Ok. I'm Hooked! When is the TTY interface coming?

While the graphical interface is nice... it's too nice.. and i can't play at work
what I'd really like...

/follow Jimminy Cricket
You follow Jimminy Cricket
You run NE
You run NE
/look
In your visual range you see 4 monsters:
* Minotaur (5 yards NE)
* Minotaur (8 yards NE)
* Minotaur (20 yards N)
HP 120/160 -- You are hit!
/target-close
/cast flare
/attack
/chat wow... like retro is sweet

So... when is the telnet interface coming? (I'm actually half-serious, especially for guild chatting, etc.)

I'm lost, what the heck are you talking about ?

lol.. that reminds me so much of text based games (muds).. I would just get a bit worried about the amount of spam that would flash by on your screen.. especially since that text-box is so small.

but, then, you are only half serious

Act of War, anyone?

Hehehe... the 80's. You really had to be there... (My first multiplayer online RPG was Scepter of Goth.)

You said you were half-serious, so I'll post the fully-serious problem: it's ridiculously easy to write bots for games with a telnet interface. Sure, people write them anyway for graphical games, but the difference in difficulty is significant. Writing a bot for a game with a telnet interface is like writing a shell script, writing a bot for a graphical game is much more difficult (until someone does all the hard work for you and makes something like d2jsp). It also makes detecting bots much more difficult, if you're not in control of the client program being used to access your server. (You never truly are, people are in control of their own computers -- but again the difficulty bar is much higher; for most people, the software developer has more apparent control over their own computer than they do.)

Rofl... this is too funny.

GW mud style. I'm scared now. lol

As a long retired bot-maker (and mud wizard), I'd say that this is the _best_ education that one can give to youngsters. People who I mentored as creators and wizards in many muds went on to be very accomplished software developers... many of them with superior written communication.

It seems that guild wars is primarily a 2D world, and while it may not nicely fit a 24x80 character screen it probably isn't that far away. The eye candy is nice... but for the most part, it should be (and probably will be when some college sophmore decides to flunk a few semesters and reverse-engineer the wire protocol) very scriptable.

My opinion about 'bots' is realistic -- people will use them. Augmenters (that run formations, skill timing, and all sorts of 'automagic') will be used eventually. Arena.Net should package up their client API as a DLL, and create the .NET Java or whatnot wrappers so that people can write their own clients -- and they should charge for the "developer" library. They can even then have competition for the best bots, and bot wars. This in no way will decrease the pleasure of the game -- it will remain very competitive and fun.

Make it so you can write your own NPC henchman! Or, even, 2-3 years down the line, write your own 'module' for Guild Wars. This does something very serious -- it would transform Arena.Net from a 'game' to a 'marketplace'. People would start buying/selling modules, robots, etc. And guess who gets a royalty everytime someone wants to write a game and add it? That's right, Arena.Net Think of it as a mini-tax levied. The more modules (even third-party ones) made, the greater the value in G.W., therefore the more people who will play, making more third-party modules economically viable, making more material, causing even more people to play. It's a virtuous cycle. Even at the very worst, G.W. gets 'formal' ways of contacting new content developers (read: bot makers).

Why fight something like this? Embrace and extend!

I consider myself an adequate programmer. But I have no idea how do people reverse engineer all kinds of stuff(protocols or pak types). They never teach us that in college. Dammit!

I know, why go to college at all? Just drop out grab a book on asembly and teach it to yourself.

Yeah well if anybody figures out how to connect to GW server and log on and send guild chat messages, I will whip up a chat client in no time.