[bad_captain]

Originally Posted by louis1016

One thing i'd love to see is something along the lines of bots being able to get aggro from wandering mobs. Having bots this way makes them way too powerful in my opinion. Theres are many situations where it creates really unrealistic scenarios. Rogues should not be able to sneak their whole group anywhere they want. A rogue should have to park their bots somewhere safe and make them guard while he sneaks and scouts where he wants his group to go. I know that the main argument against this that I've heard is that a player can just park his bot and level up afk. Perhaps some code should be added with it to have your bots despawn if they arent used for some period of time? (i dont know how hard that would be)

Yeah, AFK leveling is an issue that would have to be considered before this could be changed. Another issue is sometimes poor pathing, where a bot can't follow a player as well as another player could and could cause all kinds of unwanted aggro. I often think it's too easy to get my little bot train in and out of areas, but this would require a lot of work to execute correctly (and would still most likely be implemented as a rule with the default being no aggro).

Originally Posted by louis1016

I also would like the option of making it so I have to gather all the spells myself for the bots. I think servers should have the option of having players have to find/buy all of the spells we want our bots to use. It is too overpowered that our bots have spells that a player would generally have to collect on his own.Right now I can use my necro bot to summon my corpse even though it never never looted the spell like I'm supposed to. I know theres some bot::spellquest feature but I havent been able to figure out how to use it. On axclassic it uses anita_thrall but i dont think thats in the code in eqemu. If im wrong someone please tell me how to use it. The same goes for AA's, but I'm sure that would require a whole resturucturing of the AA system which wouldnt be practical, but it still is annoying that all my bots have AA's with no real system to limit them.

I too was interested in being able to control my bots' AAs (I love micromanagement as far as setup, not so much during combat), and believe I posted somewhere.. One thing I am working on is refactoring the bot AAs to match clients, where aabonuses and GetAA() are used within the code instead of the current switch statements or if elses. I had this almost completed months ago, so it may not be too much work, just a lot of comparing diffs. With almost all of the AA code within CalcAABonuses and GetAA(), this would more easily allow for changes as to how bot receive their AAs. Custom code could allow AAs to be quested, bought, earned, whatever.

Originally Posted by louis1016

It would also be awesome to have an option for servers to have a bot respawn timer that alters the amount of time you must wait in between spawning the same bot. It would at least give some sort of penalty for when one of your bots dies (you cant use him again for another x amount of minutes).

I think this is a great idea. I know I'm guilty of respawning my bots to take out one of the Zek brothers (and trying and failing on AHR). I think a field to keep track of when the bot dies would be all that is needed to implement this. Eventually, I would like a bot who leaves a corpse that must be revived and have resurrection effects, just as a client, which would also combat this problem (you couldn't spawn a bot who has an active corpse).

Originally Posted by louis1016

The last major thing id like to see is for the option to not be able to delete bots until maybe after a certain amount of time. The common method I see on bot servers that people use are creating bots, getting buffs, deleting them, and repeat with a different class, therefore gathering buffs from all the classes as well as having ALL benefits from every class like res, port, corpse summon, etc. Bots shouldnt be as overpowered as they are now due to things like these. Say if you give bots a 2 hour delete time then and the server limits you only have acquired 1 bot so far on the server then you can spawn a druid to fight with you, but if you want to get shaman buffs you have to wait two hours before you can delete your druid.

I've never even heard of someone doing this, but it doesn't surprise me. I'm sure checks could be created to eliminate or discourage this practice.

Originally Posted by louis1016

Bots should not have powers and privelages that the normal player doesnt. If I die down in solb do I get to just respawn immediately there with all my gear and everything? No, but my superhero human warrior bot can. I would like to actually feel like the bot I grouping just died, not had an emergency afk. I feel issues like these would make the bot system feel like more of an alternative to grouping on low population servers rather then feel like I'm grouping with someone with GM commands.

While I agree with this statement in general, I think the drawbacks of running with bots at least cancels out the extra features of bots. They still aren't very smart, they all die when I do (or at least when I respawn after dying), lack utility that comes from actual people playing characters (disciplines, problem solving, company, etc..)


I greatly enjoyed and appreciated your comments Louis, some of which I would have never thought of without you mentioning it. I don't play much on other servers, so my interaction with other bot users is basically only on this board.