I was thinking about this today and I have hit upon the perfect way to get rid of the scripters.

It's time to get graphical! Take Trade Wars 2002 and create a graphical game (like any of the xbox ones) and model it exactly after the current game. Fancy looking sectors, cool, alive planets, bitchin looking ships, fancy going to twarp movies, etc. If you do that, there's no way to run a script anymore.

Plus it would be cool to play.

I've been given the greenlight to put together a new proposal for a TradeWars project and I'm working on it. That's a big part of what I'm doing with the game today, assessing its problems and trying to figure out what we can keep and what we can't in order to make a true TradeWars game that's actually going to appeal to a more broad market. It could range anywhere from a new text-based game to a fully 3D EVE-like game, it just depends on what best serves the gameplay. But the goal is definitely to keep it "TradeWars", not to make it TW-meets-EVE or whatever.

But you know, even if the game does go graphical, it won't keep bots from impacting play. There are plenty of graphical games that have their own battles with scripts. It's really going to take gameplay design to eliminate the tactics that make scripts so powerful, because you can't eliminate the scripts themselves. Even in an FPS, you have dead reckoning and stuff like that. That's why I consider it a worthwhile effort to try to address scripting and bots here in this version, because the same issues are going to apply in any new game, if they're not taken into account in the design.

Just for reference, there's a page in the museum about the graphical prototype I did for TradeWars Tournament, which eventually became TradeWars Rising (after they took the game design out of my hands), if you'd like to have a look. That was more about a 2D interface to the existing game. Nothing like what you described. http://wiki.classictw.com/index.php?tit ... Tournament

And then you can only play if you have a Xbox, or whatever platform the client is for.

And if the platform isn't a console, then you'd need to bundle the game with sophisticated, intrusive, and platform-specific anti-cheat software, or else people could still script.

And then you'd need to encrypt the client-server protocol.

And then when the encryption is broken (which it will be) you'd need to develop sophisticated heuristic cheat detection on the server side, or people could still script with a proxy.

Possibly easier, and definitely better, to redesign the game so that scripting doesn't ruin the experience for casual players. Then it would still enjoy the good side of scripting, which is helper authors keeping the game alive with creative ways to gather and display the mountains of data the game produces. No helpers... no Trade Wars.

I take it you do not play new video games much these days?
It's not about the game so much anymore.
It's who can write the fastest and best script for botting.

Every time i go to visit my cousin kids, they got a new bot to show me.
Does not matter what game it is. It's about the bots now.

Even my Warcraft had battle scripts for PVP.
So basicly if your not up on the lastest scripts or writing your own,
you get owned plain and simple.

Good luck trying to stop it, cause it here to stay.

Peace

Yeah, my son hates it that I have a static IP address. He can't change it by unplugging the cable modem when he gets banned for cheating... lol
You don't want to get caught on steam, they will ban your account and you loose all your games that are under that account.

Yeah... even real world stock markets are dominated by bots and scripts. Nobody's trying to stop it because they know they can't. Instead, big trading houses are spending billions of dollars on high speed networks to shave milliseconds off their ping times. I wish I were kidding.

Boy, I bet you guys are a lot of fun at a party.....

I am... at parties with physicists and lawyers.

[quote="Master Blaster"]I was thinking about this today and I have hit upon the perfect way to get rid of the scripters.

Yes lets get rid of the scripters ? Let's alienate the majority of the CURRENT players to get back some players that MIGHT play...

Always the same crap ... NEW TOPIC ...

Wasn't the graphic thing already tried not long ago? Laff

Orion, in case you've somehow missed this in the past discussions, I'm going to repeat it for you. Your game isn't going away. Stop complaining. Stop trying to keep anyone else from enjoying this game. There are different opinions about what's fun with the game. Why can't you accept that not everyone enjoys the game the way you enjoy it?

I constantly hear this whining about how people are trying to take your game away from you. But it's the other way around. You and others like you are unwilling to allow any other vision of this game.

If it's necessary to alienate the current crowd in order to break this game out of the rut it's in, then so be it. The game, as it is, will be here for you. But if creating something else, as part of this game or as a new game, is more than you can take, then so be it. The game will go on with or without you. The "currently playing" crowd just doesn't seem to understand how little they represent the TradeWars community. There is more to this game than the few who play it today. Play it, or don't. But stop bullying everyone else. The most you will accomplish is for me to stop putting in so much time and effort to keep your game from changing. As it is, I wonder why I do it. I get nothing but grief from most of the "currently playing" crowd. I've tried to appease you and it isn't working. It really is wearing thin.

I didn't see where Orion's response was so out of line considering that Master Blaster's original suggestion was directed at eliminating 90% of the current players in this game today.
Is that your goal to get rid of all scripting in the game? If that's the case, it's going to be very hard for you to get any support out of the existing player base that are evidently not that important.

This is really funny. When I came back to the game in 2002 (strangely enough) I was told to adapt or die. So I adapted. Here we are again, time to stop whining about the changes in the game and adapt or die. I intend to adapt.

One of the biggest bummers is that there are only 1 strategy for winning a tourney.
1. Get the corp in and to dock
2. PPT for start up cash
3. Only passive gridding to start with
4. SST to build cash while looking for xxb ports for SDT
5. Build some bases,
6. Team SDT
7. Grid, Grid Grid
8. Find Other Teams Ports and Bases
7. Defend grid, make more grid.
8. Mobile Planets
9. MegaRob
Now the details may vary but that is the basic strategy in every tourney I have played in.

Wouldn't you like to see the game evolve so that there might be more than one strategy to win?

This isn't about scripting or not scripting, its about evolving with the game. God forbid we might have to learn something new.

H

What MB is suggesting is that a new game could address these problems with graphics. I don't think he's suggesting that I release TW v3.26 as a completely graphical game that does everything it can do to restrict scripting. Unless maybe I'd make that an OPTION.

Everything is optional until I fork the game and leave this version to the scripting crowd. And even if that happens, I wouldn't abandon that version of the game, just stop adding new features. I'll remain committed to finding and fixing all bugs in that version.

"God forbid we have to learn something new" ..doesnt that apply to non-scripters... but hey i was asked politely to shut my pie hole... so i will