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Wondering how devs will go about handling expoiting of the active skill system.
DarkPony
Member Posts: 5,566
Since the games skill system is very much like Darkfall where you improve your skills and stats by actually performing actions associated with them I am curious what the dev's can do to prevent macroing and exploits to quickly skill / stat up.
If you look at DF there has been quite some of that; even to the extent that some guilds got an early advantage over others if what I read is true.
There are reports about massive groups of people lining up closely around a group of magic users who then spam an AoE damage ability in order for all of them to take damage and with that, "increasing the rate of a certain skill gain a 100 times".
But also macroing seemed to be happening a lot; players just being able to spam magic attacks and leave their pc for a long while to gain skill ups which also worked with harvesting nodes.
Bottom line is that people will always try to find shortcuts to achieve an advantage, and we will do things in the least time and effort consuming way in general. Call it ingenuity or abuse, but it boils down to it being a part of human nature. So we need proper game resolutions to prevent this from happening; to keep things fair and not tempt folks to ruin the game for themselves and others to a certain extent.
Since a skill system like this means pretty slow progressing and can feel like a grind, rather than a natural process as it is intended, I think it is really prone to exploiting. What could the dev's do to prevent this from happening?
Your thoughts plox!
Comments
In another thread here I asked pretty much the same thing, because I'm also concerned with the possiblity of the same afk-macroing that goes on in DF. This is what I was told, which I think is a quote from some official MO source:
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"There will be no limit to how many Secondary Skills you can train, and it will take a very long time to train them all. However, you can if you like to. What you cannot do, however, is having them all "active" at the same time, as they are controlled by your Primary Skills:
It will take you a very short time (one-two weeks?) to max out the Primary Skills of your choice. This will enable you to get into the game quick and really make a difference - meaning there will be only player skill between your newbie Swordsmanship-skill(100) and the veteran's Swordsmanship-skill(100). However, depending on the veteran's Secondary Skills, he might be able to fight longer, or make a tad more damage (10%). Those Secondary Skills will not make or break your fight (only in very rare cases), but they will make a difference in the long run.
Retraining/untraining your Primary Skills will only take as long as training them for the first time. The Secondary Skills dependent on the Primary Skills you untrain will be disabled, but they will "remember" their values until you unlock them again. So, basically, you can have all the skills you want, if you train for a very long time, but you cannot have them all at the same time as that would indeed make you a one-man blacksmith-sorcerer-tamer-warrior-thief-hunter-whatever."
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Thanks to Dippy for providing that information.
If SV can hold to that, it might make the problem less pronounced than it is in DF. But, what you're talking about happeningwith afk-macroing in DF is true in my experience with that game. I hope this game will be different.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
Thanks a lot for that info, Rohn
Like you conclude, it seems like the problem will be less pronounced as in DF, though we can bet our behinds that people will still find loopholes to train their primaries faster then intended even if doing it legal would only take two weeks of normal playing per skill. At least they won't be able to get a really big advantage out of it it seems
My brand new bloggity blog.
Some primaries are going to take longer due to the frequency of the skill being used. You can quote me on that.
The only thing that SV can do is be aware of the exploits and stop them from happening, or slow their effectiveness. Here's an example. Ultima Online has the same system. They introduced a anti-macroing system that involved you having to move a certain amount of tiles away from your last position in order to gain skill again. Granted, you can gain more than .1 skill in one spot, but after a certain amount of time, you had to move. It prevented you from being able to sit in your house and macro the same skill over and over again until you maxed it out. Players had to make much more sophisticated macros and they had to do it in boats in order to make it work. It didn't stop everyone, but it did discourage quite a few.
There are going to be macro'ers, my suggestion is to take a screenshot, contact a GM, if the GM get's your page fast enough, he can observe the player.. maybe attempt to conversate with them. Macroing will be bannable. Just do your job when you see it and hope that it's enough to stop those people. It's not that big of a deal anyways, you'll catch up to them in most cases, you'll still be able to kill them in a fight.
Some primaries are going to take longer due to the frequency of the skill being used. You can quote me on that.
The only thing that SV can do is be aware of the exploits and stop them from happening, or slow their effectiveness. Here's an example. Ultima Online has the same system. They introduced a anti-macroing system that involved you having to move a certain amount of tiles away from your last position in order to gain skill again. Granted, you can gain more than .1 skill in one spot, but after a certain amount of time, you had to move. It prevented you from being able to sit in your house and macro the same skill over and over again until you maxed it out. Players had to make much more sophisticated macros and they had to do it in boats in order to make it work. It didn't stop everyone, but it did discourage quite a few.
There are going to be macro'ers, my suggestion is to take a screenshot, contact a GM, if the GM get's your page fast enough, he can observe the player.. maybe attempt to conversate with them. Macroing will be bannable. Just do your job when you see it and hope that it's enough to stop those people. It's not that big of a deal anyways, you'll catch up to them in most cases, you'll still be able to kill them in a fight.
Thanks for the reply. It sounds very realistic what you say and the ultima method sounds pretty solid.
Oh, the killing part gives me an idea; what if you would be able to kill people without any penalty as long as they don't react during the 'fight'? You would occasionaly hit some people with connection problems and afk'ers with that, but it could be another incentive to get rid of macroers.
*coughs* Nevermind, that was probably a bad idea ...
My brand new bloggity blog.
Some primaries are going to take longer due to the frequency of the skill being used. You can quote me on that.
The only thing that SV can do is be aware of the exploits and stop them from happening, or slow their effectiveness. Here's an example. Ultima Online has the same system. They introduced a anti-macroing system that involved you having to move a certain amount of tiles away from your last position in order to gain skill again. Granted, you can gain more than .1 skill in one spot, but after a certain amount of time, you had to move. It prevented you from being able to sit in your house and macro the same skill over and over again until you maxed it out. Players had to make much more sophisticated macros and they had to do it in boats in order to make it work. It didn't stop everyone, but it did discourage quite a few.
There are going to be macro'ers, my suggestion is to take a screenshot, contact a GM, if the GM get's your page fast enough, he can observe the player.. maybe attempt to conversate with them. Macroing will be bannable. Just do your job when you see it and hope that it's enough to stop those people. It's not that big of a deal anyways, you'll catch up to them in most cases, you'll still be able to kill them in a fight.
Thanks for the reply. It sounds very realistic what you say and the ultima method sounds pretty solid.
Oh, the killing part gives me an idea; what if you would be able to kill people without any penalty as long as they don't react during the 'fight'? You would occasionaly hit some people with connection problems and afk'ers with that, but it could be another incentive to get rid of macroers.
*coughs* Nevermind, that was probably a bad idea ...
I would have no problem killing a macroer on sight, penalty or not
.
Tried: EvE, DnD Online, LotRO, WAR, AoC,
Played: UO, SWG(pre-cu), GuildWars, FFXI, WoW
Liked: UO, SWG, GuildWars
Disliked: WoW, FFXI
I can't imagine crafters doing their jobs outside of their houses.
Even inside the cities there's still huge possibility to be killed by a skilled rogue.
Other thing is that I always wondered how man is able to macro a skill, when he is supposed to train it on something (PvE).
Just by swinging sword in air, or throwing fireballs to a tree shouldn't raise a skill even with 0.000001%
I don't know how DFo handles whole thing, but I assume that shooting a mana bolt to air trains this skill. No easier way to macro.
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/thread
Remember, your advantage lies in your opponent's weakness (J)
Other thing is that I always wondered how man is able to macro a skill, when he is supposed to train it on something (PvE).
Just by swinging sword in air, or throwing fireballs to a tree shouldn't raise a skill even with 0.000001%
I don't know how DFo handles whole thing, but I assume that shooting a mana bolt to air trains this skill. No easier way to macro.
That's how it was in Darkfall until recently, now you actually need to hit something to be able to get a skill up, before, you could just stand in a corner and swing your sword/do some magic/whatever into the air.
Other thing is that I always wondered how man is able to macro a skill, when he is supposed to train it on something (PvE).
Just by swinging sword in air, or throwing fireballs to a tree shouldn't raise a skill even with 0.000001%
I don't know how DFo handles whole thing, but I assume that shooting a mana bolt to air trains this skill. No easier way to macro.
That's how it was in Darkfall until recently, now you actually need to hit something to be able to get a skill up, before, you could just stand in a corner and swing your sword/do some magic/whatever into the air.
However, in DF they also just increased the rate at which you skill up. But back on topic:
I really don't think macroing to skill up will be that big of a problem in MO. Primary skills are 80-90% of what affects you, and they skill up very fast. The way I read that dev quote, is it'll take 2 weeks to get all of your primary skills to the cap.
That is a very short time if you think about how long it'll take to get just one skill to its cap. Hell, writing the macro bot might take just as long.
I would be more worried about macro miners/harvesters. But then again you can gank them and take all of their stuff soon as they leave town.
Devs stated that the pvp related skill were quite easy to max out (a matter of few weeks) but then secondary skills were rather long to up (they are related to the primary skills, but won't affect pvp directly).
The point of their skill system is not to have an endless grind like in darkfall, it's to provide choice to the players in their play style. There will be a hard cap on the primary skills, so you won't be some sort of jack of all trades like it that game. You'll have to pick the best skills to fit your playstyle.
Great info from the game forums btw.
I'm sure once the world begins to populate, players will be all too happy to gank afk macro'ers, assuming such a thing is more efficient than being at your keyboard, doing the actions yourself. I'm glad the devs are so hush-hush about their ideas of preventing it.