[debaserab2]

Exact same here. Coding a script for my miner to automatically hit the high value ore spots and detect if any PK was in the area (and recall to safety) was one of my first major programming achievements!

I recall making a similar comment to Raph Koster in a hacker news thread a few years ago. He didn't seem all that pleased about it, lol.

[jahsome]

Me too! Ain't no way I had time at 14 to train taming. Ended up taking an equivalent amount of time learning to script it anyway though...

Led me to a lifelong obsession with automation, although I never quite picked up the pure cs fundamentals. I guess I'll always be a script kiddie at heart.

[taskforcegemini]

sounds more like a hacker to me. script kiddies usually don't write or understand the scripts they use

[jahsome]

Thank you for checking my imposter syndrome! Looking back I'm realizing I was actually just using the debugger to piece things together, but I always felt like a fraud because I wasn't just magically generating it from my own mind.

I still struggle with the same feelings, but the older and more experienced I get, the more time I spend looking things up. Although "chatting" with a certain LLM has lately been replacing most of that time.

[jaredhallen]

PK or GM. I actually still have a lot of my scripts in storage.

[elif]

exactly!! PK's are the best anti-cheat. just make your game full loot and competitive, you dont need anti-cheat.

[chongli]

PK’s in UO were never very effective at deterring unattended resource-gathering (the main ‘cheat’ the staff fought so hard against). I recall having my group of friends all make fishermen at the same time and we reached grandmaster fishing skill in a week or two of 24/7 fishing.

Once we had those characters, there was no stopping us from quickly amassing enough wealth to buy our own castle. It was rather ridiculous. We also ended up with vast numbers of magic weapons and armour, magical reagents, gems, scrolls, and furniture. It ruins the entire economy of the game.

EasyUO was a big part of that. Someone had written a MIB (message in a bottle) script which would decode the coordinates from a bag full of MIBs and allow you to sail to the nearest one to begin fishing it up. It greatlyy streamlined the process of fishing up hundreds of those shipwreck treasure chests!