THis is more for those who feel scripts ruin the game. I know this will probably be long, but it may help myself, yourself, or others in the discussions.

How do scripts rule the game? There are a variety of responses, so I figure I'll go with some recent ones.


/////////////
1.) People who are AFK run Scripts, and kill me.

R1.) Scripts are simply programs that respond to stimuli, I don't know many "good" players who run AFK scripts. In general, an AFK script is asking to get you killed. If you need examples, I'll be happy to provide. In general, you can always gain the advantage on someone who is running an AFK script. In general if you are hitting figs slowly, and someone photons you, it is because you do not know how to hit figs quickly. I'm sure K3 can give a discussion on avoiding being photoned, and he has dialup.
//////////////
2.) Scripts take the challenge out of the game.

R2.) Personally I agree with many who say scripts automate the boring parts of the game. Many people repeatedly post about how scripts ruin game, but when asked do they do 5k turns of manual SDT nobody responds. In general defeating a script can be challenging. But beyond that. A script does NOT win you games. Anything you do with a script could also be done by hand. So what challenge does it remove? If you could be more specific, perhaps I could understand. It is in combat? Were a macro would work? What does it remove the challenge from? In any highly competitive game I feel challenged all the time. Heck, in my opinion scripts can heighten the challenge because the newer player has to be taken into account were before he didn't.
////////////
3.) Scripts and Helpers weren't meant to be part of the game

R3.) Why the CIM than? Could a human by hand check all that? CIM Reports don't tell you a port is blocked, so why put it in? Maybe there is a reason, but I don't know it, and would be interested in hearing it.
////////////
4.) Scripts remove Human Interaction, Less Social

R4.) I would argue the opposite. When I have to manually watch for a ton of stuff, or be manually trading, I can't afford to chat on fed. When I have a script doing boring task that is tedious, I can type on fedcom, so it strikes me as much more social with scripts. Now if you are referring to the people who are AFK all the time letting scripts run the game for them, refer to 1.).
////////////
5.) Scripts make the games short and not last long.

R5.) I know I posted a response to this before, but I will hit it again here. I have played plenty of games that lasted awhile. Now if you mean "awhile" as in 8 months, well I don't think scripts have anything to do with that anyway. But to get to the response. Show me a fairly normal game without extreme edits (a game meant to last a long time), ie planets that don't go lvl4 in 3 days or crap like that. Than you get a large group of people in, and they all play, scripts won't end that game early. What will end that game? People not making it to bang, and being locked out of SD, people not playing turns, etc. Nothing to do with scripts. I can blockade dock without scripts. Now if you are referring to the highly edited games which are meant to be fast, than you are correct. Those games scripts will excel, because most are high turn.
/////////

Plenty of you post your opinions of why scripting ruins the game, please list other reasons here, and give responses to the stuff above. Maybe you are right, and I am wrong. But simply stating "scripts ruin the game, scripts are lame, scripts are cheating" doesn't help anybody. This is meant to be a discussion, so feel free to do exactly that.

Jhereg

A new player coming into twars usually doesn't know much about helpers and scripts. Probably like many of us, they may remember tradewars as a single player at a time game and not the multiple player version that it has evolved into. The new player comes across tradewars on the internet and decides to give it a try using telnet and logs into a game. If the player has the misfortune of logging into a competitive game with hunter/killers online, he dies quickly - probably photoned, surrounded and #SD#. If he is lucky, the hunter/killer didn't go after his pod and the person that took him out is willing to talk to him.

Tradewars players, imho, are a relatively small group of people comprised of players who are stubborn and hard headed enough to get through the learning phase with all of the poddings involved. Most of us didn't learn everything about the game by ourselves - we lucked out and had a more experienced player, or players, help us out. I count myself in this catagory since I had help from some very good players - players that are still willing to help when I ask.

k, so what's the point... for very new players, scripts do ruin the game for them because they do not understand what is happening - only that they came to play a game and some, ah person, killed them before they could do anything. Why would the new player come back?

I would hope that when we kill someone and if they do come back that we offer them help with the game. You can tell if a player is very new by the way they hit your figs and their general game play. If we want twars to survive, then we have to cultivate those players.

For the more advanced players, scripts enhance the game because you have to figure out a way to counter the script or because they eliminate the repetitive tasks of ppt, ssm or whatever.

This has become rambling so, scripts ruin the game for new players and make it challenging for the more advanced players.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

I think many people have drawn the conclusion that I want to remove scripting entirely from the game. That's not true, and not even possible. But that being said, here's the situation I am faced with. Scripts allow players to do things that the game was not designed for. Current gameplay balance is more by chance than by design. What I intend to do, moving forward with TWv4 and beyond, is to look at all of the advanced script-based tactics and decide which ones are within the realm of reasonable balance, and which ones provide the scripting player with too much power. The fact is that certain tactics were never intended, and are very powerful. And just because there are advanced tactics to counter most of them does not resolve the issue. I believe that advanced players should be hard to beat, but they should not be so powerful relative to newby players that the newbies have no hope of learning and improving. As Promethius said, some advanced players teach new players, but it should not be necessary for a player to be mentored by an advanced player for that player to feel he or she can make some progress in this game. Advanced players should be a challenge to defeat, but they should not seem god-like.

Which brings up the big question. What are the tactics that will go away and what stays?

Sure, I'll bite on that one. Is there an outline of what "tactics" are good, bad, unbalanced, etc? I hear similar statements sometimes, but I am unclear what they are, any info would be interesting.

Jhereg

quote:Originally posted by Draconis
R1.) Scripts are simply programs that respond to stimuli, I don't know many "good" players who run AFK scripts. In general, an AFK script is asking to get you killed. If you need examples, I'll be happy to provide. In general, you can always gain the advantage on someone who is running an AFK script. In general if you are hitting figs slowly, and someone photons you, it is because you do not know how to hit figs quickly. I'm sure K3 can give a discussion on avoiding being photoned, and he has dialup.

I can say from absolute personal experience that the above statement is categorically untrue!

I have a relatively fast computer and connect to the internet with an advanced Cable connection (above 1.5 million).

I can sit outside of a sector with an enemy fighter in it, write a MACRO and assign it an F key trigger. In the macro, I warp into the sector, attack the fighter, lay down my own fighter and attempt to warp out.

95 percent of the time when I hit that F key, and my enemy is running one of the more advanced planet drop or photon scripts, I will get NAILED! That's letting the COMPUTER do the work! Therefore, your conclusion that a person who gets hit by these scripts is just too slow is seriously flawed and not based on reality at all!

Furthermore, I've gone up against Alexio while he was running one of his "lawn mower" scripts. I've anticipated EXACTLY which sectors he will hit, and I've sat off those sectors with a photon script, and before my script could fire a photon when he enters, he's already in and out. So, evidently there are SCRIPTS that can ensure your survival, but macros (which are incredibly fast) cannot!

What is the conclusion to this? In order to compete you either have to be a very good script writer, or you have to purchase continually updated script packages!

Is the existence of a CIM Data base evidence that the designers of this game intended it to be this way? I hardly think so! Otherwise, it occurs to me they would have, with the game, offered script packages for sale!

I've been playing this game since 1992, and I can assure you, scripts are NOT a "normal" part of the game, and the advanced scripting that is being utilized now is NOT something the game designers had in mind!

That, my dear friend, is the bottom line!

quote:Originally posted by Promethius

If the player has the misfortune of logging into a competitive game with hunter/killers online, he dies quickly - probably photoned, surrounded and #SD#. If he is lucky, the hunter/killer didn't go after his pod and the person that took him out is willing to talk to him.


The problem there is that the newbie has gone into a competative game. A newbie like you're describing is easily killed by hand. In fact, I've killed people by hand on several occasions only to have them start going on about the "kill script" I'm running. Bottom line, scripts don't kill newbies, better players kill newbies.

quote:Originally posted by Supreme Galactic Overlord
I can say from absolute personal experience that the above statement is categorically untrue!

I have a relatively fast computer and connect to the internet with an advanced Cable connection (above 1.5 million).

I can sit outside of a sector with an enemy fighter in it, write a MACRO and assign it an F key trigger. In the macro, I warp into the sector, attack the fighter, lay down my own fighter and attempt to warp out.

95 percent of the time when I hit that F key, and my enemy is running one of the more advanced planet drop or photon scripts, I will get NAILED! That's letting the COMPUTER do the work! Therefore, your conclusion that a person who gets hit by these scripts is just too slow is seriously flawed and not based on reality at all!



There is a delay on any ship movement of that type, even if ship delay is set to none. However, there is no delay on a planet warp a a planetary beamer. The key to safely exiting is a sector is to exit it in such a way that there is no delay involved. The simplest method to doing this is xporting out of your ship, then waiting a few seconds, xporting back in and twarping out. Of course, to be even safer, you would want to leave 2 limpets before you xported out then pick one up as soon as you xported in, that way the density in the sector wouldn't change when you got back into your ship.

quote:

Furthermore, I've gone up against Alexio while he was running one of his "lawn mower" scripts. I've anticipated EXACTLY which sectors he will hit, and I've sat off those sectors with a photon script, and before my script could fire a photon when he enters, he's already in and out. So, evidently there are SCRIPTS that can ensure your survival, but macros (which are incredibly fast) cannot!



Your inability to do something does not mean it is impossible. The game mechanics are the same whether an action is scripted or macro'd. There are two possible reasons your script failed to photon him. The first is that your script is too slow in responding. That is, it was poorly written. The second is that your connection to the server was not fast enough to fire the photon in his movement delay.

I personally think a large problem right now is that several offensive actions depend soley on your connection speed. I think delays should be added so that either every photon fired can be successful or very few photons fired can be successful. Having successful photons dependant on how good of an internet connection you have serious unbalances the game.

Harley hit on the main objective of the v4 changes. An effort is being made to fully implement real-time delays. Because the game has been in a slow transition from a non-interactive to interactive multiplayer game, some game actions have been given delays while others are still instantaneous (as fast as the connection and computer will allow). The goal in v4 is to basically provide some delays on every action, but not on information display. And in general, these delays will be very short so that they will not significantly increase the time it takes to run one's turns. But by having these delays in place, the pacing of the actions in the game can be balanced around specific design goals rather than just left to chance. Examples of what actions will have delays includes planet movement, transporting, dropping and taking figs, firing Photons, etc.

Once v4 is ready for alpha testing, we're going to be not only debugging the new version, but also putting the new gameplay in front of the players so we can tweak all of the new settings and delays in order to make the game most enjoyable. We won't be throwing this out there and saying "take it or leave it". We'll depend on the players to help us balance the game as perfectly as possible under the wide array of new parameters.

There will be a lot of modern tactics that will go away with v4. For those who are unwilling to adapt to the new gameplay that v4 will promote, I'm leaving v3 in its current state.

John, Will you be adding any new ships, aliens, AI to v4? larger universes etc. Or perhaps the ability to turn scripts off completely, by the Sysop?

I know this has been touched on, but I don't recall the answer. How compatible will v3 and v4 be? Can they be run off the same server? Are we going to have to upgrade TWGS to run v4? Pay more?

The plans for v4 are primarily just in changing some gameplay, and not in extending the game very much. I would be making these changes as part of v3, but decided that it would be unpopular with many of the veteran players. Releasing v4 is a compromise to try to attract newer players to the game while keeping the classic game intact.

v4 will run alongside v3, on the same TWGS. I have not yet decided if I will ask for a new registration fee for v4 from v3 owners, but if I do, it would be small, and no additional registration of TWGS would be required. In general, I would like to sell v3 and v4 as two separate games, but it depends on how much the game ends up being changed from v3. If it's really just a minor change, I probably won't sell them as two separate games. My sense after having made the changes so far is that the game will play quite a bit differently from v3.

quote:Originally posted by John Pritchett (EIS)

The plans for v4 are primarily just in changing some gameplay, and not in extending the game very much. I would be making these changes as part of v3, but decided that it would be unpopular with many of the veteran players. Releasing v4 is a compromise to try to attract newer players to the game while keeping the classic game intact.


Any idea as to how the changes might affect SWATH, Attac and TWX? If the changes have a major impact then many players will either go with Zoc or wait until changes are made to the helpers above.

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

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

The changes are significant enough that no effort is being made to maintain compatibility with v3 helpers. There would be no point in it based on gameplay changes. I expect new helpers will be written for v4, and of course scripts can easily adapt.

quote: I can sit outside of a sector with an enemy fighter in it, write a MACRO and assign it an F key trigger. In the macro, I warp into the sector, attack the fighter, lay down my own fighter and attempt to warp out.

95 percent of the time when I hit that F key, and my enemy is running one of the more advanced planet drop or photon scripts, I will get NAILED! That's letting the COMPUTER do the work! Therefore, your conclusion that a person who gets hit by these scripts is just too slow is seriously flawed and not based on reality at all!

you've got your own special blend of reality dude