Macroing Combat Skills

Greetings. Much nostalgia runs through these boards, and as much as people claim they want another UO, I still remember negative things about it such as macroing abilities. I would hope that the combat/skill systems would be set up as such to flat out eliminate macroing a character's skills as an option altogether. UO got to a point where 99% of the population used macros to level their stats and skills in days rather than weeks/months it should take to fully develop a character.

Leveling skills on use sounds great on paper, but I hope the team is careful about how this is implemented because the first thing people will do is grab a stack of reags and set up a macro somewhere safe. I will admit, the only time I truly leveled a character in UO was before I knew that macroing was possible. Every character after that just got the "GM overnight" treatment.

Most combat skills can be fixed simply by leveling skills with Experience gained from killing with the weapon, rather than just reusing it. Magic is a bit different. Leveling magic by killing is clearly not the only way to get better with magic because I expect many non-combat spells to be present in the game, such as teleporting or gating perhaps. Setting a macro to cast 500 gates while you sleep should not be possible, but pure combat should not be the only way to increase your skill either. I don't have the answer, but I would like to state my concern about macro prevention and hope it is being taken under consideration during the design phase.

 

I think you refer to UO private shards. The UO i played 1997-2003 had very few players macroing and they were removed and punished by GM:s 5 minutes after they were reported.
I played on Europe shard and thats the shard i refer to.

Macroing, exploiting and even duping is today a bigger issue then they were in early UO and you're right measures have to be taken to counteract such behavior.

 

I have never played a private shard until last year for a bit of nostalgia. I remember it being pretty rampant. I forget the town with the fighter pit, New Jhelom perhaps, where you could go there any time of day and see at least a half dozen macroers with skinning knives sparring with NPCs and bandaging them to raise swords, tactics, healing, and anatomy all at the same time. Nobody was reporting anyone when I played.

 

1) If leveling skills is a pointless grind, it just shouldn't be there. Just start people at max and be done with it.
2) I've certainly seen games where the skills / UI was do bad it needed macros (e.g. RIFT) but I'd need to hear a reason you'd need to design a game with a bad UI just to have a rich macro system.

 

Skills in SotA are not advanced through use, as in UO. Instead, you earn generic xp, and you can apply that as you will, wisely or foolishly.

 

I hope, the SotA rune combat system makes Macroing in Combat useless or at least uneffective, since you don't know what skills are coming next and on what position they'll arrive. So, I hope for fun combos and a more tactical combat, were you have to think and don't spam your skills or repeat one routine over and over and over again

 

@AndiZ275
They should do the exact opposite of this. Mixing up skills is <i>why</i> people use macros and add ons. Because goofy cooldowns and procs come up and they have to react in some unnatural way. I had macros in RIFT that would be a dozen line long trying to use proc skills, cooldown skills, then normal melee skills, then gap closing skills, then ranged skills. Cut it down to a few simple skills that feel natural.

 

@ara Macroing was allowed in UO. It was even built into the system but most would use UOassist. The only way you got in trouble for it was for unattended macroing. I poerfer to allow macroing to make it easier to do many things like crafting and for building up skills as long as your not unattended. Gets pretty tedious hitting a bunch of key strokes over and over and over....

 

@Rhoads: I fully agree with you about the key strokes. I encountered this problem in many RPGs, especially when you played a class, that was able to buff other players.

As an example: I play a captain in Lord of the Rings online and one of his main objectives is to buff the entire group in instances and raids with 30min buffs. And when the group wipes or someone dies, you have to buff all over again. This is quite okay for some time, but after a year, doing all the same klicks over and over and over again, it becomes extremely tedious and takes a lot of fun out of the game, since it's becoming work. Other forced klicks in this games are buff food and other self buffs before boss fights and in instances, weapon and equipment swapping (have to do a thread about equipment swapping in combat, when I have time, because I find it always ridiculous, when players exchange heavy plate armors in less than a second during combat), etc. etc.

On solution could be macros: this would reduce the number of forced and tedious cliques and give room for some customization. But you have to be careful, not to overpower macroing in combat, for example by letting players perform actions nearly simultaneously, that players without macros could never do. Not the velocity of your skill should be decisive, but the situation in which you use them.

And the other solution could be, to reduce tedious forced clicking as much as possible.

Cheers,
Andreas

 

Those problems are all caused by bad UIs. Just eliminate the tedium, rather than add band-aids. Even WoW has switched to having it buff the whole raid by casting the buff once. Or most of them are just passive auras so you dont even need to cast the buff.

As I've said. I've liked macros in games. But no nearly as much as a game that was well designed and didn't need them. Add ons are the same thing.

 

Ok, real fast, I hear the complaint about players using macros to unfairly level skills, but lets have some definition here. A macro is just a short program. That's IT. It doesn't have to be a short program that DOES anything in particular. Cntrl V is a macro. It reprints whatever is in the memory created by Cntrl C.

My point is this. Uncontrolled macros in a UI that didn't really think about what macros could do is a nightmare, and leads to abuses far more egregious than powerleveling. The "ultimate button" macro, that attempts with each use to use every single situational counter in the game and if that fails pokes at you with a sharp stick comes to mind.

But NO macros is also a problem. Macros allow a level of UI customization that most MMO's really need. The human hand only has so many fingers, and when the number of skills and actions available exceeds the spaces on an entire keyboard, which could easily happen in SotA, a way of stacking, sequencing, chaining, coupling, or simply organizing the desired powers would be really helpful.

I pull for a middle path. Allow some macroing, and have the devs really decide how much they are willing to let macros do. You could then police the macros by watching for abuses or excess, and update the rules on macros when you found one such. The players who LIKE and use macros are also, almost by definition, aware that they can get too powerful, and are similarly used to being patched. The players who don't like macros will shed no tears when various loopholes are closed.

 

I'd also just like to add, that for players who really like the feeling that all that hard work, theorycrafting, and nitpicking over a "perfect optimum build" that they did paid off...the joy of realizing that the macro I built actually does something useful, makes my UI work more to my liking, lets me respond more fluidly...it's part of why I even play.

Being allowed to customize my UI to work my way is something I look for in games. I don't think I'm alone.