[MUD-Dev] No bots allowed

[Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com]

From: Frank Crowell [mailto:frankc at maddog.com]

> "No bots allowed" comes from a proposal made by a developer for a
> very popular proxy bot for Quake.  Proxy bots are cyborgs that
> combines human and computer-assisted actions into the client.
> Many people felt that proxy bots were a form of cheating.  In
> fact, idsoftware added additional security to their Quakeworld
> protocol to stop the proxy bots. Of course this all stopped the
> pure software bots too.

I thought the main thing that was defeating them was the change in
protocol.  As far as I was aware, they moved from sending absolute
state updates to differential state updates. This means the bot
writers would have to implement a full simulation of the games state
machine in order to extract the information they
needed. Furthermore, they were no long being sent complete world
state, which again makes it harder to implement them.

I must admit I'm not a great fan of bots, proxy bots (aim bots et
al) don't add anything to the game, and unfortunately there is an
endless stream of people who enjoy clearing servers by ruining it
for everyone else.

> So, what do you think?  Should the mud side of virtual worlds have
> the convention of "no bots allowed please"?

What uses do people have for bots in MUDs/MMORPGs? From my limited
experience, people would just use them to automatically level their
character, or farm items on ebay to sell if they were given them. As
to people plugging in conversation bots, I don't really mind as long
as they are flagged and I can avoid them ;)

Dan
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