[MUD-Dev] No bots allowed

[Frank Crowell]

From: <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

> 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.

that and added in encryption to the Quake world.  Rather than just
politely post a sign "no bots please", idsoftware tried to use
technology to stop them.

> 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 ;)

Bots, away from the emotional world of gaming, have a lot of
potential.  Often they go by the more serious name of "agents" and
there is a lot of literature about various forms of agents.  You can
have a bot do simple things like check a mud for a certain person
and notify youif that person is there -- good for pk or just getting
in touch.  A more complex bot is one that is hooked up to an
inference engine or a database.  In fact AskJeeves could very well
be an object inside a mud rather than a link on a web page.  Two
years ago you could have gotten a carload of venture capital money
if you had drafted on a napkin your business plan that included
"Internet" and "autonomous agents".





_______________________________________________
MUD-Dev mailing list
MUD-Dev at kanga.nu
https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev