Manually multi boxing 5 characters in Shroud of the Avatar

@Chris You could tear the band-aid off as it were in QA. Make it a special QA, and push it hard for people to test with some sort of reward.
It has to be up for longer than a week though.

If nothing but acid and vitriol is thrown your way, hit the undo button.

@Elrond Rocket Surgery for the win!

 

I don't think it is apples and oranges. Both crafting and adventuring are professions that people choose to suit their playstyle, hoping they can make a living in game doing something they enjoy. If one playstyle isn't allowed to complete while out-of-focus actions that they started while in-focus, then neither should be allowed to. If an adventuring player shouldn't be allowed to train up his own small army, then crafting players shouldn't be allowed to run their own factories.

Thanks for the explanation on the use of "rune" as a technical term. That was confusing me mightily earlier in the discussion, since my auto-attack (which is more of an auto-defend) sure never uses any of the runes on my combat bar.

For me, "auto-attack" is what allows me to park my character in a quiet corner of a scene while I get up to refresh my drink or answer the phone and hopefully still be alive when I get back. I don't see disabling it being of any value. I'm concerned that this discussion is once more trending towards "advanced players are mis-using something so let's change it up in ways that will hurt everybody while the advanced players just find another way to do the same thing".

I keep keep keep coming back to some video I watched where RG was telling a story of a fisherman in UO and some warrior who assumed that of course the fisherman would prefer to be a warrior. Hah! The point of the story being that all playstyles were welcome and a diversity of playstyles were what made a good game. If someone else enjoys running a squad of warriors and has the skills to do it, that's no skin off my nose. If I could earn a squad of NPCs to follow me around, I'd do it too. As it is, I'd love to be able to send my adventurer out as a bodyguard for my crafter while she's gathering, and with a heftier computer I'd probably be doing it already, but alas, my laptop would probably slap me if I ever tried. But what I'm hearing here is no, neither of those are acceptable playstyles, the only kind of players we want in SotA are (a) social butterflies and (b) god-moders who want to be equally skilled at everything.

Also, @Chris, you've said plenty of times SotA shouldn't channel players into doing things in awkward-workaround ways when the game could make it more convenient for them instead. But if you make this kind of multitasking impossible while knowing people can still do it by using a second computer, that's just the situation you're creating. And it's not going to stop the people who are really exploiters.

 

Sometimes i wonder if you guys are looking for arguments

 

Players at the extreme edge of grinding to be the best will always win - devs can spend time trying to kneecap this stuff and the insane .01% of players will still find a way to push the envelope. Take a deep breath and let them go, because you will end up doing one of two things, or both -

1) “Fix” the problem created by a handful of people by making a change that is super not fun for the rest of the players. Like, someone mentioning auto attack removal - awesome way to solve it at the expense of so many normal players. Don’t do that kind of stuff just to address a handful of edge case players.

2) Every minute you spend on this is another minute not spent on Episode 2. Hint - that’s already way behind schedule.

There have been enough degradations of pristine content on the live client, why this one would get diverted attention is strange to me. This person multi boxing is not going to keep people away from the game. Spending time and resources on it over things that potential and existing players want might keep them away though.

 

Whatever the situation, this topic being at the top of the forums gives the game bad press it doesnt right now need.

 

Chris mentioned it on the official Twitter feed and asked for input from people. Input from players on the player forums hardly rivals that for "press". On the contrary, if I were a new player, I'd read this as a sign that devs are engaging healthily with the community with an eye towards preventing botting. Whether I agreed that the OP's behavior is botting or not (and I don't), that's how the thread would look. I don't think this is bad press at all. It's not as if we were talking about some problem that doesn't plague any other online game ever because it's so easy to solve that we must be a bad game to even have need to discuss it.

 

A flurry of five dev posts, twitter, and community outreach to figure out how to fix something, elevating this topic even further than it was, and its not an issue? Hmm. Well, if not, then I'm expecting that no other long-promised features get pushed to address this. Let's watch and see. But that the distraction of this threatens to divert our very small dev resources to address it, as Lua did, is the PR issue presented.

 

Considering Ep2 was first supposed to come in April of 2019, everyone has gotten use to the distractions.

 

This is all @Chris and the other programmers fault for improving performance so much that shenanigans like this are happening

.. sigh.. I knew this would happen. I usually blame Laz - but in this case -- I blame the performance improvements.. bah!

 

Sorry my mistake I confused runes with skills. Runes(ie arrows) are being consumed through auto attack while the client is not focused. Thank you for clarifying that. But you bring up a great point, what about pet auto attack? And what about melee auto attack? What about damage over time spells that can last over a minute like meteor shower?

The majority of the damage in that video is coming from multi shot and banish so this wont have much effect on what I'm doing.

Elrond offered some great ideas that would improve the game and make it more difficult to multi box, a win win. But what you are suggesting Chris I don't think will achieve anything other than wasting a lot of time on something that has little effect and discriminates against 1 particular play style while ignoring others.

 

Not to be a jerk - but you started this thread -- what was your motivation for it? To share information and help people - or to provoke a reaction?

 

I've answered this twice but I guess you havent read the whole thread so here we go 1 more time.