Can anyone remember the boat strategy for level up magic? How did that work...
The idea was that you would sail north cast spells until you level up, then stop, and move the boat 13 tiles, then repeat the spell. It genuinely worked for leveling up high eval.
To prevent macroing in your house they split the world into a grid of tiles sized 8x8 steps and linked your gain to the grid. This worked by hashing the tile coordinates and your skill level to find out the probability of gaining a skill point at that location.
The hash function was poorly chosen which had the effect that if you found a tile where you gained a skill point, there was a good chance the tile 8 steps to your North would let you gain another skill point.
So the algorithm became:
1. Run boat continuously trying the skill over and over
2. Stop when there is a skill gain
3. Move boat 8 steps north
4. Do skill again
5. Gain? Go to 3
6. Otherwise, go to 1
It was simpler than that, it just limited the number of gains you could make per 8x8 cell, but moving out of that cell and into another (in any direction) reset your ability to gain skills. Due to how players moved around in the world, that was sufficient to prevent macroing in-place, but since nobody knew how many cells it remembered you being in, AFK levelers just traveled around the entire world continuously in a boat.
The cost of the boat was cheaper than buying a house, so people would sail out into the sea to be 'safe' from someone trying to kill them.
Generally people used the technique similar to leveling melee skills in towns but there was always a work-around to killing people in towns. In downs you would kill someone macroing by dropping like 5 explosion potions on the ground around them, then throwing 1 in and teleporting out while a friend would loot the body.
Magic on the boat involved walking in front of the mast to cancel the spell.
I must have bought at least a dozen boats. I would park them somewhere secluded or near the mines/forests, then totally forget about it. By the time I got back, the boats had already decayed into nothingness, (or I forgot where I parked it).
I used to own a house on that little pirate island with NPCs you could kill. My house was situated on some weird boundary line such I could fire spells at people outside while in the safety of my own home.
The idea was that you would sail north cast spells until you level up, then stop, and move the boat 13 tiles, then repeat the spell. It genuinely worked for leveling up high eval.