No Macros or Botting Allowed of any kind

@DarkStarr On the subject of water collection, perhaps it's time to make "water buckets" more of a tool similar to (for example) a wood rasp? Where the bucket can be crafted or purchased, it has durability, but it doesn't require the endless pressing of "E" and instead can be automated to collect 20 buckets at a time (just as many crafting skills allow). There would now be a greater emphasis on "cost" of the tool rather than time spent not having fun trying to get enough water for your crops. The bucket could also store X amount of water, and would not require you to use one bucket at a time, only X units of water (something that should be easy to integrate as we move to a more automated agriculture system in the future).

 

This is why selective Multiplayer and especially friend mode online is a very good feature!!!
And this why PvP should always just an option aside the main game!!!

I'm tired of competing with people who believe challenge were the essence of everything!!!

It is not!

 

I have absolutely no problem with this. I do not bot or macro.

 

That doesn't help clarify since it contradicts what @DarkStarr said. What does it matter what you're paying particular attention to if any offence qualifies someone for a ban? What qualifies as an unfair advantage?

Understand or not, I'd be out of here. I've been playing since Feb 2014, my hours on Steam playing the game prior to 2016: 270, hours spent playing the game in 2016: 1160. That's even with hardly playing at all for a few months because the Linux version was broken. Persistence, whether the game was ready for it or not, has increased engagement. Throwing all that work away now would be too much to swallow.

Then they'd have to re-design control points, because staying in one place killing the same things is how they are supposed to work.

 

Good approach.
But whatever you or they do, some will exaggerate it. 900 plantings I read here or smelting 40k ore or 8 hours refining.
I don't want to judge others, but this is exactly what i mean with not playing but only challenging.
The substance of playing is reduced to challenge. Bothers me, although I should not.

And that's why I want options, options, options!!! To not constraint to compete with such people.
I would love to setup my vendor for a few people and sell Mandrake for 2.5 gold, because i can and i want, but not to become out of stock by greedy business man, who then sell it for 4 gold.

I want always options and no limitations to people who don't follow this ambitious route and do not want to partake in any competetition
with eager players. To me playing is more than just a challenge!

I want the option to seperate me from this. I have it with SPO and or FM and I want more features like this, e.g. make setting to my vendor for players or guild only.

 

We've already got some of this in place, with craftable (or 'stealable') buckets already being a thing.
I always found it a bit curious that when you use a bucket to water your crops...WHERE DOES THE BUCKET GO???

I mean, there should be a giant mountain of empty buckets next to my greenhouse by now.

 

This thread has become ridiculous.
I play a lot, I am both on high adventurer as well ass crafter level just by playing. I know for sure that I don't do any macroes which would give me advantage vs other players.
All you fearful people should know when you do macroeing which gives you advantage over other players or not. If you can't say definetely "No, I for sure do not macroeing in the sense of Darkstarr" then you should consider the your gameplay.

 

I hear you, @Stundorn. It's a difficult thing to balance, Time vs. Money.

One of the things that is working against the economy right now is that there's very little upkeep cost. There's unlimited storage (a single chest is currently near infinite - but this will be changing soon), being encumbered is really not much of a restraint, travel is easy. The whole thing is ripe for people to exploit as the time it takes to do much of anything is very little. What a lot of casual players don't understand is that all these conveniences are actually benefiting the power gamers and gold farmers the most. Although tightening the ship would settle some of this down, it would never stop them. It's an unfortunate reality that is part of MMO culture and unlikely to change in our lifetime.

But back to what I was talking about earlier, storage and upkeep costs. For you to be able to sell your mandrake at cheaper prices, that would have to mean that other players HAD to do the same thing. Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Right now mandrake lasts forever until it's used. This means there's absolutely no incentive for profit driven players to sell it below the maximum price they can get for it. Eventually someone will need it and eventually someone will buy it. But what if mandrake only lasted for 1 month before it went "Stale"? What if you could prolong the freshness for an extra month if you put it into a glass jar, but then even that would only give you 2 months before it was no longer usable? Well now you have a reason to start selling it at a lower cost!

This means that as the value of the mandrake decreases over time (people haven't bought it yet), the seller is going to have to lower the cost in order to make any profit or risk losing everything. That would allow people to sell mandrake at a reduced cost (cheaper and more affordable) without having other players snatch it up to sell at much higher prices (assuming the mandrake you were selling already had some of its self life reduced).

I'm hoping we move to a system more like this in the future. A system that makes hording much more difficult, but also making the time you spend now in the moment much more important (which should help balance out the game in a significant way for more casual players).

 

No-one can say that because Darkstarr said all macroing and botting. There was no sense of, there was just all.

I disagree. Now we have a reason not to bother trying to sell it in the first place. Growing stuff is already too much of a pain in the ass.

 

That is an interesting idea, but would require adding another attribute to many items ("freshness"). Apart from the dev time required to implement a way for this attribute to be automatically decremented and examined, there is also the requirement to add another field to the database. Could this be done without a full wipe? I don't know, but it is a consideration. Some changes are more difficult than others, and I suspect that anything that requires a change to the database would be difficult at this stage.

 

I agree it's a pain right now. But if you're growing with the intention of hording wealth, that's not healthy for the economy and it hurts casual players. I realize that the average casual player would look at this and be confused or angry at this statement. But if you stop to think about it, you'll understand it's true on a macro level despite anyone's micro problems.

 

Following on from the above mandrake example, the other problem is profitability vs. time investment.
If we assume you spent hours clicking the well to get the waters for 'free' and only had the initial seed investment, and we also assume you got maximum yield on those mandrake, the amount of money that you 'make' for the amount of time invested is far less effective money making than just going out and killing monsters and selling their junk. If you don't get max yield or miss a watering, you wont make anything at all. As long as that endless money faucet exists its going to be difficult to make money doing anything else.

I mean, when I have to decide between messing about farming mandrake or buying it from the NPC (because the money I can grind in the same amount of time is far more than the value of mandrake I'd get) or even going to places I know it grows and making my rounds and picking it, growing it makes the least sense. And I think that's backwards.

The maximum you're ever going to get for mandrake is matched NPC price.
I think the idea of a decay mechanic to encourage people to move/use goods is interesting, but its not going to solve the core economic problem.

People will macro water buckets and sell them for 2 or 3 gold each (NPC charges 4).
Why? Because its free money. The money earned per hour is too low and too tedious to actually sit there and click it (best case scenario at 8 second actions is like what, 400 buckets an hour? at 2 gold each? You can make more than that in Soltown catacombs) and folks who refuse to subject themselves to that sort of tedious gameplay are more than happy to buy it off a player vendor for less than what the NPC charges.

The easiest solution to the macro problem is to make tedious tasks less tedious or, if they must be tedious, at least more rewarding (ie decent producer xp) so they are worth a player's time. Most people wouldn't feel the need to macro then. If there isn't a reliable detection method to ban such offenses, then make the 'craft' button appear somewhere different on the screen each batch or something so it can't be automated with a clicking program.

 

I don't know if it would require heavy lifting, of course that would be a consideration we would want to think about.

Anecdotally we have a recent event (post wipe) where repairs were changed in a way that added a new field in the item description (Major Work Performed, or something like that), so either they thought ahead and had some room in the database for new fields, or they have a way to add them without a full wipe.

 

I think you're confusing the way it works now with what could be...

Yes, you are describing how it works today very well, and I agree that in that system the time vs. reward is not balanced. But in the example I gave, you could no longer hoard wealth forever, eventually you'd just have a pile of dead mandrake that couldn't be used for anything. So it would encourage you to sell it quickly, which would also encourage you to reduce the price to sell it faster, thus avoiding the very real possibility that you'd lose all your profits. That's how it works in real life with commodities like produce. You can't expect to sell milk the day before it expires with the expectation that it will all be purchased. Most people don't want to buy milk that is recommended you stop drinking the following day.

 

True, but reagents like mandrake, etc. could be dried and stored for later use, or otherwise you couldn't stock up on reagents and carry an amount with you all the time... Fresh food OTOH would have to be sold quickly...
But it's the mandrake people want to make the biggest profits on, because people *will* need that... So that's a bit of a catch 22

Of course, they could add a refining step to it, but that too would then be easily scriptable...

I like the *general* idea of it though!

What I do NOT like is the unclear sweeping statement that still has not been clarified by @DarkStarr, @Berek or @Lord British! I have a Roccat gaming mouse and keyboard, my son has a Razer Black Widow... I like to use a joystick instead of my mouse for direction control... Is that permissible?
What about things like VoiceAttack, IRtrack and similar alternative control tools?

 

I think they would just need to fix the CP exploits (already done I thought) and make them harder. I think the fundamental problem is that we have a game that is winnable by pressing 1-2-3, not how people are pressing 1-2-3.

 

Well to clarify, The cps were not exploited as much as they were not designed correctly and are still Abused is the word you are looking for. Massive exp reward and no skill or effort bassically 1 gm skill an hour in xp. However some people ran macros during cp runs and that is a diffrent story also people run macros for a lot of other things including gathering resources like ore wood water looting respawning chests etc. Macroing/botting is the real enemy not the hardcore player and when they allowed "attended macroing" it eas too easy to take that to mean atteneded ocassionaly to let me sleep on it type of thinking.

Fix it now fix it aggresively and this will be better. Like I said above warnings were so two months ago its time to break skulls.

 

And what's about beeing just altruistic.
I had this discussions in a german boards where i offered 100 Mandrake for 250, because after the water patch I could produce for at least 1 gold and don't count hours of work or broken hoes. I still had a plus of 1.5 gold for each mandrake.
Then someone ordered 6000
I sold him 2000 of my stock and had to explain why i am so cheap, too cheap and all that and that i seller it to support the guild or residents of the PoT, but 6000 were too much work to do for me and this would take the wrong turn for me.
Now i do not sell it anymore for this price because people I would offer this special price don't get it, because others take the advantage and grab it all.

That is why you need no timesinks or limiting factors or make things hard to get and a clickfest, the botters and sellers do i either way.
I don't want to have it too easy, but... maybe more options to be more self determined.

Except one

I now going to practice serenity and go on playing this evening without complaining of what others do.
Exploit, macro, compete, whatever , i won't partake, because i'm playing this game aside any competitition but only cooperstive.
And not because i don't like competitions among players, but because people do or cannot compete for fun itself, they're just going for personal
feeling of winning and to nobble everybody else.

 

I like the general idea of it, but the issue is that because (bafflingly) agriculture isn't sustainable, the only way you can get seeds is by continuing to have an up-front investment.
Sure, you could lower the price but we're already talking pennies of profit even without a decay system.
Look at the numbers here.
Mandrake costs 4 gold to buy from NPC
To grow a mandrake plant at the 10 yield level you need 32 gold "worth" if you're buying buckets and seeds at NPC prices. Cost is 3.2 gold, max sell price (due to npc) is 4 gold.
If you're doing all the water manually, then your cost is 1.6 gold per mandrake. That's as low as you can go having to buy seeds assuming you don't miss that third watering at which point your cost is doubled because your yield is halved.
The amount of time it takes to plant and draw water, it simply becomes not worth it compared to the alternatives available for making money.
This encourages people to use unattended macros to do the work for them because their active time is better spent doing almost anything else.

For me personally, I'd love to see sustainable producability of all NPC-sold reagents and fuels. I'd love to see blacksmiths stop buying rusty weapons (since really, why do they want em?) and salvage/scrap be the only value in picking these things up, and the only items of any 'vendor value' be crafted items, whose values are bumped to a rate appropriate to their complexity/material use. But I'm afraid that's a pipe dream, as long as we have NPCs regulating prices and the only viable faucet for income being adventuring. Every other income stream pales in comparison to it, both because the profit per hour is lower and because it relies on having a player 'buyer.'

 

I agree that seeds should be something players don't have to go to NPC's for.

I also agree that NPC's generally muddy up the waters in the economy. The argument for NPC's is two fold. 1. They provide "stuff" to players (mainly new players) when other players are not around to provide that stuff. Let's face it, no one wants to be in a game where all you need is coal but no one in shouting distance can provide it. 2. NPC's act as a gold sink while also helping to keep inflation down. This is a reactive process though and the developers usually don't make changes to NPC pricing faster than month to month (if at all). So I don't really put a lot of weight into either of these arguments. (although having NPC's sell things for a flat amount certainly does help keep inflation down for those particular items)

Here's an interesting thing to consider. Did you know that Black Pearl is only supposed to be harvested in the wild during certain phases of the moon? Talk about a shortage or inflated prices if NPC's weren't selling it! Which would still be my preference, to have ups and downs in the economy until the player market stabilized. I think to do that you actually need a lot less NPC interaction, but the developers do not appear to agree with that. During development, it makes sense to have more of a hands off approach, but as we move more towards launch I wonder if they will become more involved day to day and begin to remove some of the NPC automation from the game.