Welcome change ?

Well thats that, its a bit extreme so good : it didn't stay stuck inside you All opinions welcome !

 

If we recall the OP, macro keys and combinations are allowed, but not in sequence. Calm down bro Thats what attended macroing means... it can be a small sequence like auto-detecting ore nodes and mining without you needing to click. That is what "third party program" to modify the intended game experience means.

It's still a very large definition, which raised an alarm for me... sure the majority of players I'm sure don't have any idea how all this works, but in the wrong hands, with the wrong latitude...

 

Bots are coming, no matter what.
RMT, hard crafting, tedious resource gathering, skill training requires repetitious single button clicking.
Fighting can be done with good character, by just standing still and selecting targets and clicking random buttons.

If the player base stays low, as it is now, bot catching is easy(ish), because you can actually visit each player and check what they do, but if this gets more, then it becomes impossible. There are laws, that prevent the game to scan my computer for external softwares and there are techiques that prevent the game to see that there is someone else reading the memory ( writing to it is easier to detect ).

(Sources: I was GM in Neocron, mmo game when it was at its finest, I'm also software developer, with keen interest in games, reverse engineering and game automation)

( and yes, I know that somekind of flag is placed on me now and its ok, I don't bot. I cant even bother to login )

 

Just to say i get my 160 Water for 40 crop manually over the week and then use them at weekend.
I would have not enough time to water in a 4 or 8 hour turnus within workdays.

This game has nowhere any balance.
The way you are talking about min maxing by botting or makroing to me sounds not like playing an RPG.

I would like R.G. get rid of all numbers and indicators ingame, no chatlog, no HP bar, only the grafic indicator when you bleed and get in trouble.
No skill levels, math available.

Oh yes, nobody would play the game!
But they dont play anyway.
They just let bots achieve.

Btw getting water out of a well in RL is boring too.

 

That was, sometime in the past, the plan.
But there was so many crying folks and it was pushed back. I wonder if there is any plan for other grafik health indicators than an annoying shrinking bar.

 

Yes i know all these "features" many people ask for are good to make the game more accessible and to get more players, but it also takes the uniqueness of the game away and makes it more generous.

Thinking about financial success we need fast travels, ! Quests ? no decay and whatever....
To make a real RPG, oldsql, immersing and all that, we need to make the game more inaccessible or "hard" in a way of having less comfortable, but more immersing features.

 

The worst part about it @Mac2 is if people Truely understood how the game works.... they would realize that macroing on dummies is not required. Once i figured it out within a month of play. I quit macroing. What i am reffering to is the fact that the bigger the pool of XP you have the larger the bites you skills take. This means your pool of xp will find a dynamic value between how much is being used and how much is being gained automatically between the skills you are training.

Moral of the story ... Just Play the Game !

 

Just a small note is that the recent ban-a-thon has been for XP gains.
" 100% of this round of botters were people who were botting combat and loot gaining situations."
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...hris-daily-work-blog.85584/page-4#post-873632

Plus that "ban support" has only been in the standups twice in the last months.
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/standup-corner.2315/page-53#post-875197
https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/standup-corner.2315/page-54#post-877432

 

there was none apparently... macroing stapled for life.

 

hm you can address me too brother.

I think you don't even need to understand how the game works, you can just play unless part of your priorities is competition.

Which our game clearly wasn't built for, maybe portalarium thought they could make an hybrid and it will certainly "work" for some people but the truth is that in our striving to eliminate all "bad apples" we have also created an arbitrary meta-game that is embodied in the oracle that is the anti-thesis of a sandbox.

You refer to the fact bigger xp pool = less effort than lower xp pool with macro, good example ! But you're still meta-gaming if you calculate how high your XP pool needs to be for you to have the best bang for your buck. I don't even check my xp pool... and I hope it makes my training take much longer because it means I'll enjoy the game that much longer.

To be perfectly candid, I'm a siege perilous player. I tried hard to get such a server here because IMO you cannot make a hybrid, people who RPpvp will have an aversion for oracles, RMT, and pretty much all meta-gaming aspects. You cannot reconcile them with the rest, and I don't need to pull out statistics to make my point.

I would reduce game progression by a factor of 10, actually... and I tried to suggest the devs to focus on low level content because its much more easier to balance everything before people reach "end game" in fact I'm sorry to say but I think it was clumsy on their part, wanting to be like other big MMOs to please the "big pvp guilds" that supposedly would play our game but left at the first sign of trouble with their tail between their legs.

It's a fine balancing act my friend, its easy to analyse from an outside perspective but when you're caught in the tornado it isn't so easy to find the middle ground.

It's even in the top 10 priority list to have the game have clearer indicators, Starr even talked about telling players if there is a quest in a particular scene with mouseover... that is pretty close to a glowing exclamation point over NPC heads... its a compromise and compromises never made a great RPG.

But remember the scope of the game and the size of the team when you make those analytical observations.

We did talk alot about it, it was something innovative we really hoped would come to pass, but thats alot of 3d animation work, and other systems cried "BROKEN" louder than such customization.

Bit of an extreme viewpoint, but I agree with the hiding more numbers from the game, in fact I have championed this RPG style and been poetic about it for over 3 years now, our artists need freedom, and people complaining about math kills artistic freedom. We should not let people BEGIN to complain, or they get used to it, and then when they are bored and have nothing to do they complain and bring everyone down.

But I'm also a big proponent of the "your avatar isn't stupid" and AI makes a game so much more enjoyable... if you have repetitive chores at work, you don't want to come home to play about repetitive tasks.

Your avatar knows it needs to water his cotton, we should not have to control every aspect of the avatar like we were piloting a mechwarrior.

Programming AI takes time... priorities, I swallowed the pill but many others won't, so its a good idea to think about changes now because its never too late.

 

Couldn't have said it better.

 

Isn't Portalarium planning on a portable device app, where you can access in game stuff? How does that effect botting or macros?

 

If its programmed by them, they can easily harness the cloud token service they use to make sure its genuine instructions, there isn't much chance of hacking, and even less of massive hacking. Unity did at leas one thing right with their monitoring functions

 

months back it was posted no macros attended or not.. I have no issue I use no macros, not even some form of key chain of presses on a mouse button. Have I wished I had (especially stuff like combos) sure...

However - I have seen botters in game, and they irk me. when you see people standing back right against a rock constantly walking backwards fighting stuff thats only right in front or hitting them and does it for HOURS without responding and about 4-5 ours in responds "Sorry was afk" err really.. yeah.. we watched one guy who seemed to be a primarily afk botting guy standing in the same spot for over 11 hours.. killing 2-3 mobs a min cos it was a good spawn area and .. so lets see 11x60x2 (lets be kind) = 1320 .. each mob was 1000xp so.. 1,320,000 xp gained while afk.. now no its not ridiculously good but if you got it while you slept...

While I feel for crafters for it is a ball ache cos you must manually click each final item to be made to get a chance of a crit, it is equally as bad.

My everquest background botting was bad, people like to justify botting or claiming what they do doesnt count as macro/botting, so I dont blame port for not being definitive of what might be ok and what isnt because people will skirt along the line as much as possible.

I got RSI with a combination of oddly a gnome necro running down to the bottom of the city at steam front and.. my bard. hence in this game I do NOT do the running around leaping any more.. I have managed to get to a point where I can game play for 13 hours without rsi if I dont.. so.. I dont so in someways am I for macros? yes in a way but if it means opening it even a bit will mean abuse.. then I get the answer is no

 

I don't see anything noteworthy in the change. It has no impact on the minute-to-minute game-play what-so-ever and, although I do believe it's a good thing that the devs are taking this particular stance, you can see it as either arrogance or ignorance that this is the kind of stuff that they're worried about.

Sure, having an economy ruined can drive certain players away, having barely anything to DO in the game (or what little you can do is "so so" or subpar) is worse.

So, yeah, it's a thing that they're doing.

It's good I guess...

 

FYI, you don't have to be "botting" to do this. Just turn on auto-attack. If you only want the XP, and you don't care about the loot, then that's all you have to do.

 

No but there was a period when he did come back and then after he would do the same and then heal every like 30s irrelevqnt of needing to heal .. very bot like behavior though.