Posted October 31, 2018
As most of you know (or should know), botting in most MMORPGs is a highly bannable major code-of-conduct violation.
Consider this: What about an MMORPG intended partially to help teach programming where writing bot-scripts to control your characters is a fundamental part of the game?
In this hypothetical MMORPG, you create characters on your profile and select 1 of them to control at a time, then recruit other characters from your roster and attach them to user-written AI control scripts. Assume that control scripts are profiled for CPU instruction and cycle usage to prevent bad actors from overloading the server with many expensive loops in their scripts.
Obviously there would be some scripting language, probably Lua, where you define events and preprogrammed reactions. Additionally, you can define special scripts to program your followers in large fights such as raids.
Other programmable behavior: Macro-assist where the behavior of a hotkey changes programmatically depending on various conditions. For example: given the following skills:
Raging Attack: Gain 30 Energy and attack for low damage.
Fully Enraged: Costs 50 Energy. Does a large amount of damage and makes Raging Attack generate 50% extra Energy for the next 8 seconds.
Finisher: Costs 50 Energy. Does a moderate amount of damage. Double damage on enemies below half health.
Furious Whirlwind: Costs 50 Energy. Does a moderate-low amount of damage to all adjacent enemies.
you could make a 1-button programmable macro to optimize their use:
If energy < 50: use Raging Attack; stop;
if numNearbyEnemies >= (currentTargetedEnemy.healthPercentage < 50 ? 6 : 3): use Furious Whirlwind; stop;
if currentTargetedEnemy.healthPercentage < 50, use Finisher, else use Fully Enraged
There would also be group-programmable behavior for multiplayer groups, allowing you to coordinate on important skills like interrupts and mitigation CDs. In most MMOs where interrupts are important, there's always going to be the problem where 2 people interrupt at the same time, leaving no one to cover the next dangerous boss mechanic. With group-programmable behavior, a script (built-in as a legitimate part of the game) coordinates the raid group so only 1 of these important skills gets used when it needs to.
Idle-farming. Advanced players can program 1 of their characters to remain "logged in" while the game is closed and farm resources. To prevent unreasonable server load and resource contention between players. idle farming is locked to solo instances and CPU/instruction usage limits on scripts that control idle farming are stricter than normal.
Consider this: What about an MMORPG intended partially to help teach programming where writing bot-scripts to control your characters is a fundamental part of the game?
In this hypothetical MMORPG, you create characters on your profile and select 1 of them to control at a time, then recruit other characters from your roster and attach them to user-written AI control scripts. Assume that control scripts are profiled for CPU instruction and cycle usage to prevent bad actors from overloading the server with many expensive loops in their scripts.
Obviously there would be some scripting language, probably Lua, where you define events and preprogrammed reactions. Additionally, you can define special scripts to program your followers in large fights such as raids.
Other programmable behavior: Macro-assist where the behavior of a hotkey changes programmatically depending on various conditions. For example: given the following skills:
Raging Attack: Gain 30 Energy and attack for low damage.
Fully Enraged: Costs 50 Energy. Does a large amount of damage and makes Raging Attack generate 50% extra Energy for the next 8 seconds.
Finisher: Costs 50 Energy. Does a moderate amount of damage. Double damage on enemies below half health.
Furious Whirlwind: Costs 50 Energy. Does a moderate-low amount of damage to all adjacent enemies.
you could make a 1-button programmable macro to optimize their use:
If energy < 50: use Raging Attack; stop;
if numNearbyEnemies >= (currentTargetedEnemy.healthPercentage < 50 ? 6 : 3): use Furious Whirlwind; stop;
if currentTargetedEnemy.healthPercentage < 50, use Finisher, else use Fully Enraged
There would also be group-programmable behavior for multiplayer groups, allowing you to coordinate on important skills like interrupts and mitigation CDs. In most MMOs where interrupts are important, there's always going to be the problem where 2 people interrupt at the same time, leaving no one to cover the next dangerous boss mechanic. With group-programmable behavior, a script (built-in as a legitimate part of the game) coordinates the raid group so only 1 of these important skills gets used when it needs to.
Idle-farming. Advanced players can program 1 of their characters to remain "logged in" while the game is closed and farm resources. To prevent unreasonable server load and resource contention between players. idle farming is locked to solo instances and CPU/instruction usage limits on scripts that control idle farming are stricter than normal.