[MUD-Dev] Containing automation?

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad <olag@ifi.uio.no>]

Marian Griffith wrote:
> I think the assumption exists because until fairly recently adventure
> was the only thing you could do on -muds-.  Players had to follow  or
> find other games. The result was, as you can expect, that only people
> who want to adventure are found on muds.  Only with games like Ultima
> Online and Furcadia do we have games that are mud-like but do not ha-
> ve that exclusion of anything but adventuring and combat.

Not sure what you mean by "MUD", but you undermine this viewpoint in a later
message referring to MOOs and what not.  Besides, LPs and DIKUs may provide
building as an activity. Then you have Alphaworld, The Palace,
Habitat/WorldsAway...  No hack'n'slash there.

IMO the Internet and it's MUDs weren't accessible to the casual types until
now. Thus the types that are satisfied with some repeated simple games of
checkers, or similar activities, weren't around until now either.  Most
casual types haven't had a MUD served to them on a silver plate yet.

(Regarding automation/cracking: one possibility is to obscure your
code/protocols regularly by randomizing them, and making sure all reponses
are signed by randomid's provided by the server. Requires Java client.
Another possibility might be to remove all context from the client, thus use
a very dumb client, and make sure nothing is absolute. Thus only presenting
visual data in nonfixed positions, somewhat randomized to avoid easy
detection. Yet another possibility is to make the game based on human
understanding of preconditions which aren't easy to write AI for. E.g: there
are indications of something happening... => sell so and so.. buy so and
so... You need a large number of pre-/post-condition pairs. )
--
Ola





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