Just an idea...

[stevec]

Call me crazy but I have been toying with an idea for some months. Its mainly while I am cycling long distance and thus have hours to think about things but I was wondering if its ever been considered to bot a guild to the very top.

I am not talking about boxing 6 chars and using warp to get to targets easily, I guess I am talking about the challenge to produce a system capable of taking a guild to the very top of EQ in a purely AFK, watching from the sidelines, type of play.

Originally I was thinking of doing this by myself but of course the financial outlay of 54 accounts (or however many it would take) combined with the hardware and bandwidth required makes this prohibitive to say the least unless I win the lottery.

What I am thinking about is some sort of engine that is capable of co-ordinating a guild using scripts to determine the actions of the characters. Once these scripts are perfected the encounter is then trivialised and joins the list of targets to farm.

With enough targets the guild is then capable of raiding 24/7 (though probably would have to raid less because this would have some ppl wondering what the heck was going on).

The aim is of course to get the characters to max lvl/aa with the best of gear.

Guess its a bit of a stupid idea but heck grinding to the top is pretty dull and having the whole guild botted would be heck of a challenge. Of course it would also allow the ppl involved to create some pretty wicked characters for selling on

Flame away

 

[SiegeTank]

This is the kind of thing people like Michael Jackson, Nicholas Cage or Curt Schilling could afford! Definitely possible since most high-level raids these days are indeed heavily scripted encounters. You do have to ask yourself "what's the point?, though.

 

[stevec]

Well I guess the point is I love the rewards of being in a high end guild but I find after 8 years that I am going to have to retire soon due to the huge impact of raiding at this level has on my real life.

Combine this with the fact that it is mind blowingly boring to raid the same zones night after night, week after week, month after month and the fical nature of players nowadays and I am finding it fustrating to say the least.

The challenge of this game is in beating scripts. Its not a question of skill its a question of how many ppl aren't AFK or otherwise distracted.

So what greater challenge is there in beating scripts with scripts

 

[gman]

its been done before in EQ and WoW. I read about it a long time ago and don't remember much of the details. I know the guy that was doing it in EQ got baned however. I want to say he was boting a guild of 36 if I remember right and the wow guy and his GF ran like 50 some odd toons 1 pally, a few clerics and a shit load of nukers, again if I remember right somewhere in the are of 50+ toons. I think the WoW guy got a ... nm I found the url. you can check out exream box/boting here Dual-Boxing.com :: View topic - Gameslah's 50 Boxing Setup

 

[Ioannis]

GL when you ld,

This would need a team of a few people handling everything from the accounts to the computers and etc.

Hell, SoE can barely manage to script an event.. whats the odds on scripting a guild encounter.

Just make a guild of one War and 49 clerics and you can do anything =p.

 

[JimJohnson]

its not really that hard to script events. You could run an general all in one macro that sets conditions based on class. Then have another INC for every event and have subs for what you want them to do based on class + settings. Raids move off calls anyways so you can filter events to do the same thing, record pathfile with one guy per type melee dps healer caster just incase they are going to different areas. It would be more trouble then its worth but it is possible. New events it may be harder but you could still break everything down into events and control them off one guy with hotkeys, or the macro he runs that calls out actions based on what is going on.

 

[Fry]

To anyone whos tried to write a monster mission macro you know an idea like this is next to impossible.

Even in a monster mission when almost everything is standard, it is impossible to write a flawless macro. There is just too many unknown variables you can't take into account. Normally I'd spend a week writing the macro, then another week fixing tiny bugs that pop up, even then there were flaws I could not control like SoE bugs of not letting you out of the mission, or if the mission expired you were ported inside the mountains.

I've always wanted to write a macro that took say a wizard and solo'ed him from 1 to 75, but once you write it out on paper of what you need to do, buy certain things, somehow find non-vender spells, it looks like the job from hell.

 

[stevec]

Which is what I am getting at really.

There is little challenge in EQ, its just a timesink. Playing a particular class to a standard exceptable in a raid is farely easy. The challenge is working out the strategies for the raids so the game is more about puzzle solving than anything else.

You put in the hours, pay reasonable attention, choose a guild of like minded people and eventually everything is dead. The more you play the more dkp you get the more gear you can buy. Expansion after expansion its just rinse and repeat with encounters getting more complex.

As a software developer I have always been interested in the challenge of co-ordinating 54 toons in the most complex of raids PURELY by maco/plugin. I am not interested in actually sitting there and controlling the characters and boxing them, thats not the point, I would love to be able to automate EVERYTHING

Ideally a rack of blade servers each running 6 toons.

Software to handle the logon / relogon after LD.

Plugins to allow a central "control" to communicate to all bots.

All bots controlled by scripts. Now I am not talking about conventional macros, I dont think that would be sufficient, it would require way too much work. You would need the engine that runs these scripts to allow fairly generic commands. These commands would be interpreted and result in individual bots being sent commands.

Dont get me wrong I am in no doubt this would be a hell of a lot of work to get it working and of course it could never be flawless and instability of EQ, networks and the system itself will cause all sorts of problems but these are no different from when we play anyway so the engine will have to know how to do a corpse recovery

I feel sometimes that we just scratch at the surface with the various automation macros out there.

 

[gman]

I don't know. You look at macros such as RD or zbot and plugins like mq2moveutils, mq2melee, etc., They are very powerfull if you you want to spend the time to tweak them. I can see less complex raids (zerg like) could be done with them IMHO. The more complex stuff yeah would be a stretch for sure. I say if you have the time, the money, the know how go for it

 

[DigitalPixel]

This would be quite a take on and pretty cool if successful. I read on some Emulator forums a few months back where they were testing out Bots than ran as a part of the server coding, I dont know how far along it has come since but might be worth looking into if you are serious about this. It could be helpful possibly, if you do take it on make sure to take some screen shots of your fully color matching guild, lol.

 

[stevec]

Well they would all be blond barbarian/human females

Call the guild Amazons or something