Crossfire Archive
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Re: CF: hello

On Sep 9, 12:49am, Christian Stieber wrote:
> Subject: 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.

 Is the point of the above to just have the highest score on the server?

 Maybe it might be interesting to add a recording of how many ticks the
character has been played.  Thus, a character that gets to level 10 in 5,000
ticks is probably aa more impressive accomplishment than a player that gets to
level 10 in 10,000.

 But I will agree to the extent that at some point repeat play becomes less
interesting when you know all the maps.  It is a lot more fun the first time
you go through a map and are not sure what to expect compared to repeating it.

 Some of this could perhaps be improved by some better randomization of the map
(different monsters each time or something).  But unless new maps are
constantly created, at one point you do have pretty much the entire map set
under your belt.  I don't really know to much what can be done to improve on
that.


>
> 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 will agree to the sentiment.  It may be player to player - some may have fun
repeating the adventure but in a different character or trying to play it
differently.  However, this probably only lasts so long, as you run into the
same artifacts, so characters will start to drift together.


> 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.

 It could be difficult to explore maps and still have a high survibilty.  I
could think of many maps which could be explored pretty easily (the robot only
needs to know about walls, and could conceivable keep track of what stuff they
have not seen and go there.  Certainly, some maps would be more difficult than
others (ones requiring keys found on other levels, ones with lots of earth
walls, etc).  However, the number of wall types is pretty limited, so a wall
following robot would not be hard to write.  Know waht to attack and how to
attack it could be the harder part.

 However, that said, to follow what Christian says, there are certainly some
maps where a goodly amount of exp and items could be found, and are pretty easy
to do.  For example, at first level, head to the newbie tower.  And some point,
head to the hall of bones, and so on.  Both of those are pretty simple maps to
navigate, but can be good at the appropriate level.

>
> 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.

 I think some maps are certainly better than others.  Ones which have a quest
or common factor are more interesting than those which just have a mess of
monsters you slice through for no greater purpose.

>
> > 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.

 You certainly need to be careful on these or develope some smarter scripting.

 For example, if you are fighting a titan which does 25% of your hp each time
it hits, you probably want to drink that potion when you are at about 50% to be
safe.

 However, if you are fighting a lot of smaller creatures that do 5%, you could
probably wait until you get to about 20% of your total.

 Same coudl be true for fire immunity.  Into the dragon cave, fire immunity is
almost needed.  But if fighting one wyvern, do you really want it?

 I guess basically it would affect efficiency of these items.  Having the AI do
it would probably be safer, but not be used as efficiently as doing it
manually.   At some point, this may not be a big deal (one you get piles of
money, you probably won't care that maybe you used an extra potion there.)



-- 

-- Mark Wedel
mark@pyramid.com
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