Announcing a bot-free nursery



  • Too often, you see a novice zone colonised by open source bots, which expand rapidly and leave no room for genuine novice players. As an experiment I would like to try out a player-created solution to this problem.

    Having recently declared two sectors bot-free, I would like to announce the opening of a player-created novice area, that is guaranteed free of NCPs and open source bots, open to anyone of GCL 3 or below as with the usual novice sectors.

    The area of this player-created novice area is approximately the top half of sectors E25S35 and E35S35 on shard 2. 0_1550739245336_ncp free zone.png

    Compared to a traditional novice area:

    Pros

    • Guarantee of no open source bots (or that they will be wiped out soon after spawning in)

    Cons

    • No walls surrounding the zone
    • No protection from nukes

    Let's see how this works out.

    👏👍


  • What happens once you reach GCL 3?



  • You can stay there, as you would a normal novice zone. If someone spawns into it and they're already above GCL3, they may get attacked.



  • How are you detecting NCPs? If this works out it would be nice if others were set up, but I'd hate for a bug in the NCP detection to wipe out someone needlessly.



  • @deft-code NCPs are detected via LOAN. So far this hasn't failed, but there is some minimal risk that things could go wrong with LOAN.



  • @deft-code @wtfrank you can also manually do what LoAN is doing and look at creep names, structure layouts, and controller signs to determine if it's a bot or not...



  • happy to outsource