In the 22 years Dragonrealms has been around, we've seen a lot of change both in and out of the game. The nature of online gaming has of course changed as well.

From what I've seen on LNet, Discord, and Reddit, the topic of AFK scripting is a flashpoint for argument. We mostly agree that it is rampant, and has been an ongoing issue for a long time. It's also been said that scripting is a symptom of a greater problem: the experience system. It takes tens if not hundreds of thousands of hours of learning to start capping skills.

Lich is a very helpful script-sharing community, and there are several Discord groups with channels specifically for scripting. It's a pretty inclusive community, the scripting one. Creating better scripts is very likely a reason a lot of people play the game. You've also got the "get numbers higher" crowd, and the PvP crowd. All of these folks want to build a stronger character, and that takes a great deal of time.

Script checks last ~5 minutes before you're deemed unresponsive. Does the community accept that you shouldn't go more than 5 minutes without checking your scripts, in tens of thousands of hours of (virtually automated) gameplay? Do we believe that "big" players don't leave their scripts unattended for more than 5 minutes? Probably not, but you tell me.

I wanted to open this can of worms again to drive the discussion toward a shift in policy, if one were deemed necessary. "Policy Updates" is on Lyneya's chalkboard (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_KlJW-Q-CX-dAyLUX8xCB3WSAG9-hR0JLMwZBbaMGtE/edit) and I think at least part of this is taking a look at the scripting policy. The experience system could eventually change, but it is what it is right now. Enforcement of the current scripting policy will, in my opinion, drive people away from the game.

But that's just my two cents. What do you think?

>>Nope. Anyone who is 100+ has absent-scripted for long periods of time. I don't know that I would say "afk scripting" but unresponsive for 20+ minutes while they watch Netflix or whatever.

For the record, this isn't completely true. Many people over 100th might do this, but not 'everyone'. I've had PCs well over 100th, and I never did this, nor did I have scripts written to be able to facilitate doing this (and that was on purpose. It helped keep me from accidentally zoning out because I knew if I did, I'd probably get my character killed before I'd have failed a script check). I know others that play the same way, too, even still to this day.

The plural of data isn't anecdote, though, so I know plenty of folks aren't necessarily going to believe me, or take what I've said as worth much. Nor should they, entirely. The reason I wrote anything at all wasn't to convince anyone, so much as it was to remind you all that your anecdotes aren't really any more able to be generalized to everyone than mine are :)

Just please keep that in mind as we continue this discussion, okay? I think it's good and healthy that you guys in general weigh in on issues like this, but avoiding the sweeping generalizations also helps a lot for the tone of the discussion as it moves forward.

PS -- It's also totally within policy to do other things while you're playing, so long as you can also still respond appropriately to the game environment within the time a script check would be finished. I just know that dividing my attention like that doesn't work great for me personally, even with triggers set up to assist me in noticing stuff going on I might want to interact with (not just script checks -- other players, invasions, whatever). Your mileage may vary, but as long as you can still appropriately respond to the environment if you're gaining any advantage in the game, binge all of the Altered Carbon and Black Mirror you want. I mean, I'd love it if nobody felt the need to do that, and instead used that time RPing, even just over the gweths, but hey, different folks have different ways they like to play. Follow policy, and it's all good. :)

-Persida

A really hard to accept lesson I've had lately is that everyone, players and staff alike, all have different visions of 'What DR is/should be'. I don't think anything is going to change regarding policy, and people are going to continue pointing fingers at everyone else as being both the problem in DR, and 'doing it wrong'.

>>Are you suggesting you mostly avoided scripts to maintain an active play style, or you didn't script at all and made 100+?

>>The difficulty I have is not a matter of belief in truth of your words but one of physical possibility. To reach a high level, you're required to type in tens - no, hundreds - of thousands of commands.

Not to speak for Persida, but she didn't say she avoided scripts but that she avoided scripts that could go on forever.

For what it's worth, I'm 100+ and have a similar setup. My combat script stops after a critter dies and is looted, so I have to actively reboot it to kill another critter, and a lot of my other scripts work in a similar manner that causes them to eventually "end". This accomplishes something similar to what it sounds like Persida does: in the event I step away from my computer and forget to turn off my script, or if I nod off, or whatever, I don't end up violating policy due to the script looping on infinitely.

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

>>Are you suggesting you mostly avoided scripts to maintain an active play style, or you didn't script at all and made 100+?

Neither! I just didn't make or use scripts that would fully automate my character. My scripts still required me to input things to keep them going (no significant looping), and they didn't account for stuns or do anything fancy that would keep the character alive if the situation went south. I avoided making and using scripts that would make it too easy to afk.

I like an active play style, for one, so I never felt the need for that level of automation since to me that doesn't feel like I'm playing a game at all. I also never wanted to feel tempted to 'just go to this one thing really fast, it'll be fine this once' and leave my character gaining advantages in the game while I wasn't paying attention.


>>This is where I get stuck. Let's say that it takes 5000 hours (+/- depending on guild, usually +) to get the point where they have all of their guild skills and feats and are generally 150th (still FAR less than capping out the game). Maybe 10,000+ hours to get to the point that they can hunt most mobs in the game or craft most things even with low workability or cap most spells for peak power.

My personal feeling on this, and I stress that it is personal, is that DR isn't really a game where anyone should want to quickly get to the end, because there isn't really much to do once you get up that way that is meaningfully different from what you do at any other level. Yes, you get more spells/abilities, and you're stat and skill-wise buffer. You can kill things you couldn't kill before. But you don't get anything different out of killing those things.

We don't really have anything resembling an 'end game'. DR was never designed for that. We don't have raid content, or special drops that only high-end critters drop. The PVP at high level isn't really any more strategic (and arguably less so) than low level PVP. DR isn't really an 'end game' sort of game, it's more of a 'journey' sort of game, by design, and that's why the journey is so incredibly long by design -- to allow folks to continue that with just one character and still feel like they're moving along while doing so.

Now, you could argue that the journey sucks and we need to improve the enjoyment factor of day to day gameplay. You can say that you just don't like that type of game no matter what. Those are completely valid opinions to have, regardless of if I agree with them or not, but the game was, and currently is, designed for a journey-like style of game vs. a quickly grind through levels to get to do end content style of game.


>>(re: policy on attentiveness during gameplay) I see that as mostly a negative, not a selling point. It's an admission that the game-play isn't engaging. It's work. You can build a machine to automate it, just be there for when the boss shows up or you get in trouble.

I didn't say I personally find that as a selling point for the game. I don't enjoy playing that way, myself! It's also not required that you play that way, though. I certainly never did, and I didn't find the game to not be engaging! I found lots of things to engage with, even when I was hunting, that kept me super involved.

Mostly, though, that's because I really, really enjoy RP, and because I have zero desire to just hit .hunt. I'd have played another game entirely and not logged in to DR if all I was going to do was .hunt. That sounds very boring to me! However, I do recognize that other people are not the same as me, and they might like different things and different styles of play, so I like to emphasize what is and is not allowable within policy vs. what I think is a fun way to play. :)


-Persida

> My personal feeling on this, and I stress that it is personal, is that DR isn't really a game where anyone should want to quickly get to the end, because there isn't really much to do once you get up that way that is meaningfully different from what you do at any other level. Yes, you get more spells/abilities, and you're stat and skill-wise buffer. You can kill things you couldn't kill before. But you don't get anything different out of killing those things.

There is definitely an advantage in having higher ranks.

1. High level defenses make you survive more things.
- This is important for flexing creatures. There's nothing worse than getting one-shot in a quest or invasion simply because someone much bigger than kissed the creature that is now aiming at you.
- This lets you hunt down treasure chests more easily.
- This lets you explore (if you care about that) in relative safety.
- This lets you mine in harder to find places.
- This lets you survive (kind of) the griefers.
- Some treasure maps can't be found without very high skills.

2. High level athletics makes the game smaller.
- It makes the game smaller. It's no longer an hour long investment to move from Shard to Theren for the invasion. You can get there in 5 minutes with enough swimming.
- It opens up new hunting areas.

3. High level offenses and/or survivals (with #1) makes you more platinum.
- The economy isn't great, but it still exists. Higher level creatures, faster kill speeds, and higher skinning/picking lets you increase that rate substantially.

4. You can participate in more games.
- High appraisal and slings are required for the spinnerette and boggle blast. The better you are, the faster you can gain very rare resources in a timed event.

5. You need VERY high crafting skills to play that game.
- Most people only want the best of the best in crafted gear. You need 1000+ ranks to make most of the really important things.

6. You need very high magic skills to cap out all of your buffs.
- The esoteric spells are capped out at 1000 ranks, some higher.

7. More efficient leveling.
- High skill ranges make it so that you have fewer skills stalled. That equals more TDPs which feeds into a self-replicating cycle.

Can you play the game with a level 1 novice? Sure, but it's more difficult. You also have the problem of finding someone to play with. Most people, even while ATK, want to be constantly training skills since the treadmill is the game.

> We don't really have anything resembling an 'end game'. DR was never designed for that.

I see where you're coming from. It's a sandbox game. It's designed to play in, but that doesn't mean there's no end game. People game skills to is being able to do anything. There's a PvP end game, and an auction end game for the very top of the top.

I wish there was more end-game for PvE, but what do you think would happen if all skills from a functional perspective capped at 300, 400, and 500 for tert, secondary, and primary respectively? Everything else was just for TDPs which could be greatly scaled to be insignificant gains after a certain point. I'm not proposing this, but what kind of end-game do you think that would allow for?

> I found lots of things to engage with, even when I was hunting, that kept me super involved.

Like what? I'm not questioning it, but I'm curious what suggestions you could give.

> Mostly, though, that's because I really, really enjoy RP, and because I have zero desire to just hit .hunt.

I think that's fair, but the game doesn't really reward you for RP or push you into RP (downtime). It rewards you for scripting. I'm not sure it could change at this point, but in terms of rewards it's pretty clear.

I'm just going to chime in and say I have seen people with vastly lower ranks conquer players who are by and large superior to them in every way. It happens all the time, to be frank. I think you have to devote time to learning how PvP works and the strengths and weaknesses of each class. Is it perfect? No. Does this mean a novice can take down a level 150? No. But I have seen creative people pull off some impressive feats when working with much less, on paper. Just some food for thought.

-GameMaster Signi

>>High appraisal and slings are required for the spinnerette and boggle blast. The better you are, the faster you can gain very rare resources in a timed event.

As someone utterly obsessed with Boggle Blast ("I picked sling as my primary missile weapon AND now it has a use beyond being funny for a Gnome to use sling? Sweet!"), I don't think the bar to do well in this game is that high. Yes, you might need 250-300 ranks to reliably hit 30+ points in it (and this might be different as of last year), but I feel there is a notable difference between a game requiring ranks in the high hundreds/breaking 1000s vs a game requiring you to have done some training to be good at it.

>>Most people only want the best of the best in crafted gear. You need 1000+ ranks to make most of the really important things.

IMO, this is only half true. I feel like people don't really value lower difficulty tier weapons like they should. Sure, I can't make a masterful katana out of telothian, but I'm also happy knowing that I could make masterful glaes daggers if I wanted (and that's without techs dedicated toward doing it!). I won't be making swappable thin fans anytime soon, but I can still make some masterful things that would be just as good if I had another 1000 ranks in forging.

>>You need very high magic skills to cap out all of your buffs.

IMO, once you throw in things like spell stances, and you weight things toward potency over duration (or hell, integrity), this matters less. Sure, you might need to recast more often and you could theoretically have someone cast dispel at you (a real threat?), but you'd be pretty well off otherwise.

I happily join people in saying mid-game becomes a bit of a repetitive slog, and the advancement ladder has a fair share of issues (mainly that as EXP rates slow down, the space between each rung on the ladder grows, making it doubly-slow to move on to something new/different... I'm probably going to be forging crowns for another two years or more), but I also think people overly weigh the idea of being the best at everything as the metric for enjoying the game. I think it's important to feel like you're advancing and moving forward, and experiencing new things as a result, more-so than hitting an arbitrary view of "now I am the best".

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

> I won't be making swappable thin fans anytime soon, but I can still make some masterful things that would be just as good if I had another 1000 ranks in forging.

I'm not disagreeing with what you're saying. You can do some things well enough, but I want to keep perspective on how crafting is showing the problems with the exaggerating scaling of this game.

In order to make a steel two-handed weapon, you need 550 - 700 ranks without techs. With techs and professions that can be reduced to 368 - 500 ranks depending on the weapon you're trying to make. That's just a base, but there are a large number of penalizing factors such as weapon quality, tool quality, and metal workability.

If this were converted to magic ranks and compared with a magic prime (this is for a baseline, not a GvG argument) you'd need the skills of an 85th - 150th (depending on what you're working with) for what's effectively a 10 platinum weapon. To add to this, with the way crafting xp works, you're spending all of your time doing just that. You have to sacrifice optimal progression to level crafting. Even traders can't level by doing just crafting since they have armor reqs, so that further draws out the time commitment.

All two-handed edged weapons are challenging to complex.

This has gone off track. The point I am making is that you have to spend thousands of hours to master one facet of the crafting system alone. Something that takes so much time that it's a less productive usage of your time to be good at, putting MT items aside. There's also a strong incentive to scripting it as having a very high level of skill does matter.

There were some questions and comments here that made me want to not only respond, but to start an entirely different conversation. I don't want to derail this one further, since player input about scripting policy is just as important! So, I started an new thread in a more appropriate place: http://forums.play.net/forums/DragonRealms/Discussions%20with%20DragonRealms%20Staff%20and%20Players/General%20Discussions/view/14078

-Persida

I’d force anyone caught afking enough times into TF, and let them continue to play that char with the correct subscription upgrade. Prime gets cleaned up a little and TF gets fresh meat.

Monster Elec

You hear the distant echo of a savage Horde snarling in barbaric disapproval of your deeds.

If tf didn’t cost more, I’m sure a lot more people would play.

Monster Elec

You hear the distant echo of a savage Horde snarling in barbaric disapproval of your deeds.

A post was hidden.

Let's stay on topic, please.

Helje
DragonRealms Senior Board Moderator

>>If tf didn’t cost more, I’m sure a lot more people would play.

I would never play on TF. If I were forced to play on TF from the previously mentioned comment, I would leave. If TF didn't have open pvp that'd be fine, but forcing people into an open PVP environment when they don't want to PVP is not a solution.

Before someone hits me with the "oh there's not much pvp on TF anyway," that doesn't matter. On an open pvp server it only takes one person to ruin your experience. We've already talked about DR being highly griefable and tbh I wouldn't believe for a second that people don't get griefed on TF. That's even the people who quietly script and don't draw attention to themselves, too. Some people just like to start fight.

Also, there are way less people, which means a worse economy, less people to collaborate on box office events, just an overall worse experience overall imo. Forcing scripters to TF would be like putting people in permanent time out, except the other kids in time out are going to beat you up and take your stuff.

Anyway, back on topic, I agree with OP. Punishing scripters is going to hurt the game in the long run. I see a lot of resistance to the current policy in these posts. I'm not surprised to see the red names here trying to gently nudge us into supporting the current scripting policy, but I think the policy should be abolished for the sake of the game's longevity. The game has changed. Gaming in general has changed such that MUDs are mostly a nostalgia item/coding practice now. That's not a bad thing, I just think if we want DR to stick around we're going to have to appeal to as many audiences as we can to keep the subs flowing.

Read this to the tune of the Cindy Lauper song, "Girls, They Wanna Have Fun".

"Players just wanna have fun. That's all they really want. When the world can get them some, oh, player's they wanna have fun."

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Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game. Michael Jordan
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/game

> I would never play on TF. If I were forced to play on TF from the previously mentioned comment, I would leave. If TF didn't have open pvp that'd be fine, but forcing people into an open PVP environment when they don't want to PVP is not a solution.

Ironically, it's really the opposite. There's the introduction death, probably a new player gift package, and then you're left alone indefinitely. If anything, TF has too little interaction with each other, but that's perfect for the just let me script crowd.

> Also, there are way less people, which means a worse economy, less people to collaborate on box office events, just an overall worse experience overall imo.

And this. This is why I suggest allowing people to swap between instances. TF is a single player game, much much more so than prime today.

> Forcing scripters to TF would be like putting people in permanent time out, except the other kids in time out are going to beat you up and take your stuff.

Naw. Too much effort. They want their numbers to go up. Killing you isn't worth the time, unless you start something first.

> Anyway, back on topic, I agree with OP. Punishing scripters is going to hurt the game in the long run. I see a lot of resistance to the current policy in these posts. I'm not surprised to see the red names here trying to gently nudge us into supporting the current scripting policy, but I think the policy should be abolished for the sake of the game's longevity. The game has changed. Gaming in general has changed such that MUDs are mostly a nostalgia item/coding practice now. That's not a bad thing, I just think if we want DR to stick around we're going to have to appeal to as many audiences as we can to keep the subs flowing.

Succinctly and accurately put.

Simu could make money allowing a tf sub separate prime. Or at the very least allow you to play prime and tf at the same time. I’d sign up a few of my accounts for tf if I could play prime and tf at the same time.

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Don't forget to vote for dragonrealms:

http://www.topmudsites.com/vote-DragonRealms.html

>>I'm really surprised this hasn't happened yet. It seems like so much wasted potential to not allow players to be in all the instances and games at the same time.

After dealing with some rather old infrastructures myself, I think it's less "we don't want to" and more "oh god making X do Y in this situation is going to require a lot of upending and modernization that might not be worth it for the folks who really want to play GSIV and DR at the same time" (or whatever).

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.