Recent Alignment/Damnation changes

[12345]

True, I know the feeling. I think the worst I can say is that I was leading a group against mobs that I sometimes solo... the group was about 6 people besides me, decent levels, and we were dying at a pretty good rate. Couldn't understand it for the life of me. Then 1 person that I know pays attention joined and turned the whole group around.

I've noticed my newbie tolerance is higher than most, but honestly, some newbies aren't nearly as frustrating as the botters.

[kjartan]

You aren't supposed to be botting, even in groups. We want to encourage groups, but not at the price of allowing botters. If you guys have any suggestions for ways we could automatically detect and eject botters in groups, let us know. I am willing to devote some serious coding effort to this, so even if your ideas are pretty ambitious I'd love to hear them. If you don't want to post something, you can email me at kjartan@slothmud.org.

[12345]

Honestly Kj, I've been racking my brain and there's very little coming to mind. The 2 problems that I keep running into are that half can be faked with a client, and the other half could be triggered by someone who is honestly afk for an emergency...

The best I can think of is that if you have someone who's made 3x their current cap and they haven't typed anything combat worthy, start giving them xp penalties. This would still catch people who legitamately go afk, but considering most will ask if you want them to recall anyway, I don't think they'd mind taking an hit like that unless you killed them or something.

Other things to check for would be protecting someone who's not in the room or you're not grouped with (though this could trigger honestly) for 5 or so minutes. I'd like to say not protecting the person below you if you have the skill... but this is an actual tactic every blue moon.

Being the only character standing in a CF with 90% or more of your mana... but some quests could trigger that.

The ones that don't even assist are probably the worst... but when I have more than 1 non-protector, I often have them stay out of combat and heal... or do raises/reblinds/respells/etc.

I'll have to think about that some.

[kjartan]

We could deal with honest emergencies by adding an "idle" flag that you should set if you are afk for an emergency. It would prevent you from gaining any xp while in the group; when you're back, you unset it. We can also make it so the group leader can set it for you.

If you don't have the idle flag set, then the mud can start trying mercilessly to tell if you're botting.

[12345]

If the leader can set it for you... that'd be a great start.

[Weasel]

Good idea with the idle flag - and if it's going to be over X amount of time (say 2-3mins max), the leader should have to approve it.. but again I can think of ways around that.. ie: script timers to turn flag off after 2 mins and back on again a few seconds later. It's certainly a step in the right direction, and if nothing else will serve as a warning.

The most effective thing was when immorts actually spent time monitoring groups for a while and wiped someone for botting/afk in a group (once they established there was no lost connection etc and it was all beyond doubt and discussed with the perpetrator as not an emergency etc).. I didn't see any botting at all for quite a while after that, strangely enough... unfortunately this manual monitoring is time consuming, and immorts time is better spent elsewhere. Making an autoscript for could be really dangerous though - I'd hate to see someone pinged for it when it wasn't really deserved, while others get away with it through scripting. Maybe random checks are the best thing, just to keep people on their toes, and a delevelling for those caught without a legitimate or leader-approved reason.

[Weasel]

one more thing with leader-approved idle flag - leaders have enough to do, so perhaps a request system where the group member enters a 'request for absense' command and length of time requested in minutes, and the leader just receives a prompt to approve it, then all they have to do is type 'ok {some argument}' and the requester gets another message confirming their afk for X minutes.. if the leader does not respond within 30 seconds, a response can be sent to the group member saying 'disapproved' or something along those lines..

[Avatar]

Hrm, interesting interesting.

First regarding auto-assist: I often automate a lot of things: blinds, curse, damn, assist, etc. I don't automate heals, and I hate the assist lag when I'm healing. Typically the first 3 or 4 rounds of combat, pre-buffs, see the highest damage to the tank so I try to stay on top of tank hps. I'm just saying that if I'm 1.healer, I normally turn off my auto-assist and focus on healing. That often means that if I'm healing, I never bother to assist.

I'll try to think of bot-detection-methods too. The "idle" flag seems interesting, but with so many client scripts I still don't think it'll be easy to auto-detect bots. I guess a method for the leader to set this idle flag on players is a good idea. That gives a leader some capability to manage idle/slow players short of recall/ungroup. Another issue with afk/idle players is the way it can cf a group with poor protects. Some methods to audit/control protects would be nice.

I guess something like a leader command that automatically clears all protects for group members would be a start. This way the leader could clear protects and tell everyone to check protects, and noone has an excuse (he's already protected!, my protector hasn't left, i didn't bother to look, etc.) Another leader command to automatically set protects down the list (protect down mode) would be nice. That might take care of 80% of the protect issues, more complex groups (non-prot chars, leaders who are also tanks) would still have to fix a couple of the protects, but not so many.

Hrm, what was I talking about? The idle flag? I seem to have rambled.

[13]

this is dogshit, people just need to recall the bots or leave them at demo.

[Weasel]

heh.. yeah, that works too.

[12345]

Some Aa, others have genuine emergencies (like me) and I'm not about to make a char they've got 60 days of playtime on unusable for a misunderstanding because they had to deal with something important, their computer crashes, or the rare instance (like me) where their keyboard's batteries go dead and they're scrambling around the house looking for charged batteries.

I WILL set them idle, let them lose 20 mil in xp and not give it a second thought. More xp for me and they're the one risking death for no gain.

Speaking of which, the idle flag should also disable looting and being included in the split. Also, if the idle flag is set by the leader, it should set so that it can only be UNSET by the leader. That way they actually have to plead their case and can't just unset it with a client...

I really like this idea

[kjartan]

For whatever reason, there is apparently sometimes a reluctance on the part of leaders to just demo some idlers. I think we can't just say "demo them", everybody is aware of that option and they aren't doing it.

I don't have any problem making the leader have to unset the leader-set idle flag, I just wonder if that will make it annoying for the leader because he has to actually deal with it. I guess we could let the leader set it either way, so he has to remove it or so the idler can remove it.

We could make protect skip idlers (i.e. if you are protecting someone with the flag set, you 100% succeed). I don't want to let the leader just set up the protect order anyway he likes at this point, not even down the list.

I much prefer letting the leader deal with it than trying to auto-detect bots. As has been said, auto-detecting bots can be hard.

So, how's this sound - if the idle flag is set:
- you get no xp
- you get no split
- you don't autoloot, nor can you use "get"
- people protecting you succeed 100%

[12345]

Honestly, it sounds good. Probably more to the point, if I have someone sitting idle in the group for any length of time, they'll get recalled. If I'm constantly tagging the same people idle... I just won't let them join.

I think allowing them to set their own (and remove if set) flags is a good idea. Recalling is the honest thing to do, yes, but can potentially mess up the protect chain, the occasional person doesn't have gate to get back, or if you're in a nogate area, etc. As a leader, I think it'd be pretty cool for someone to say "Damn, I gotta take care of something quick, brb" set themselves idle, and then flag themselves back 5-10 minutes later. They didn't gain anything while afk, took care of their stuff, and generally did the most honorable thing with a minimum of hastle. I don't see that needing a punishment. At least not as long as I have the option of flagging them over their flag if I think they're abusing the system.

And honestly, if the system doesn't work, I'm sure you'll hear plenty of suggestions and complaints on the crier

[Weasel]

Sounds good but for one thing.. the ones who abuse it the most atm are just as likely not to bother setting the flag or advising the leader, so only the ones who are honest about it are going to get penalized..

[*Splork*]

While this is something we are willing to work on, it ultimately comes down to the leaders-you guys know this. It has become acceptable behavior because you guys have allowed it to get to this point. I said this the last time we had thread, I've still yet to be notified once about a botter in a group.

People used to beg to get into a good group that people knew botting was not going to occur. Those who botted rarely were allowed back into groups.

Kick them out of your groups, pkill them, whatever. Just don't put up with it.

Splork

We are not going to spend our time looking for botters. If I stumble upon one, they will be dealt with harshly. Otherwise, it is up to the leaders and group members to notify us.

I disagree with Weasel( again I know) but botting was at its lowest when annie and others were pkilling botters, flight was removing their protects, groups refused to allow them to join, etc. Those immortals who spent countless hours finding botters should of been building us a new website or adding something fun for our players to abuse because ultimately it gained nothing for Sloth:-)