Well, it worked when I copy-pasted it into telnet. But that aside, you don't HAVE to store them. You can send, wait 200ms, send again, etc. There's no reason why you have to be dependent on their buffer. Think outside of the box a bit.

Variable prompts aren't enough to stop scripters, we can always add trigger matrices and regexp if we have to. The only question is whether it's worth the time.

And delays won't matter much either. Slowing scripts down won't help because in the end, you're pitting the responsive speed of a computer against the speed of a human. Humans just aren't that fast. Anything you do to "slow" the game down will alter the balance towards one script over another, that is all. Torpers too slow? Fine, grid more! Grid too slow? Torp more!

Stop thinking 2-dimensionally. It's not just about adjusting scripts to beat the new settings, real players are capable of adjusting their entire strategy to give a different set of scripts an even bigger advantage. Ex: I already have a new login monitor script (single player too, completely walks around the time limit) that bypasses the CLV delay, and it's very very accurate at determining grid activity. The advantage that gives me, when everyone else's monitor is failing, is huge.

Stop thinking 2-dimensionally.

Reading your messages without entering a password will tell you if someone is hitting your grid or invading, but I wouldn't say it's as effective as watching the CLV. For one, it has to calculate whether it's worth the time penalty to log in for 10 fig hits. Which of course I'm going to run a grid script that hits 10 figs or so, then pauses and checks the in game CLV to see if you've logged in or not. If you've logged in, the script will wait until you've logged out and begin again. If you haven't logged in, the script will hit 10 more figs. My CLV is instantanious where your CLV isn't.

That doesn't work. You don't get the messages prompt until after you enter your password. Once you do enter the PW, you get dinged a time penalty if appropriate.



Actually, I'm not using CLV. But that is a valid point, a good gridder will have an advantage in a timed game if it monitors the active players and takes appropriate precautions. That is a good example of what I was saying, it's more than just adapting a script to fit a new situation... the balance changes.

That's true. I guess I was thinking about the daily logs which would let you know if someone was invading someone. Your are right you couldn't monitor grid with it unless the fig hits were offensive or something that showed in the daily logs.

Edit: So I'm guessing you are going to lay an entire grid of offensive figs to monitor grid?
Other than the CLV, the daily logs is the only data you can monitor without logging completely in. I don't understand why offensive fig hits are in the daily logs anyway. laff

[Deleted]

Sing, you acknowledge that even if a gameop sets a time limit, it is your goal to circumvent that time limit in any way you can, and you think that's a legitimate way to win. Are you really so bent on winning that it doesn't matter to you how you win?

Here's a question that I think will illustrate how hypocritical this kind of philosophy is. Does the game allow a gameop to edit assets for his or her friends? Sure. Is it cheating? Not according to your philosophy. What you do, you think is a legitimate way to win, but if a sysop helped another team win, you'd cry foul. What's the difference? It's a given that gameops do not intervene in games. Just like it's a given that players do not circumvent time limits, or break any other rule, whether game imposed or gameop imposed. It's a two-way street. But you're perfectly happy knowing that if a gameop cheats, you can shun that server, but a gameop doesn't have this recourse. If you cheat, what can a gameop do to catch you, much less stop you? The only thing to keep you from cheating is honor.

People keep saying that if the game allows it, if it can be done, it's not cheating. Well, a gameop can do a heck of a lot of things that will determine the winner of a game far more than anything you do, any tactic or strategy, skill or creativity. You can't have it both ways. Either everyone plays with honor or anything goes. The game can be fun, or it can be a complete waste of time, but it depends entirely on the honor and honesty of the players and the gameops involved. It's just the nature of this game. And right now, there is no expectation of honor on the part of the players. Players who do things that Singularity admits to doing should be shunned as much as any gameop who edits game assets.

There is a bit of difference in a player doing something that all players can do, and a sysOp that T-Edits. The sysOp is the only one that can add/change assets.

The honor you are talking about does not exist with the majority of players. The definition of "honor" can't even be agreed upon - one person's perceived lack of "honor" is another person's adapting to exploit their knowledge of the game. As far as I know there are no formal rules set for the game except for the server's rules that an Op may choose to try and enforce. Truce games give excellent examples of the "honor" in TW - some follow the server rules, others ruin a game either outright, or within the gray areas.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

But that's my point. Gameops often do make explicit rules, and honor requires that players obey those rules. Certain settings imply certain rules, even if the setting itself may not completely keep players from breaking those rules. Honor is honor, whether it's the player or he gameop who's being dishonest. Doesn't matter that the gameop is the only one who can edit assets. Even if 100 people can exploit a bug or circumvent a setting, many others can't or won't. It's an unfair advantage in both cases. I contend it is the same. The only difference is everyone agrees that sysop edits are cheating, but you can't get a consensus on whether this or that player tactic is cheating. Well, I'm saying there's one judge that matters, and that's the game's operator.

Actually, I probably just wouldn't play on that server. Why waste the time?

But that assumes that a sysop sets an explicit "no monitoring" rule. I haven't actually seen anyone do that yet.

So some players can break the rules, but others shouldn't because of honor?
Won't this end up with the least honorable having the advantage?

I agree that players should abide by server rules. The thing is though,
if players are able to do something in the grey area, like monitor online players,
or watch for log or CLV for changes, those players have a distinct
advantage over players not doing the 'grey area' stuff.

And all I'm saying is, if you want anyone to play, you have to consider that whenever players gain an unfair advantage by ignoring rules, it turns other players off. I'm not saying you have to do this, I'm just saying that for the good of the community, you should want to do this, and you should hold others to that standard.

You can argue about what the "rules" are, but a simple rule of thumb is, if there's a setting in the game, like time limit, and a tactic defeats that setting, like monitoring, then that tactic is a cheat. It doesn't matter whether or not the op specifically says "monitoring is not allowed". That assumes that an op is going to know all of the advanced tactics employed by today's players. That's just not the case. And it shouldn't need to be. As soon as you name one tactic, another one will pop up. It's simple. If there are time limits, time limits should matter. They're not there as a way to give an advantage to those smart enough to figure out how to defeat them.

In sports, players and coaches can and do try everything they can get away with to win. That's why there are referees. If it was possible to have referees watching every move a player makes in TradeWars and calling a penalty whenever that player breaks a rule, then we might have a clean, fun game that would appeal to a larger base of players. But unfortunately that's not possible. Well, maybe it would be if I provide detailed logs of every action of players, then some enterprising programmer could write a tool to analyze that data and identify those who break the rules. Maybe that's the solution. An automated referee to keep players honest.

An automated referee system might be good, but coding in truce enforcement would benefit a lot of players who like to play truces. I won't go into all truce violations since this has been discussed.

Setting up a toggle system to allow/disallow certain actions (invasion, large fig deployments, ship-to-ship) would allow the Op to setup the edit for building games also. Flip the toggles and the war is on.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

John,

The issue is not about bending rules. If you dont want people sitting at the menu prompt monitoring the game then fix it so they cannot do it.

A good rule of thumb when playing or planning a game is that every thing the game allows is legal unless there is a rule against it. ie no buy outs. Doing anything else requires operator monitoring.

How can monitoring the game from the menu be any more dishonorable than putting a gold alien planet in a sector with maxed allowed planets so they do not overload? If the game allows it it should be legal.

H

Matter of semantics I suppose; I dont consider it cheating - just distasteful. I dont use menu squatting/in and out for data mining dedahdedahdedah, and I agree with your disdain.

That said, if the game permits it, and cant detect a violation of a gameop rule, shrug. I voted with my feet more than once.

This is incorrect. A lot of sysops specifically want a time limit game, but don't want to disable monitors, for example. Infact that's pretty much every TL game I've ever had.

I will not assume rules that aren't posted or stated somewhere. That's just bad form, it leads to a bunch of people whining over rules they assumed were true but aren't. It's one of the top 5 reasons why people stop playing this game (servers with bad sysops), and one of the top 3 reasons why people stop playing a particular server.



Right, but the rules of the game are defined ahead of time. There's no debate over the rules because the league sets them out beforehand.



Well, that has been proposed before. Still, there are ways to abuse it, too.