[MUD-Dev] Containing automation?

[Matthew Mihaly]

On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Koster, Raph wrote:

> I wrote:
> 

> It's also worth noting that stuff that the general user may not be capable
> of automating, like say, speedwalk, might be interesting for one person to
> automate, who then releases a nice GUI front end to his automation, like
> say, a mud client. In other words, the wider your audience, the more likely
> someone will find something worth automating, and then can distribute the
> software to many people. In most muds this stops at standard mudclient
> features, but in some muds it goes further, into mud-specific botting
> scripts. And in commercial games it goes to the extent of custom
> packet-altering software for maximum possible speed and efficiency.

Good point. What an awful world we live in.

> 
> > The economic system you described sounds pretty basic, and it doesn't
> > sound as if there is much strategy involved, or much decision-making
> > involved. If you want to stop people from automating it, I think you have
> > to force the users to make decisions based on previous output. If there is
> > just a standard way of doing things, ie a to b to c, then you are going to
> > be pretty much screwed in terms of stopping automation, I suspect.
> 
> There aren't many muds where there is an economic system at all, so they all
> tend to be fairly basic, based on simple a + b = c types of things.
> Eminently dull to actually manufacture things, and extremely 
automatable.

Hmm, yeah, that's true. If you're going to go with an economic system of
that type though, why not just let the players hire mobiles to do the
grunt work? Assign specialties to each type of work, and have general
labourers. Each type of work takes X investment in raw materials and X
investment in labour-hours. How much a labour hour costs would depend on
the type of work being done. Just hire the workers, and let them go at it.
Totally automated, but also a totally level playing field as no one has to
know anything about clients to do it.

--matt




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