Reading the forums, I've seen a few suggestions that the reason some of the scripting API is limited is because there are aspects of the game that NQ never want to allow to be automated.
I'm not sure how true this is (probably a lot of the API is limited just because nobody has got round to making it less limited).
However, in as much as this explanation is true, it seems a bit lame to me.
I guess the logic would be that scripts are somehow "magic" or a way to "cheat" by avoiding work. But the work in question quite often seems to me to be mindless busy work which is tedious and a massive turn off when what we really want to be doing is building/crafting/pew-pew-ing.
I'd like to propose a different way of thinking about it. Allow scripts to do pretty much anything, but give running a script a resource cost. Make scripts consume "fuel", at a rate which is proportional to the amount of work they do. Maybe have different API calls cost different amounts, so that certain really important operations can only be automated at a very large cost.
It would need balancing (like everything else, obvs...), but potentially it would give free reign to the creativity of the script writers, and would allow people the choice of trading off wealth for drudgery (in much the same way that people can buy minerals instead of mining them, or buy elements instead of crafting them).
samdeane
commented
3 years ago
Reading the forums, I've seen a few suggestions that the reason some of the scripting API is limited is because there are aspects of the game that NQ never want to allow to be automated.
I'm not sure how true this is (probably a lot of the API is limited just because nobody has got round to making it less limited).
However, in as much as this explanation is true, it seems a bit lame to me.
I guess the logic would be that scripts are somehow "magic" or a way to "cheat" by avoiding work. But the work in question quite often seems to me to be mindless busy work which is tedious and a massive turn off when what we really want to be doing is building/crafting/pew-pew-ing.
I'd like to propose a different way of thinking about it. Allow scripts to do pretty much anything, but give running a script a resource cost. Make scripts consume "fuel", at a rate which is proportional to the amount of work they do. Maybe have different API calls cost different amounts, so that certain really important operations can only be automated at a very large cost.
It would need balancing (like everything else, obvs...), but potentially it would give free reign to the creativity of the script writers, and would allow people the choice of trading off wealth for drudgery (in much the same way that people can buy minerals instead of mining them, or buy elements instead of crafting them).