They do room-wide damage and afk crew members stand a chance of dying if the awake person doesn't whack the slivven quickly enough, since most auto-sippers work off of the prompt.

This is a trivial addition to make to a script however so this will have no impact on anyone who wishes to automate the process.

So how would you make it so it isn't trivial to automate it?

#ALIAS {amod} {whatever the command is to lock yourself into a module;sip on elixir balance}

This completely negates that, and anyone really wanting to continue to bot it up will do it.

Edit: Yes, I know. It would require just a bit more work than a single alias. But the point stands.

Anything that can be coded by the admins can be coded against by the players. The best you can do is what you have done really. Or barring that put in Desitrus' idea. Also make the ship owner responsible for the people on the ship. If you (the admins) do find someone afk on the ship don't just punish the person who is AFK, punish the person who owns the ship as well. I don't at all buy this idea that ship owners should not be accountable for people breaking the rules on their ships.

I liked the idea somebody had put up of captchas with big arrow like things that vary enough to make building triggers for them too difficult, and you just need to respond with the direction.

You could slap that on turrets and say it's something like 'the beast is dodging to the direction and the turreter needs to relalign the turret on the beast or they'll start missing every shot and they get an AFK warning.

For collectors say the power is fluctuating and some settings need to be adjusted or the module will start leaking energy along with the AFK warning.

Empath and pilot I'm not sure what RP you could put into it, but sure somebody could come up with something. <,<

And while we're at it, let's punish the org leaders for the cities and guilds involved for both the person botting, and the person who owns the ship... even though they might not have necessarily been there at the time.

I think if someone is found to constantly have people lolafkaetherhuntbotting on their ships then steps should perhaps be taken, but for a single infraction, I think that's a bit stern.

Course, I don't own an aethership or anything. But I do know for a fact I wouldn't wanna be held responsible for the actions of some of the people who play in lusternia.

Even easier
#trigger {} {sip health}

No to punishing shipowners. There is no reason to force ship owners to ban players from having access to their ship when they are not online. And it gets even messier when a ship is owned by a city.

@demonnic: if you have repeat offenders you don't punish other people as you have enough evidence to just shrub, reduce their level, make it so they can not ahunt at all or other creative punishment. (ooh how about reducing level and taking away their aethercraft skill forever with no lesson refund )

Punish the pilot instead.

And why is the pilot suddenly the leader? Why not punish the empath, or the collector, or the combateer? seriously just punish the person that AFKs in such a severe manner that other people will really not want to do it

I kind of like that. Ok, you lose the levels, -and- you lose the ability you exploited.

Still, at that point, they'd probably just permashrub them.

The longest I've walked away from my computer when doing anything in lusternia was about 6 minutes. Just happens to be how long it takes my electric kettle to boil water, plus the 4 minute brew time for my french press coffee...

Because if you add punishments to people there with them, players will enforce it and free up admin time. I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree, but that's a decent incentive for doing it, I'd think, from an admin perspective.

I really like Lehki's ideas to add RP captchas, as it would actually add something to it at the same time you're implementing the solution. I like to think that I'm there fiddling with the controls of a turret or something instead of mindlessly pulling a trigger all day.

Because without the pilot you are not going anywhere. Therefore the pilot is in charge.

Again though I don't buy into the whole "it's not the ship owner's fault who uses their ship and breaks the rules" because... the ship owner has complete control over who uses their ship offline or not.

And I don't buy in forcing gamers in doing the job of an admin. Nor do I believe in creating a gaming environment were you have to distrust everyone or be punished by an admin. Nor do I believe in punishing people because they invested more credits then others and are then nice enough to let others use it.

Luckily I trust the admins enough to never enforce such a rule or I would already be playing another mud.

The admin should not have to be checking for afker's every time they see a ship out. It's your ship so you should know who is using it and it has nothing to do with distrust. Instead of letting everyone and their dog use your ship let people you know won't abuse things when they use your ship. It's lovely and altruistic of you that you spent so much and let anyone use your toys, but sluffing off the responsibility for your toys is BS. I would prefer a game where the players take responsibility for what they have and do instead of a game where we have these threads forcing the admins to take resources off improving the game so they can code babysitting mechanics, because people like you won't take any responsibility.

And so because you have an aethership, you must have impeccable judgement of character. Or else distrust the majority of people, lest you get smacked down for misjudging one person who does something stupid. And we go back to only extremely small cliques of people get to do anything in the aetherways, because it's just too risky to let someone else take your ship out.

Yes, if you misjudge you get smacked. Boo f'n hoo. You then ban that person that got you smacked from using your ship again.

Like others have said I don't think you can, the best you could do would be the captcha idea though I personally find it rather tacky.

As I said before the real mechanical solution is to make it easier for other players to interact with ships. I put up one idea in the start of the thread but so far only Rainydays has commented on it indirectly. I am sure there are other possibilities to open up player interaction in aetherspace. Once players are no longer going around bashing in private you will see the incentive to automate things drop.

I would much rather see more player interaction and use of aetherspace than keeping things self contained like they are now with the addition of some blatant OOC method to try and catch AFKers. That said I would rather see capthca's added to the game than have people leech their way through advancement. I understand that the simpler solution is going to be the best one and any PvP system is not going to be simple.

See my post a page ago about making them not OOC. ):