The Ghost of Christmas Future, II

[DeadlyPencil]

2 ideas to reduce botting

Curio collecting bots:
Remove pearls as a curio. increase the study time of the other rare curios. For example floatsams to 12 hours, bluebells to 48 hours (LP/Hour could stay they same).
what does this do? for people who do not bot, these curios are still rare and it will be hard for them to keep them constantly in their studies. For people who do bot they will have so many of these curios that they wont be able to study them quick enough to the point that they will likely reduce the amount they bot them because there is no point in having 10 cubbords worth of curios that will take 3 months to study.
Essentially the lesson is making the rarest curios also the fastest to study heavily promotes botting. So you just need to make the rarest curios also the longest to study and the problem goes away.

Food making or eating bots:
Make so drinking water or getting hurt does not increase hunger and make so everyone gets hungry at the same rate even when offline. at the moment this game is online even when you arent, but we dont get hungry unless we are online which is counterintuative. You could make it so that in 96 hours you would go from full to starving. You will likely have to give up on the idea of characters starving to death to make botting food worthless. Making these changes would make food quality outway quantity and would make botting food/eating would not be nessessary.

[LadyV]

2 ideas to reduce botting

Curio collecting bots:
Remove pearls as a curio. increase the study time of the other rare curios. For example floatsams to 12 hours, bluebells to 48 hours (LP/Hour could stay they same).
what does this do? for people who do not bot, these curios are still rare and it will be hard for them to keep them constantly in their studies. For people who do bot they will have so many of these curios that they wont be able to study them quick enough to the point that they will likely reduce the amount they bot them because there is no point in having 10 cubbords worth of curios that will take 3 months to study.
Essentially the lesson is making the rarest curios also the fastest to study heavily promotes botting. So you just need to make the rarest curios also the longest to study and the problem goes away.

Food making or eating bots:
Make so drinking water or getting hurt does not increase hunger and make so everyone gets hungry at the same rate even when offline. at the moment this game is online even when you arent, but we dont get hungry unless we are online which is counterintuative. You could make it so that in 96 hours you would go from full to starving. You will likely have to give up on the idea of characters starving to death to make botting food worthless. Making these changes would make food quality outway quantity and would make botting food/eating would not be nessessary.

So we punish the no bot users because others bot? No that's not a good solution. The food and water idea is just as bad. Your punishing others for botters exploits. Exertion does make you thirsty and hungry that's a good system. Under yours those same bots wont need to stop so often.

Change the need and mindset of botters, not issue draconian penalties for all.

[bitza]

what deadlypencil is going for, of course, is an end to the "plow your way to excellence inside your mansion" mechanic which is absolutely one of the worst things about the game. this doesn't actually "punish" anyone if it levels the playing field all across the board. i'm really racking my brain to see how botters would have any advantage over legit players as far as how much they could eat, if this mechanic was fixed to a universal linear progression rather than how much stamina a player can burn.

for this i would propose that drinking water does not regain stamina. stamina can only be regained through time, or possibly by drinking tea (and maybe chairs) so that miners and heavy farmers aren't crippled in their tasks. this would also solve the problem of combat as a water drinking contest.

hunger should also be dependent on time online, if you sit around doing nothing all day you'll still get hungry, and need to eat. ideally, hunger and stamina should operate independently, and if we still want players to require drinking water, there would have to be a negative consequence to being thirsty in order to make drinking water non-trivial.

[Bob_the_Cat]

Pretty much to stop botting, if you can get a days study worth of stuff in an hour of boating, then the guys bot isnt doing him much because he just has tons of crap he cant study. This ends up making getting good lp a lot easier, but its not like the botter is putting in a lot of effort either.

[ramones]

As for hunger, maybe if you are limited to how much you can eat per day? As in you can eat xy food per 2-3 hours as a meal, then whatever you do (stamina up down, you can drain hunger as much as you can) you cannot eat until you are "hungry" again. Like some kind of a limit, which doesn't prevent you to do whatever you want, but you would have to do it with a risk in case you have just eaten and wanna go for 2 hour killmehard mining.

[jorb]

But do you think that manual inquisition of bots has a place once Haven is out of beta and has become a commercial product, or will this forever be an MMO-RTS when played at the hardcore level?

There could perhaps be more of a discussion about it.

Also, in closing on the UI thing: It's not as if we do not have any ambitions whatever for the UI. We do.

[Xcom]

Hunger drained over time is a bad idea. Would just end up turning into first in best stats. As jorb stated many times over people would make 10 alts and bot food for all of them making sure they have backup fighters.

But the curio changes are in the right direction. Less over powered pearl study's and more of the rare and shiny stuff. I think someone else suggested giving curios an LP reward per short interval, say 5 min. You wouldn't need to login every 30min to change curios. That idea that you have to constantly maintain your study box is actually more bot abused and prone to create imbalance then if the curios were to need a long term strategic study-plan.

[strpk0]

I have an idea to, at least, make botting less profitable than playing legitimately in some ways.

Character awareness

There would be a buff called "character awareness", which is basically how "awake" a character is. Your "character awareness" could be increased by performing different activities, say farming, crafting, mining, etc. (however, performing an activity too repeatedly would not increase your awareness. It would instead drain it, sort of like doing something boring and repetitive in real life that makes you sleepy).
It would also be quickly drained by being offline (after 12 hours or so of offline time, it would have dropped from 100% to 0).

How character awareness could affect foraging bots
This value would greatly alter your chances of seeing curiosities. As a result, characters that are actively played on and have high levels of awareness would be able to find curiosities way more often than say, a foraging bot that simply logs in, runs around a swamp collecting curios then logs off for 15 minutes (which would, along with the repetitive activity of foraging the same swamp, quickly drain his awareness to 0, rendering him useless for foraging.)

How character awareness could nerf alt farms, and give way to a new character development system
Now, this system could also apply to curiosities. Your "character awareness" could determine how much LP you earn from studying a curiosity (if it's at 0%, you get 0 LP. If it's at 50%, you get 50% of the respective LP). This would result in characters that are actively being played on developing much faster than characters that are simply filled with curiosities and logged off.

Also, in order to prevent LP gained from your curiosities being affected by being offline, the value could be recalculated a few seconds after login, instead of immediately. This is so that this system wouldn't nerf the amount of LP you get from your curiosities if you had logged off after an active day, and came back the next day. (You would earn the full LP you worked for and "earned" on the day before, but then your "character awareness" would drop accordingly to your offline time).

I believe that this idea could bring the curiosity system and the old "lp for everything you do" system together, and merge them into a new one that rewards active players and greatly handicaps bots, while still not handicapping players that cannot play 24/7 (as long as they play enough to raise their awareness to 100% before they log off, they would develop just as quickly as a person that plays 24/7.)

[Kaios]

I am not so certain about some of your suggestions for its implementation, but I think a character "awareness" factor sounds quite interesting.

[strpk0]

I am not so certain about some of your suggestions for its implementation, but I think a character "awareness" factor sounds quite interesting.

What is it that you're not certain about? I'm open for discussion
I realize my idea may not be the best, but perhaps with some discussion we can all come up with a better idea for nerfing bots.