Dex Ironmind
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Posted - 2011.08.16 19:18:00 -
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Edited by: Dex Ironmind on 16/08/2011 19:32:14
Edited by: Dex Ironmind on 16/08/2011 19:23:57
Appreciate the small move on the BOT front. BOTTING is a major sandbox game changer and a big reason why NULL holds no allurement to me.
It will take a lot more than this small move to win the battle against BOTS, or at least control it. Until you deal with them on a client level or add some dynamic features to all elements of space that occur frequently and randomly, these BOTS will have the run of the place, particularly in the deep recesses of NULL where big alliances control everything that goes on.
DYNAMIC game features would be your ticket here. Make it a miserable for a BOT program to work consistently, but interactive and dynamic for a real miner.
For example, if mining BOTS have to reset their software every five to ten minutes because their ship got attacked by NPCS more often, AND an asteroid released a gas that they had to react to in a certain amount of time or their mining lasers or ship gets blown up AND their strip mining disrupted the orbit of an asteroid and it headed for their ship knocking it out of range of the asteroid belt, damaging their ship in some way and shutting off their lasers unless they moved. Even something as simple as equipment malfunctions (jammed conveyor, broken mining laser, etc.) would be effective. There are any other of number of dynamics, interactivities and variables you could come up with to make mining more interesting and BOT proof. They just have to happen frequently and randomly.
Make the mechanics of mining more dynamic and interactive and will you not only have another deterrence to botting, you will have made an otherwise mindless and mundane element of your game more interesting for those who actually get out there and do it.
You can do the same with cargo missions. Add an element where an agent gives an in course correction and sends them elsewhere (keeping those places quite random). Cancel a mission midway and have the agent call the pilot back to home base for his reward. Dynamic elements that switch things up that leave the BOT sitting in space doing nothing until it is reset.
The more annoying it is to BOT and the more it has to be micromanaged, the more casual botters you will get to give it up. There will always be hardcore botters. That is an inevitability, but keep them hopping with dynamic and randomly interactive elements that can be easily twinked and changed by your developers and GMs is your ticket to success here. It gives the rest of us some fun too. WIN/WIN.
Dex was here. 
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