[MUD-Dev] Curing skill spam (was: Moving away from the level base system)

[z032383 at students.niu.edu]

Scatter wrote:

> What are you trying to achieve by blocking people from making use of
> the system you implemented?

> That comes across a bit blunter than I intended, let me expand. You
> (generic you, not you personally) designed and implemented a system
> where players increase their skills by using them. Why? The usual
> reason is game-world realism (the world feels and works more like a
> real place than it does with artificial constructs like experience
> points. The player's can increase their skills by practicing them,
> just like in real life.

> In real life, you might be bad at playing a certain piece on the
> piano.  What do you do? You play it over and over until you've
> practised it enough to get it right almost every time.

[snip]

Okay, I think I shall expand upon the original 'blocking' system.
Skill spamming creates a disparity between skills that are not
necessarily combat skills, and combat skills. It is impossible to spam
a skill that deals with sword use. A character has to go out, fight
monsters, and gain experience to improve at his or her sword. Most
spells, save combat ones, can be spammed as quickly as mana becomes
available. Now this isn't really fair for someone who has a
warrior-orientated (in a classless system) character, whose skills are
mostly useable only in combat. Of course, life's not fair. Why not
create a practice dummy somewhere where warriors can go to attack it
ad nauseum to increase their weapon skills.

You gave the example of a mage wanting his teleport skill to be useful
enough to use in battle to get out of a jam. This bears the need for
him to practice his teleport spell very often, perhaps even spam
it. Yet bringing this to reality, the character has gotten very good
at his teleport spell outside combat situations. When it comes to
casting it under major pressure, he may very well pee in his pants.

Instead of doing what I originally said, a system where players gained
little from spamming and lots from real use would be better. For
example, successfully casting teleport while in battle gives the
player 6 skill points towards raising that skill.  However, using the
same skill in town earns the player 3 skill points. Even worse, if the
player is continually casting teleport (I almost want to say cramming
for an exam. . .) he will only gain 1 skill point or a fraction
thereof.

This certainly shouldn't be the case for every skill. Obviously,
"professional" skills such as jewelcraft or armor repair can only be
done in town, and characters should not be penalized for that. As
well, these skills either produce useful effects, or they
fail--generally costing the player lots of money either way.

> You don't want unattended clients hogging resources or causing the
> game to appear to have anti-social players? I don't have a flip
> answer for this one, but some techniques spring to mind. Most
> notably, make it risky to run unattended. You can arrange events
> that would be no real problem for a human to deal with, that are
> beyond a scripted client.

Events like what, the mud popping up with a random question like:

  What is 2+2?

I think that's quite lame and very distracting to the people who
actually are playing. The only viable thing I can see is having an
immortal occasionally check in on people who are thought to be using a
scripting program. But then again, if the person wasn't, it could be
rather insulting.

--Ryan
rpfeiffe at niu.edu
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