Game Development: World 16, with Steam

[Audiosmurf]

I don't think new players will be okay with botting and all the custom client stuff. It's an unfair advantage.
It doesn't matter that it's allowed. H&H is on Steam and they (normal people) don't like games full of cheaters.

No no, trust me, jorb understands, he said so in the stream. Bots are the same thing as the sawmill. It's equivalent so it's not a problem. Trust the process.

Steam users won't like Jorb's view on cheating.

I actually agree fully and have expressed the same, but I think the devs' "politics" (perhaps not the precisely correct word,) basically preclude any action from ever being taken on bots or almost anything else. Something I've come to both deeply respect and resent in nearly equal measure.

[gravesmerch]

can I just use Steam to buy stuff, then go play outside of Steam?

edit: answer is yes

[Audiosmurf]

If you guys don't address the bot issue I'm going to cast a nefarious spell to make you both more bald

[Audiosmurf]

If you guys don't address the bot issue I'm going to cast a nefarious spell to make you both more bald

You have 72 hours to comply with my demands, and to show you that I'm serious, you have 24 hours to comply with my demands

[loftar]

What kind of "addressing", more precisely, is it that you'd like to see? Also, where would you draw the line? Do you make a distinction between "pick nearest herb" or "close nearest gate" bots, drinking scripts, farming bots, the built-in autoharvest action, foraging bots, surveillance alts, &c? Just curious. If I gave you admin access, what would you do?

[Audiosmurf]

What kind of "addressing", more precisely, is it that you'd like to see? Also, where would you draw the line? Do you make a distinction between "pick nearest herb" or "close nearest gate" bots, drinking scripts, farming bots, the built-in autoharvest action, foraging bots, surveillance alts, &c? Just curious. If I gave you admin access, what would you do?

I honestly don't know how to realistically address it, I'm largely just light heartedly griping. I do think wrist slapping the obvious 24/7 botmasters with mini-divine-interventions would at least make a dent, but I'm also sure that's reductive and it's not so simple.

My main issue, personally, and I think what you're going to hear a lot of after launching to steam, is that knowing that there are players who are getting the same rewards as you (or, generally, better rewards because you can time/optimize things better with automation,) basically without Playing The Game cheapens much of the sense of accomplishment/progression, leaving larping as roughly the only gratifying thing left.

One of the best steps I ever saw you guys take in this regard, just as an example, was the addition of curio tables to remove the disparity between the theoretical barely existent vanilla client normals, and losers like me who stayed logged in permanently with an autostudy script running. Jorb asked in the stream, approximately "if everyone could do it, would that make it fine?" and the answer is yes, 100%, it's the inbuilt disparity of proprietary client/scripting stuff that's the issue.

Like, if you knew that everyone who was in the know was just perpetually getting stronger/progressing like it was EVE Online, but you're only getting better/stronger when you're Actually Playing, I'd suspect you can surely see how this would dampen or snuff the enjoyment of someone who's not already an entrenched player, yeah? I sincerely think it's gonna be a real problem for this game in a normie ecosystem.

[TheServant]

What kind of "addressing", more precisely, is it that you'd like to see? Also, where would you draw the line? Do you make a distinction between "pick nearest herb" or "close nearest gate" bots, drinking scripts, farming bots, the built-in autoharvest action, foraging bots, surveillance alts, &c? Just curious. If I gave you admin access, what would you do?

if you give me admin access i would remove quality nodes!

[Mepp]

Make botting (any kind of automation) and playing multiple characters for one players benefit a bannable offence. It doesn't matter whether you can detect it or not.
Add Anti Cheat software. A Report feature. Have some in-game moderators. A ToS and some basic rules everyone has to agree to before they play.

Just be a normal online game for the Steam release.

[Robben_DuMarsch]

What kind of "addressing", more precisely, is it that you'd like to see? Also, where would you draw the line? Do you make a distinction between "pick nearest herb" or "close nearest gate" bots, drinking scripts, farming bots, the built-in autoharvest action, foraging bots, surveillance alts, &c? Just curious. If I gave you admin access, what would you do?

Just keep doing what you've always done - adjusting mechanics appropriately to give something of a more level playing field for non-botters and botters.

For example, right now bots are pretty egregious for animal spawning in high quality nodes and for making infinite cheese killing the food market.

It'd be great if you removed animal quality nodes and gave cheese the black pepper treatment (bum burn equivalent, even if not quite as strong, call it constipation) to return non botting as the best way to farm most animals and limit the power of infinite cheese.

[Audiosmurf]

What kind of "addressing", more precisely, is it that you'd like to see? Also, where would you draw the line? Do you make a distinction between "pick nearest herb" or "close nearest gate" bots, drinking scripts, farming bots, the built-in autoharvest action, foraging bots, surveillance alts, &c? Just curious. If I gave you admin access, what would you do?

And, yeah, the line I would draw in the sand is around "is this something that could be realistically implemented into vanilla," like the aforementioned curio table, or the drink hotkey, or as you mention, autoharvesting, or foragable radar, being a formerly MASSIVE strictly custom client advantage, etc etc. Automated surveillance alts are lame, angler/mammoth/whatever checking bots are lame, foraging bots are lame, etcetc, and I find it's gotten tiresome and a bit embittering to see it mostly tacitly endorsed again and again over the years.