the playing field between those who know how to bot and those who don't. If a small mana cost were added to sneak while simultaneously the odds of a given sneak command resulting in improvement were increased, the non-botters would actually have an easier time mastering it. It's the other type (like me) that would find it more difficult.

I don't bot.

And I don't have any trouble spamming them. It took me an hour or so to master hide and sneak with a felar recently. I did it while watching Family Guy. Not complicated.

And it would have taken me longer to master it (using my fingers, rather than a bot). If you know how to program a bot, then you can program it to rest for a few ticks after so many tries or whatever. So really, it doesn't hurt the botters at all, aside from adding a little extra time to mastering it. Who it hurts are the people like me who spam in our guild like good boys.

Besides, it's not like this is any kind of problem. Has anyone, ever, complained about it? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Especially when fixing it will just make it a pain in the ass for us all.

How about this then:

Modify skills like hide, sneak and mark such that they have an extra "hidden" affect. Give it a medium duration, mabye six game hours, and have successive uses overwrite the duration. Now, make the probability that a given usage will generate an improvement inversely proportional to the "time remaining" on the hidden affect. If the "time remaining" is six hours then it'll be "less likely" for a given usage to generate an improvement. If the "time remaining" is zero hours, or if the affect is absent altogether, then the odds of improvement will be "more likely".

The guy bot spamming hide will always have his hidden affect sitting at the maximum duration, meaning each hide command will be "less likely" to generate an improvement. The guy who uses the skill "normally" will have each of his uses be "more likely" to generate an improvement.

The difference would have to be VERY extreme to justify it.
Even still, all I can think of when I read that is "ew". Sure, it helps one style of play, but do we really want to add a detriment the other style too? Not all spamming, in fact I'd hazard to guess very little spamming, is bot spamming. Should we punish the finger-mashing spammers? I should think carpal tunnel and boredom is punishment enough.

Splntrd

Since we want to eliminate spamming all together how about we have the immortals code that each subsequent use of a skill will incur a higher mana usage penalty alltogether. Why stop at hide and sneak. Let's eliminate ALL spamming! Then after that we can request that the immortals implement the need for balanced diets on our characters, otherwise they up and die. Then we can add random variables fitting to each area where if you're in a forest a random tree can fall on you and kill you, if you're in a city you can be run over by a carriage, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions but let's not stop just there because the sky's the limit. Then when we finish all these changes we can sit back and see how we've made CF a better game.


I can't believe you'd actually take the time to write a post about something as inane as spamming hide and sneak.


Cheers.
Jhyrb.

You like spamming. Gotcha.

We could just realise nothing is broke here.

Dude this is the equivillant of reminding the teacher to give homework. You just lost mucho cool points...

That which does not kill us,
makes us stronger.

Enough about BOTTING.

Any one worth his salt is going to ask himself, "What is a BOT? Let me go google BOT and hit Dioxides to see what it is."

If they don't know what a bot is they are new to mudding as it is and are going to have to take their licks like everyone else.

Sidenote:

If this is changed, I'd further suggest upping the chance of improvement when these skills are used, since they're no longer super-spammable.

Don't ever suggest something like this again. Horrible idea. Better idea = make them work 100% of the time regardly of skill %. Same function as now, only no spamming required.

although I cringe the idea of giving thieves and assassins inherently perfect hide/sneak. Not sure what sort of balance issue this would cause at lower levels. I can imagine not tooo much of a change, but it would definately benefit them a lot.
Also, I like the satisfaction that comes from perfecting sneak or hide, and the imperfectness of it before 100% makes you appreciate it that much more. Its a reward tingy. This is the same argument for not making it easier to hero; you appreciate things like that more if you work for them, and there's definately a sense of accomplishment.

Splntrd

But I get zero sense of accomplishment from botting hide and sneak for an hour at level 4. If there is an advantage here, it's only for newbie players who don't know to perfect hide and sneak. Any vet playing a hiding class is going to perfect these before 11, and I'm ok with giving newbies the advantage of not getting tooled because hide failed.

Simply playing devil's advocate. And then there's still the balance issue; how would that change stack up against other classes at mid levels? If every stealth character perfected these skills before level 11 as it is now, it wouldn't affect that balance at all. Not everyone does. But maybe, there are few enough who don't that it wouldn't affect the balance in any major way.

Also; if you give thieves/assassins 100% hide/sneak, do you also give rangers 100% camo/creep, Mages 100% invis/duo, or even 100% detect invis? How do you justify NOT doing it to those things, if you've already done it with hide?

Splntrd