Daily reminder that animal nodes encourage botting

[mulamishne]

Can't we simplify things by making every piece of animal worth the same just by removing the quality system? This could shift focus from tedious tasks to socializing, community building, and PvP. Quality doesn't enhance gameplay positively, it just diminishes the value of time spent in the game due to rapid inflation. While the quality system was cool when there wasn't enough content, now there's enough material to tailor engaging gameplay without it.

Issue with no quality is the game lacks content, and it would be week 5 (big gold quantities) that everything could be accomplished. Squishing node quality range is in my eyes the best answer.

[Ø]

What if the server checked the players base survival within a province and averaged it to then be used for the animal spawns quality level? Yes, this would cause alt spamming. People would either be forced to up their survival on all alts or for a contested area people would spam low survival alts to grief. This could be partially mitigated by checking for exp gained per week with a minimum required to be counted towards the average. It would potentially encourage neighboring provinces to contest each others zones or neighboring villages and hermits to keep their survival high to ensure animal quality continues to creep up.

So more reasons to kill random hermits and everyone in your village either lives a bit away or has to raise survi?

Yeah, pretty much. It adds the need for PVP and communication with neighbors for a cooperative game style in a large area. If it's thought out by the player base it could create large coalitions in a tightly-nit province while maintaining individuality of hermits and village alike. It may even enhance the mechanics of Realms as a whole, but I don't know enough to support this claim; it may be a delusion on my part. Also, it would take quite a lot of dedication by an outside force to do any real damage to this system. If it's implemented properly with checks for exp gain the minimum requirements would circumvent most bots. It would also negate the need for some players to need to raise their survival if their "job type" does not, typically, generate enough exp to be counted toward the average.

I'm sure there is a way for devs to get metrics for exp gained per week by players over a survival threshold. Though, that is asking for a bit much just to check to see if a system like this could possibly work. It would also, likely, be exploitable by maintaining a singular high survival character in a province, but the likelihood of that happening without any interference, whether on purpose or unwittingly done by a sprucie, is rather low, imo.

[Harunobu]

I don't get why quality nodes of animals promote botting more than any alternative mechanic.

If you always arrive and see the area is already cleared because there's an botted alt, just kill the botted alt?

I think making quality completely random removes the need to fight over some areas. It will just mean you need to kill 20 low q animals to get 1 high quality one.
And making quality nodes reset every once in a while will mean you have to find the quality nodes over and over, which isn't a fun gameplay mechanic.

I do like the idea of making more dangerous biomes with higher quality animals that beginner players will avoid.

[Sevenless]

I don't get why quality nodes of animals promote botting more than any alternative mechanic.

If you always arrive and see the area is already cleared because there's an botted alt, just kill the botted alt?

I think making quality completely random removes the need to fight over some areas. It will just mean you need to kill 20 low q animals to get 1 high quality one.
And making quality nodes reset every once in a while will mean you have to find the quality nodes over and over, which isn't a fun gameplay mechanic.

I do like the idea of making more dangerous biomes with higher quality animals that beginner players will avoid.

Scouting alts take about 5 minutes to make a new one, so killing them doesn't solve anything. Plus you really can't "detect" an alt that logs in for 30 seconds every 30 minutes. It's a particularly effective thing to bot because real humans *hate* doing it. Much more than mindlessly slaughtering hundreds of animals for quality.

That said, I agree with your other two points. Random for every animal means needing to murder everything and people will just ignore the corpses which is kinda gross. Randomizing quality fields would suck for basically the same reason, it'd just be a slightly more indirect "kill everything" mechanic.

[Harunobu]

If people are actually botting, making a bot that creates a new character and then moves to an animal quality node takes way way way more work than just a bot that logs in and looks for animals.

Or are we not talking about bots, but about alts?

I made a bunch of alts now for a bunch of things. The only way to make that harder is a character cap by account or account cap by ip.

I guess for high end animals like orcas and mammoths there is going to be 1 or 2 spots in the entire world map where they spawn at very high q. And once discovered, people are just going to focus their attention there. Either with bots, alts, or their mains. I guess the goal would be to drive player interaction or pvp in those areas, rather than logging in for 5 seconds. But I am out of ideas there.

[maze]

~

Making a naked single bot is just 1 charatertone away~ you can then spam them with 0 effort.
I own more then 20 accounts...each account has like 3 alts on it.
The bots take effort to setup sure, but it's basically like turning this game into a RTS game instead of a community MMO.

Whats to point in their the find the mid/max to effort values of making new bots for new bottable systems?

We have a bot to make new bots, they make the beacon and everything.
We have bots to map.
We throw together a bunch of study desk, throw tons of crap Q stuff on the study desk, have the bots turn spits for a few days and feed them fox and fish.
2-3 days later the bots now have 40 to 100 survival.
Those bots are sent to check with row boats for high Q water and ping back the places they searched.

We have combat alts that go along river ways to just kill animals, test local Q and gain combat moves~ with roaming Q those bots would just hearth home with q200 Q animals, all they carry is a boar spear and no loot to really write home about if you do know them out.

When they start using Snekja they have player aggro avoider and will legit run a path to the sea.

Now we move onto the forger bots, they go out and gather low level forge good of all types.
We have a crab gathering bot
We have a bot that walks along shores to check for Whale barnicals.
A bot that looks for those whales (and orcas)
We have a bot that checks roads non-stop and bots that sit at palis all day warning us when players walk by
We have bots that walk around the maoutins all day looking for mammoth.

Roaming Q or the current system are both flawed ~ hell just use nurglings client its the public version and see how easy it is to sort your full village using that client.

The devs really need to sit down and think about the direction they want with hunting and how endgame hunting should look~ in my full honestly dungeons are insanely amazing ~ I can setup an explore bot to tell me where dungeons spawn, but to complete them I've always had to use my main.

thats why I'm asking for a stationary dungeon ~ or some new type of dungeon that maybe you can access from quest givers or fairy rings or anywhere~ were it would feel like a community level event to do~ as dungeons are so far the most community aspect of this game.

[wolf1000wolf]

bots HnH into RTS

Sounds amazing. Feels like you're playing a different game compared to most of the playerbase though.

[terechgracz]

I think devs should think about renting servers for running bot clients.

[Harunobu]

~

*clip*

You could have saved yourself a lot of typing by just having stated "You are absolutely right."

[Archiplex]

merge all quality nodes for animals, give biases based on biomes/seasons (percentage based- i.e bears are worth x% more in winter, foxes x% more in hearths, blah blah), scramble all quality nodes every year

you still need to find good nodes periodically but its not as autistic, scout bots arent nearly as necessary (but still kinda useful if you only want a particular animal type), people still need to explore and there might be some conflict over high quality zones but not so much that you can settle in one early and stay there forever. argument that it makes hq stuff more common is arguably just good cuz it means botting it infinitely is less important

the biases for weather and seasons are probably superfluous but it's fluffy and idk give winter more value cuz animals are fatter


none of this should apply to ocean hunting because of how stupid it is. fix that some other way, like, idk, removing whales