Honestly, a mechanical solution needs to find the incredibly tiny sweetspot between making the system defunct and 'too profitable'.

I hesitate to suggest this, but what about a very high level Empathy skill that helps respond to slivvens? Perhaps a high balance and/or high cost skill that zaps a slivven on a module or slivvens on the ship or something? It would be impractical to do mid-combat, but it would help with the problem of EVERYBODY dropping everything to deal with one or two of the critters, causing a dead freeze on the entire goddamn aetherhunt while the slivvens sit there being a multiplying nuisance.

Have you piloted at all since these were introduced?


Perhaps forestall the initial time when they begin draining, which would allow you to finish dealing with the aetherbeast(s) currently attacking you first. I don't think anyone has let this go to the point where they are reproducing yet, so I can't say there. Yes to lowering the chance to hit the chair (and maybe grid).

The scripts I have set up are just missing a few things purposefully to keep it from being completely automated, but I could very easily change it to go forever without me. Assuming the rest of the crew never had to leave or anything. <,<

I believe that stopping the automated experience gain was a fine and just idea, but rendering the system defunct or implementing an unrefined mechanical solution that does nothing but make the system frustrating to use successfully is not really doing the players any favors. I just don't agree with the point of making slivvens unprofitable - making them profitable would make it so you could get ANOTHER person to form a crew in aetherspace if you want to bring the process back to pre-slivven efficiency by dedicating said new person to ONLY killing slivvens. I'll admit that it could be possible to cause a lot of trouble with this.. scenario being:

Assuming command chair is immune as per request, only lock somebody in on the empath grid. Person A + B will Pilot + Empath, Person C kills slivvens spawning on the Grid over and over. It is tedious and like actual bashing - but more like turning on a faucet to pour a glass of EXP, turning off the faucet (forcefield), then finishing the water, and doing it over again.

I'm sure you could automate that.. but then again, you can also automate influencing monks or astronomers, or automate bashing anything.

Not a whole lot since the vortexes vanished and couldn't find anything to hunt, but the times I did they were a mild annoyance at best. Then again I usually did have an Orckui on board. D:

Personally I would suggest tinkering with slivvens in terms of the kinds of attacks they do to people - e.g. room-wide damage, aeon and leeching health. If they are irritating (as in you still have to deal with them or they eat your ship) but not eye-rollingly frustrating they will probably still work as intended to discourage AFK-ing.




Pretty much anything can be automated, especially in a text-based game. People are smart enough that anything that can be responded to in an easier, automated way, will be. That's why Treant and other systems are a success: who wants to manual the curing part of combat and bashing when you can put much of that burden on a coded system? IRE games have always worked this way, with everything from auto-sipping to auto-harvesting to yes, auto-aetherbashing. "Well someone will automate it" would seem to be an argument of somewhat limited value when you're talking about a coded, text-based game.

Anything which can be reacted to by a human can be reacted to by a bot.

In a MUD, what you do is react to what is presented to you on screen.

Ergo, given enough desire, scripting knowledge, and a halfway decent mud client, anything can be scripted into an autobot that'll run while you AFK. You can even factor in random variables and automated responses to AFK checks. The point being, if you want to AFK it badly enough, you can and will, and you'll probably not get caught.

That having been said... it's not practical to AFK most things, given that competition for denizens to bash/influence or etc. can be quite high so your bot is running around looking like an idiot, unless you spend a -lot- of time programming it. Time which could be spent at the worst semi-automating it and RPing in CT/tells/CLT/whatever while still getting things done.

of course, being on an aethership makes you far more removed from the rest of the game world, which makes aetherbashing even -more- boring for semi-automating.

I dunno. I haven't been aetherbashing since the slivven change, nor have I done any turreting, even. I keep ending up on a collector. So my opinions on aetherbashing itself are somewhat limited.

You can discourage AFK botting. It's very difficult to eliminate it without help/support from your playerbase.

As I said before you can not really solve people being AFK without using other people.

I have almost no experience with ship to ship combat but is it a system that could be tweaked/changed/improved to allow for real pvp in aetherspace?

As long as you have the ability to gain exp without any interaction possible from other players you will have issues with people automating the process.

Yeah, you can. I'm really not trying to make it seem like I want aetherbashing to be what it was when no one was using it because it's just not worth it, but there's an inherit problem with aetherbashing that doesn't exist in other forms that the administration is trying to address.

These are all pre-recent changes, by the way. I've no first hand knowledge of aetherspace after vortex/slivven changes:

1. Aetherbeasts are more or less infinite. You'll never run out, and there's no such things as them being bashed or influenced out.

2. Aetherspace is vast. It's vast enough that people don't really want to go combing aetherspace most of the time to kill others aetherbashing.

3. Aetherspace has an inherit cost. This prevents most people from going into aetherspace. What I mean by this is that there are never 50 ships floating around out there fully manned and capable of killing another ship. Or even not fully manned and fully capable of being a good target for griefing.

So, other things that can be automated carry some risk:

1. Bashing/Influencing areas on Prime/Astral are not vast. You can be easily found, and if afk, easily killed.

2. Viable mobs to bash/influence (Ones that are worth it) are not infinite and usually used up. This of course depends on who's around, what time of day it is, what level you're bashing/influencing at, ect., but they're certainly more limited than aetherbeasts.

3. Everyone has easy or semi-easy access to Prime/Astral areas, with the only cost being some Planar from Astral, and the cost of bashing materials. So, if there's 100 people online, there are 99 variables that could potentially jump you. In aetherspace, I'd doubt if there were ever more than 3-4 fully capable ships out at a given time. (I've nothing to back that up besides my observation.)

So, it's not that other forms of xp gain can't be automated - they certainly can. It's just that they carry more risk in doing so. Remember, it's a calculation of risk vs reward. Is the risk of getting caught worth the reward? In aetherspace, with how it's designed, the risk is significantly lower, so the risk vs reward ratio is more skewed towards an answer of yes.

I could easily write a system that patrols for slivvens based on checkpoints and map pathing specifically applied to my own LMap, pausing only to engage in automated combat with a slivven using my autocuring that I already have + my autosipper. It would very likely be best performed by a high speed class that gets multiple crits - a BM/BC or Monk, specifically. It isn't hard to bot such behavior - I've done much more advanced stuff elsewhere.

Is it lame? Yes.
Does it reduce the amount of tedious crap I have to do on the trip, assuming I performed slivven duty? Yes.

To be honest, if I'm at my computer with a bot like this running or a script to turret/siphon running, carrying out a conversation or other functions, etc, what then? Is that still one of the 'problems' slivvens are supposed to solve? If slivvens are intended to force all module-users to manually perform their commands instead, I question the wisdom in that - since honestly, that is tedious to a fault. However, I am very sure that is not the case.

Also, I do agree with you on that note: an infinite well of EXP is the real problem here.

What about player-based incentives, instead of a mechanical solution? What if aetherPvP yielded experience too, or something of that nature? Some kind of compelling reward to encourage ship v. ship contact.

edit: My general point being: why not up the risk in a way that is associated with the player element instead of a mechanical/NPC element?

I don't see what's the problem with an infinite well of EXP, but yes on aether PVP.

The problem is that it's an infinite well of EXP that cannot be exhausted. Even I can admit, despite my staunch defense of aetherspace EXP, that it is questionable. There is no cap on how much you can gain, besides the rate at which you collectively as a crew function and how powerful your turret-users are. There's no waiting to repop or for them to relax to be influenced again - it's SIPHON -> KILL -> SIPHON -> KILL ad infinitum. That means that one of the primary limiters of EXP gain in a game with kill for exp mechanics has been utterly voided.

What makes it even worse is that, like my imaginary scenario of A and B gathering slivvens for C to kill, there is no other risk. There is no outside force that can STOP IT, besides human error that can be defeated by technique/routine/automation or some kind of artificial buffer or breathing room. There is absolutely no risk in a controlled environment.

My suggestion of making aethership pvp profitable would TREMENDOUSLY increase the risk of aetherspace - at least on a theoretical level. It would rely heavily on just how attractive the reward/incentive is, and how well players can police themselves. In truth, removing slivvens and instead introducing player-based risk would be putting the fate of aetherspace functionality in the hands of the playerbase.

You'd have to gain a truly ridiculous amount of XP to make hunting down enemy aetherships a worthwhile endeavor.

Again, still not seeing the problem. You basically just said there that problem with it being infinite is that it's infinite.

You don't do it for the EXP, you do it because you're a griefer, like all other PvP.

Well, I mean, I would do it for the lulz, yes, but I think I'm in the relative minority on that one. It wouldn't really fix the XP faucet problem (if there is indeed such a problem).

Aether pvp ideas would be fun to look at. It's a not used feature right now, mostly.

I see a problem with infinite xp in aetherspace because just like what happened when it basically was - there was no one really in the game. We had 90 people online and 70 were off prime. For all those people that don't like to bash, don't like to hunt, like to rp/pvp/interacting with actual people since this is a multiplayer game, that certainly cuts down their options. And I'm not saying that their needs should be put over bashers needs (I'm more of a basher myself, honestly.), but I believe that the more you eliminate that need for player interaction, the worse the game becomes. I'm generally opposed to anything that mechanically separates or limits a player to use interaction options within the game. Aetherhunting provides another kind of interaction (Team building through aethercrews), but it's quite limited. That's why aetherbashing needs to provide similiar benefits to any other form of xp gain, so that it encourages moderation. We're just not there yet.

As to aether pvp, there's a lot of room for improvement skill wise that might make tracking/finding ships easier and what not, but that's probably fodder for another topic and is more of another overhaul of the aethercraft skillset, honestly, which I'm not sure they have the time/resources/desire to do since it would have to be carefully balanced between being competitive, but not overly griefable.

And the people to go around ganking in regular bashing is a relative minority as well. D:

Rest assured, I'd gladly be first mate on the S.S Griefsalot. :3