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savfan104I figure I should update this with my latest toy! Or two, depending how you count.
I'd started playing Echo Bazaar (fallenlondon.com). I like the atmosphere. I don't like the fact that it is trying to do to twitter what apps did to facebook. But I like the cool little snippets and storylines. (Take a look at the front page for a sample, or search twitter for #ebz if curious. They give minor bonuses for posting about them on twitter, though you can preface the post with "d [alt username]" to make it a direct message to yourself that nobody else will see.)
It was kinda cool for a while - storylets and opportunities and fun things. But it got quite grindy at higher levels, because of their leveling mechanic; advancing from level x-1 to level x takes x experience points, and experience gain does not speed up at higher levels. Also, because of the way they spread out their actions, they try to encourage logging in many times per day, and that was distracting.
So I got tired of that and spent a few evenings playing with selenium (RC) (seleniumhq.org) - supposed to be a web application testing system, lets me write things things like "$sel->click_on_link('ACCEPT')" or run javascript in a firefox browser. So now I have the majority of that game entirely automatable! Much of it runs on fairly transparent javascript - "showmap(); travel(4, "ladybones", "Ladybones road");" do exactly what it looks like they do.
Unfortunately, actions are all coded by IDs. "beginEvent($eventid);" to pick an event (or card), "loadMainContentWithParams('/Storylet/ChooseBranch', {'branchid':$branchid });" to choose which branch. I've been mostly using this script to grind repetitive events - I tell it to run the "Donate your body to science (for an hour or two)" storylet 50 times, I come back from UCLA in the evening to find my watchful leveled twice. Easy enough. I have to look up the IDs manually, though.
Cards are trickier - there's so many, I can't just look up the IDs of a few useful ones. If I have time/feel like it, maybe I should figure out how to parse out the card text/description/id, or something... but that may not be worth the time, the grinding is what needs automation.
I'd started playing Echo Bazaar (fallenlondon.com). I like the atmosphere. I don't like the fact that it is trying to do to twitter what apps did to facebook. But I like the cool little snippets and storylines. (Take a look at the front page for a sample, or search twitter for #ebz if curious. They give minor bonuses for posting about them on twitter, though you can preface the post with "d [alt username]" to make it a direct message to yourself that nobody else will see.)
It was kinda cool for a while - storylets and opportunities and fun things. But it got quite grindy at higher levels, because of their leveling mechanic; advancing from level x-1 to level x takes x experience points, and experience gain does not speed up at higher levels. Also, because of the way they spread out their actions, they try to encourage logging in many times per day, and that was distracting.
So I got tired of that and spent a few evenings playing with selenium (RC) (seleniumhq.org) - supposed to be a web application testing system, lets me write things things like "$sel->click_on_link('ACCEPT')" or run javascript in a firefox browser. So now I have the majority of that game entirely automatable! Much of it runs on fairly transparent javascript - "showmap(); travel(4, "ladybones", "Ladybones road");" do exactly what it looks like they do.
Unfortunately, actions are all coded by IDs. "beginEvent($eventid);" to pick an event (or card), "loadMainContentWithParams('/Storylet/ChooseBranch', {'branchid':$branchid });" to choose which branch. I've been mostly using this script to grind repetitive events - I tell it to run the "Donate your body to science (for an hour or two)" storylet 50 times, I come back from UCLA in the evening to find my watchful leveled twice. Easy enough. I have to look up the IDs manually, though.
Cards are trickier - there's so many, I can't just look up the IDs of a few useful ones. If I have time/feel like it, maybe I should figure out how to parse out the card text/description/id, or something... but that may not be worth the time, the grinding is what needs automation.
