[MUD-Dev] The grass is always greener in the other field

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 18 Dec 1999 13:27:23 +1300 
Ian Macintosh <iman at issystems.co.nz> wrote:

> I would suspect that you would just keep track of the last one
> attempted per player (ie, player.last_picked_lock or whatever).
> That'll stuff the macro's up.  And that's all you really want,
> isn't it?

No go.  All that happens is that the macro people change the macro
to be:

  Go to house X and pick lock
  Go to house Y and pick lock
  Repeat until success.

The lengths players will go to to automate and chart their game
worlds are extreme.  Look at the lengths players have gone to to
empirically determine what UOL's base formulae are by carefully
graphing the observed behaviours, and then tweaking the forumlae
until they match the graph for damn near all the skill growth
curves, combat curves etc.

YOu cannot assume that just because something is difficult or
complex, that it won't be figured out, __or__ that it won't be
automated.  This has been proven time and again.  Further, you often
cannot assume that a complex behaviour cannot be approximated by a
very simple behaviour sufficiently well to give good game rewards.
Your formulae may be complex to all hell and gone as an attempt a
obscurity and obtuseness -- and be totally useless if a simple
quadratic approximates it well enough to satisfy 90% of the common
cases.

--
J C Lawrence                                 Home: claw at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--


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