Crossfire Archive
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Re: CF: hello

Scott Wedel (swedel@Tymnet.COM) wrote:
> The idea that an intelligent client that does stuff for the player is
> somehow cheating strikes me as odd.  If CF is boring and predictable enough
> that a helpful client can play the game for the player then there is something
> wrong with CF.

Not necessarily. When we find a new server, we don't "play" crossfire.
We just go ahead and "build" a character. This is a mechanical
process, which could "easily" be put into a program. Crossfire used to
be a lot of fun; the last part being the "explore pupland" activity,
which took quite some time. However, crossfire has a fixed set of
maps; when you know all the maps there is nothing left to explore, so
you start "building" characters following a fixed path. This even
works for the restricted classes, except that the path is slightly
different.

Crossfire is not boring --- if they don't cheat (crossedit...), people
can have a lot of fun for quite some time. Not forever, though. This
is my personal experience, though.

> I suppose it is possible to have something like rogueamatic
> which would play the boring levels for you and then you took over when it
> got interesting.

Boring, interesting... it would be difficult to make an automated
player that explores maps. If I were to write an automated player, it
would have all the map/item knowledge that it needs to build an optimal
character. If new maps are added to crossfire, I would take over to
explore them, and either add them to the automated player or not,
depending on the result.

I don't think crossfire maps can be classified as "boring" or
"interesting".  All maps are interesting, until you reach the
end. Then they become essential (because you can get an item, or
exp out of it), or useless. If you want to classify as boring
or interesting, then all maps would be interesting until you
have completely explored them, after which they become boring.
 
> And presumably if there are helpful automatic actions then that client
> would just make the game more interesting to play as the tedium would
> be reduced.

That's debateable. How about drinking healing potions automatically?
Sure, one has them on the z or x keys, but drinking them automatically
makes it almost impossible to kill the character, except in instant-
death situations. How about casting fire immunity? Many newbies die
because the spells runs out... a client could prevent this from
happening.

Christian


-- 
Christian Stieber        http://www.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/~stieber
References: