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.
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.
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.
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!
I vaguely recall a Joel Spolsky (?) podcast years ago mentioning that everyone thought it was dead, but a survey showed something crazy like 30k active developers worldwide. And that was classic VB, not VB.Net.
I got bad news
Scripting menial tasks is probably lowest form of cheating but still cheating. Would it be ok if someone made a bot that plays perfect PVP?
There are plenty of games that allows modding. Or games that are focused on programming. Plenty of opportunities to learn scripting in more legit ways.
UO pvp was not about being perfect, it was about selfishly manipulating a mass of fighting to loot stuff while not losing your loot. 3 people precasting flamestrike is more broken than anything an individual or bot can ever do. instant trapped pouches were the only way to escape that and the only way to activate the right one is to script it or to stop moving, mouse over to your inventory, and double click it. scripting became THE BALANCE in that regard.
I was a little put off initially when LiveOverflow (youtube) switched to being a minecraft channel but the material ended up being pretty good.
There are client-side anticheats, both as external apps and entire clients with anticheats incorporated into them
Amazing that you can't script your most-used computer - your phone.
(seriously, why can't we write an automated script to handle new phone calls?)
Me and my brother also ran our own servers for a while. Believe the last server I played on was one of the Zuluhotel ones.
I distinctly remember the EUO window and the first time I was trying to understand the syntax of a random script I pasted into it. It was almost readable with and made sense “if X”, “while X”..
Who knew I was learning basic flow control, booleans and variables.
What stuck the most after all the years is that curious desire to tinker and hack at something obsessively until you get it.
It is a shame that the cheat vs anti-cheat war has escalated to the point where kids today would rather pay $100 per month for access to a closed binary (with who-knows-what malware) which is able to bypass anti-cheat mechanisms rather than freely play with a live application that they are already invested in.