[MUD-Dev] Curing skill spam

[Travis Casey]

On Saturday, December 30, 2000, Dan wrote:
> z032383 at students.niu.edu wrote:

>> 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.

> Of course, this depends on your particular spell system and combat
> system. In my game, I'd expect the opposite effect - it'd be much
> faster to increase your combat skills by, for example, sparring with
> a friend than it would be to increase 'magic' abilities which take
> more time to use and need to be practised in secret.

>> 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.

> Yes, with a bit of thought you can add ways to practice more or less
> any skills. Some are more tricky than others, of course.

> I do intend too address the imbalance between skills which are
> expected to be used very often and those which are expected to be
> used more rarely or are more difficult to practise. Each skill has
> an 'advancement rate' which determines how quickly it increases with
> use. A skill like 'perception' or 'sneaking' which can be put into
> constant use will advance much slower than a skill like, say,
> bribing which would be used only occassionally and difficult to
> practise.

This is something that was addressed in the "Best Guy on the Mud"
thread that I just posted a pointer to.  The solution that was
suggested there (and may have been discussed on this list before then,
but that's when I remember it from) is to have the mud keep track of
how often skills are used.  This can be as simple as, say, keeping a
count of how many times it's been used in the last few months.

With those numbers, you can then write code to automatically adjust
the rate of advancement for skills.

--
       |\      _,,,---,,_    Travis S. Casey  <efindel at earthlink.net>
 ZZzz  /,`.-'`'    -.  ;-;;,_   No one agrees with me.  Not even me.
      |,4-  ) )-,_..;\ (  `'-'
     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_)      


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