New Ascension Area: Manual Hunting Only

[chrenraf]

I think it would be great if there was an ascension area built where LICH would not work at all. Once you entered, you have to hunt and do everything fully old school (no teams of 1 controller and 5 ghosts). The critters would be built with human speed in mind and not computing speed. Same with swarms. Pump up the silvers/rewards and take away the overhunted/under hunted loot balance mechanism in order to reward players who are present. Maybe even add a 10%-20% permanent absorb rate for all EXP gained while in that specific are. This would also reward ACTUAL team playing amongst live players.

Thoughts?

[Neveragain]

I think it would be great if there was an ascension area built where LICH would not work at all. Once you entered, you have to hunt and do everything fully old school (no teams of 1 controller and 5 ghosts). The critters would be built with human speed in mind and not computing speed. Same with swarms. Pump up the silvers/rewards and take away the overhunted/under hunted loot balance mechanism in order to reward players who are present. Maybe even add a 10%-20% permanent absorb rate for all EXP gained while in that specific are. This would also reward ACTUAL team playing amongst live players.

Thoughts?

You are never going to beat innovation and automation, billion dollar AAA game developers have been trying for years.

Most coders take pride in beating new attempts, it's their greatest reward.

[Rjex]

Lich is just a 3rd party software to interpret game data and generate responses. Simu can't disable it as it has no control over it. If somehow, lich vanished tomorrow, you can write dozens of other programs that communicate with the game to do the same thing. You'd never be able to tell them apart.

For massive online games there are now actual AI-driven bots that mimic a player, so soon enough the whole multiplayer genre will have to undergo some fundamental shift because the technology is changing. Online FPS games in particular will become pointless as bots that can't be distinguished from good human players will dominate.

[Tgo01]

Lich is just a 3rd party software to interpret game data and generate responses. Simu can't disable it as it has no control over it. If somehow, lich vanished tomorrow, you can write dozens of other programs that communicate with the game to do the same thing. You'd never be able to tell them apart.

Yeah Lich did many things before the GMs tried to mimic all of the data.

Lich calculated when spells were cast on your player and how long they lasted, it gave each room in the game a unique room ID so you could move around via ;narost and ;go2, it even had a game wide chat system via ;LNet.

The GMs only recently allowed the in game ESP to go game wide, only very recently allowed us to see the duration of spells on our characters, and only very very recently allowed us to see the in game room numbers.

It almost sounds as if the GMs are trying to replace Lich entirely, but that won't happen anytime soon because Lich is 90% all about the scripts people create for it and use, but it sure seems like they are trying anyways.

The only way the GMs could ever really "disable" Lich is if they went out of their way to make it impossible for Lich to know all of this stuff, like not giving a specific game line for when you receive a specific buff, instead it's just a generic game line so you have no idea what spell was cast on your character, stuff like that. And that would be the most petty thing I can imagine the GMs doing, though not entirely out of the realm of possibilities.

[chrenraf]

You could perhaps modify/adapt the client and allow entries by exception. I know there were macros and some scripts prior to lich, but lich made everything able to be entirely automated. Now, that is cool for some aspects, but not for others. Lich can be sniffed easily as it's parameters are set. The timing is set. It is easily identifiable. If you built a new area that banned lich and monitored it for non-human activity I think it could be successful. Also, in that area you could be perma-banned if you try to circumvent the rules. Not perma-banned from the game, but just that specific area and if that area is super beneficial and fun people would think twice about trying to do so.

The system itself may not 100% be able to stop people from "cheating" but they would be easily recognizable and banned from entering that specific area of the game. Obviously, macros as intended by the game originally would be fine. The goal would be to have an area that has to be hunted the old school way, advocate for the players to be present, which would in turn create more dialogue and RP. If this area was much superior to the rest of the script allowed game it would be met well. Nobody will mess with any of the game areas currently out there, just a new area. Perhaps a whole new small city with ascension hunting grounds.

If that area had say a 20% increase in absorption, 20% increased mind capacity, and a 20% increase in loot with it's own legendary hopper I think we would find a lot of people there and more engaged. The best part is you can leave that area and go back to lich world anytime you want.

[Methais]

I think it would be great if there was an ascension area built where LICH would not work at all. Once you entered, you have to hunt and do everything fully old school (no teams of 1 controller and 5 ghosts). The critters would be built with human speed in mind and not computing speed. Same with swarms. Pump up the silvers/rewards and take away the overhunted/under hunted loot balance mechanism in order to reward players who are present. Maybe even add a 10%-20% permanent absorb rate for all EXP gained while in that specific are. This would also reward ACTUAL team playing amongst live players.

Thoughts?

And how do you propose that they do this, on the technical side?

EDIT: Keep in mind this is Simutronics we're talking about.

[Gelston]

You could perhaps modify/adapt the client and allow entries by exception. I know there were macros and some scripts prior to lich, but lich made everything able to be entirely automated. Now, that is cool for some aspects, but not for others. Lich can be sniffed easily as it's parameters are set. The timing is set. It is easily identifiable. If you built a new area that banned lich and monitored it for non-human activity I think it could be successful. Also, in that area you could be perma-banned if you try to circumvent the rules. Not perma-banned from the game, but just that specific area and if that area is super beneficial and fun people would think twice about trying to do so.

The system itself may not 100% be able to stop people from "cheating" but they would be easily recognizable and banned from entering that specific area of the game. Obviously, macros as intended by the game originally would be fine. The goal would be to have an area that has to be hunted the old school way, advocate for the players to be present, which would in turn create more dialogue and RP. If this area was much superior to the rest of the script allowed game it would be met well. Nobody will mess with any of the game areas currently out there, just a new area. Perhaps a whole new small city with ascension hunting grounds.

If that area had say a 20% increase in absorption, 20% increased mind capacity, and a 20% increase in loot with it's own legendary hopper I think we would find a lot of people there and more engaged. The best part is you can leave that area and go back to lich world anytime you want.

So.... You want a specific area to have 24/7 human monitoring? Because that is what it would take to shut off lich.

[Neveragain]

You could perhaps modify/adapt the client and allow entries by exception. I know there were macros and some scripts prior to lich, but lich made everything able to be entirely automated. Now, that is cool for some aspects, but not for others. Lich can be sniffed easily as it's parameters are set. The timing is set. It is easily identifiable. If you built a new area that banned lich and monitored it for non-human activity I think it could be successful. Also, in that area you could be perma-banned if you try to circumvent the rules. Not perma-banned from the game, but just that specific area and if that area is super beneficial and fun people would think twice about trying to do so.

The system itself may not 100% be able to stop people from "cheating" but they would be easily recognizable and banned from entering that specific area of the game. Obviously, macros as intended by the game originally would be fine. The goal would be to have an area that has to be hunted the old school way, advocate for the players to be present, which would in turn create more dialogue and RP. If this area was much superior to the rest of the script allowed game it would be met well. Nobody will mess with any of the game areas currently out there, just a new area. Perhaps a whole new small city with ascension hunting grounds.

If that area had say a 20% increase in absorption, 20% increased mind capacity, and a 20% increase in loot with it's own legendary hopper I think we would find a lot of people there and more engaged. The best part is you can leave that area and go back to lich world anytime you want.

Because of the loot changes they made during "War of Nations", Lich or not, the treasure would be wiped clean within 3 days.

1 person, lich or not, can empty the hopper of an unused hunting area in under a week.

[Izzy]

This is a terrible idea. Also, impossible. That is all.

[chrenraf]

Well, when doing so is a ban-able offense it wouldnt take long to weed it out. Also, like I said, lich uses very specific timing for it's commands and can already (and most likely probably did ages ago) make a program that instantly recognizes it and could ban those using it in that area. In order to get to the area you would be well aware of the consequences. no oops I didn't know! monitoring it wouldn't take quite the manpower folks would think. Everything is logged and they just would have a program that sniffs lich users out, extracts the logs, places then in a folder, and then staff reviews it as able.

It's a post cap ascension ground so it's not like people will just make new characters to evade the system. That, and getting caught jacking around in that area and getting a ban would result in lowering the re-sale value of the character especially if it became a well liked area.