I noticed the other aetherspace thread was closed so I'd like to start a new one to narrowly focus on how to tweak slivven, vortexes and other aspects of aetherhunting. Obviously, we want to make aetherhunting viable as well as dissuade autobotting. Try and be constructive and not just complain! This thread will be closely moderated, so be respectful and don't go off on tangents.

Would talking about ideas for making PvP more common in aetherspace as a possible solution to dissuade automation be considered on topic?

Making aether PvP more viable would defiantly make people think twice about botting, but that would probably require a special report and lots of tweaking to get right. It would be awesome though.

Sure, but it would need to be a simple solution to implement. For example, one skill to teleport to a random ship on your plane (or something like that) would be doable. However, redoing the entire skillset would not be practical at this time. Already, what we hoped would be a simple solution has thrown off several projects (you can probably guess which ones) and I don't want to sink too much more time into this.

In any event, I don't think slivven will be going away regardless.

I do not have much room to comment on slivvens as I have yet to deal with them, but reading about them I think they serve more to make it harder to get a crew going than they do to address any kind of automation. I will leave it to others to comment on afflictions, damage, and spawn rates.

On the PvP topic I have done some more thinking about my tongue and cheek idea and perhaps have something that might work.

1. New skill or module added that will allow you to get the number of ships in each plane of aetherspace (not the names, just the count).
2. New skill or module added that allows you to teleport to a random/specific aethership in your plane (random works, but I think being able to target a ship is better)
3. It takes X seconds to teleport to a ship (X should be semi large, perhaps 30?)
4. When a teleport is activated the target ship receives a warning message broadcast by the ship
5. Once you are on the ship you have X min before you are automatically teleported back to your ship

Some comments on this idea. First the warning should be long enough to allow the target ship to kill/disengage any PvE targets and get ready for a boarding. I think the teleport should go through even if they ship moves off of the plane but I have no idea if that can easily be done in the code. If not I would suggest not allowing a ship to leave the plane if a teleport is incoming to prevent ships from just leaving.

The purpose of the time limit on the boarding is to give the target ship some ability to survive the combat without having to kill all the boarders. It is my idea for how to solve the "you can't run" issue of boarding. If you have better ones please suggest them. This also would solve the issue of having enemies left on the ship after everyone was killed making it hard/impossible to recover the ship. The point of this boarding method is to allow some pvp, not to allow some group to camp out on a ship. If the original ship is destroyed then the auto-teleport would result in death instead.

Even with slivvens, botting is going to happen. As of right now, there only needs to be two people really paying attention. The chair and the Demi running around cleaning stuff up. Oh, and it would be nice if there was a way for the slivven hunter to get xp from killing mobs as well.

I haven't tried them yet, but from what I'm hearing from others, the big problems with slivvens are the room attack, and that whoever gets stuck fighting them will make almost no profit of any kind. So:

• get rid of the room attack, so you can still have under-80s on the modules while the big guys clean up the slivvens
• make a room message when they appear in a room
• make it so their corpses can be turned in at the Facility, or put into aetherholds to trade, or in some other way produce gold
• make sure the slivven-patroller gets exp/essence comparable to the siphoner

And that'll probably turn slivvens from a gripe-point into a feature.

(Though I don't know how well they're preventing botting.)

I understand how people do not want to be on slivven duty when they get next to nothing for doing it. Yet if you put in semi-decent rewards then you just turn slivven hunting into the goal rather that aetherhunting. You could just get one infection, put up a shield, and farm them as much as you wanted (by allowing them to multiply).

Clearly the answer is psionic mini-games where flashes and symbols enter your mind and you must type what they resemble.

That's right, in-game captcha's. Har dee har har.

Seriously though, I've actually played muds that do that. Make it jettison them into aetherspace if they fail it three times in five minutes.

Except that people who cannot see well/rely on screenreaders also play.

I didn't realize they multiplied. Why not just make them not multiply, so they only appear when you are actively aetherhunting, then? Then it becomes neither the goal nor a neglected side effect, but just a parallel goal.

Idea: be able to put slivvens into the energy collector for -insert incentive here-

How do you make a captcha in text? I mean, as dumb as it sounds, it would solve everything, I just don't get how it would work.

Draw little ascii pictures

OR ask what color something is that you are shown

Ever tried some cactus weed? Basically that except not always a smiley face.

I don't know what OS the rapture engine is running on, but the program 'figlet' which I know is available for the *nix based OSes does essentially that.

example:

figlet hello there!

outputs: in attached file because it requires fixed width font

That one looks darn nice, and it wouldn't likely require a specific OS either if coded directly into Rapture. Would also be semi-hard to automate (or at least requiring a big database for it) with a big enough dictionary (100+ would likely stop most people from even attempting to automate it, and it'd be easy enough to put far far more than that in). Just make it not fire too often and not fail on the first attempt, so that you still have time for the occational bathroom break.

Also thinking along the lines of it only firing if someone actually does something in order to stop it killing linkdead people, but I suppose a low enough timeout would solve that issue.

EDIT: Altough I already came up with one possible approach to decoding it, but I'll keep that to myself for now, I think. In my case it's mostly academic anyway (a challenge to overcome more than automation in itself).

I still like my color idea, or, OR, use an MXP tag