If this is something everyone would like then it is possible we will have the base Ironman mode and then a seasonal Ironman mode later on. The original idea was that Ironman could be a challenge that you compete in and once it ends it will contribute to your overall progress in Deathzot.
The issue here isn't botting, it's mcing. I think we can all agree that a character that is hunting afk with a bot is much less efficient than a player that isn't afk. What this means is that the bot will be gaining less progress per hour than a manual player. As an Ironman, you cannot trade this "progress" which means that by botting afk you are essentially wasting stamina hours that could be used more efficiently if you weren't afk. Once your bots stamina runs out, it can no longer progress, meanwhile, the character that isn't botting 24/7 will have plenty of stamina remaining. Also, the character that wasn't afk while using said stamina will have gained much more progress in those hours.
So as an example:
Player and
Botter both hunt for 10 hours.
Both are hunting an exact copy of a spawn.
Botter is semi-afk so he misses all orbs but he has an alarm for ubers.
Player is collecting all orbs.
Lets assume for arguments sake that both characters have the same gear/vocation and are hunting at the same rate (unlikely that a human could not out perform an AI but bear with me for now).
Lets also assume that at said rate, per hour, both characters can gain:
- 5 Loot Orbs = 50 tiers
- 1 Uber Monster = ~75 tiers (25 instantly and 50 in future loot orbs)
- 10,000 experience (includes orbs)
We can say that by the end of the 10 hours:
Player:
- 100,000 experience
- 1,250 tiers
Botter:
- 50,000 experience (half because exp orbs account for 50% of the experience gained while hunting)
- 250 tiers (because botter only loots the initial uber loot but not the following orbs)
What this means is that
Botter will have to hunt twice as long as
Player in order to keep up in levels, and 5 times as long to gain the amount of loot. The problem
Botter is going to face is that in order to hunt 5 times as long as
Player he is going to require 50 hours of stamina. This means he will have to bot for 42 hours straight, stop hunting for 24 hours, and then hunt for another 8. Meanwhile... As
Botter does his thing,
Player hunts for another 10 hours the next day and puts
Botter even further behind.
One thing that does throw a wrench into this example is the
semi-botter that hunts manually while at the pc and then puts a bot on while sleeping. The progression gap in this scenario would be much smaller in the short term but
semi-botter is still limited by stamina so any afk botting is essentially just wasting stamina on inefficient hunting.
On the topic of Ironman, increase all of
Players loot gains by 50%. This means a manual Ironman is worth 7.5 normal mcs.
Now I know someone is going to say "but a bot can hunt 24/7 while a normal person can only hunt for a few hours".
I completely understand that argument, and that's why we allow bots. So when you are busy at school or work, you can somewhat compete with the no-life players that are capable of putting 16 hours a day into the game. You're welcome btw.
