[MUD-Dev] Curing skill spam

[Jon Lambert]

Travis Casey wrote:
 
> 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.

A couple months back, I was asked to implement a magical 100% cure to
skill spamming or macroing.  So I went back to mine the old Mud-Dev
threads and try out a few things. :-)

One of the ideas from that thread or maybe even earlier was to seed
the random generator with the details of the task at hand in order to
get consistently repeatable failures or repeatable successes.  So I
actually tried this with some of our static maneuver skills like
hiding, sneaking and lock picking.  For example with lock picking I
seeded with the character's skill level, and the lock id number.  It
worked as advertised.  Characters could consistently succeed or fail
at certain locks.  But there was a side-effect to this.  As someone
rose in skill level, there was also a good chance (although a
decreasing one) that consistent success at earlier picked locks were
consistent failures at an increased skill level.  Also it doesn't
really solve the learn through repeated use problem.

Anyways to make a short story longer, what I ended up doing was to
attach a number of types of invisible affects to a character's body as
they adventured through the world.  They generally fall into two
classes.

One class regulates learning rate.  The chance of increasing a skill
is randomly determined every time they use that skill.  It's a pretty
low chance.  But once they get a skill gain, I install an affect on
their character which prevents another skill gain for a duration of
about 2-3 days in real-time.  It is still macroable of course every
few days, but you'd have to log in every couple of days to macro your
skill up a percent.  Obviously as a result it would take 200-300 days
of real time to macro ones skills from 1% - 100%.  Assuming it's the
only alternative.  Still I think it's a reasonable solution.

The second class affects success or failure repeatability.  This can
handle the whole gamut of static maneuver skills like those involved
in crafting.  Generally a character sits around and repeats the task
not for the specific purposes of skill gain, but for the purposes of a
success.  Again I attach an affect to the character which has similar
information that I would have used in my first solution.  For a lock,
I record the lock id and whether the character succeeded or failed at
the lock, and set up a reasonable duration.  This could be one mud
day, or several mud hours.  When a character successfully picks a
particular lock, they will be able to consistently pick that lock for
the duration of the affect.  If they fail at the task they won't get
another real try at picking that particular lock until that affect
expires.

I use a similar concept to regulate experience gains through monster
killing.  Though for storage reasons we classify and categorize
monster types.

This solves a number of issues.  It's not a real high storage cost
solution.  It feels and plays well.  And it fits in nicely to an
already existing system of affect handling that already exists on this
particular mud and I imagine many others.

--
--* Jon A. Lambert - TychoMUD        Email:jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com *--
--* Mud Server Developer's Page <http://tychomud.home.netcom.com> *--
--* If I had known it was harmless, I would have killed it myself.*--
 
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