Artisan Archive
Thread: AFK Macro Samplers Consider Yourself Warned
Better start preparing your whines about the prices of goods next. All those people AFK sampling are getting resources so they can craft quality goods to sell to you. If they have to solely rely on harvesters, which are expensive to run, your prices will be rising. Maybe you should start whinning for the /slave command, so you can have your own little personal crafter on a chain.
The survey XP gained from macro sampling is useless, it leads to no elite professions. If it were me, I'd be in favor of eliminating survey XP, it's just a leftover from the deleted miner profession.
Well, macroing is a problem, the PROBLEM is that i can get more resources sampling than my 2 harvesters can generate. Why do i sample then, because its faster than the harvisters (that i still use).
The best solution that i can think of is to put a sample CAP.
Heres how it works, you log in and your "sample resource" is set to null (it is now).
You then open your tool, select the resource you want to survay for/sample for.
You start sampling for it.
After X (say, 250 or 500) units are collected, the type that you are looking for is reset.
This means that ever 250 or 500 units collected you have to manualy reselect the type to sample for.
This would not stop macro's but would limit their effect.
At a rate of say 10 per 30 seconds it limit the time that a macro would be usefull to 15 to 30 minutes.
Just a thought, since every other idea that ive noticed is basicly to remove the ability to sample in a macro rather than limit its effectiveness for AFK fokes.
Why whine about it? Sampling is the most retarded way of getting resources anyway. Anyone who jumps out of Artisan into a real crafting profession is not going to be able to keep afloat with just macro-sampling. Even the most notorious macro-sampler is gonna need to go out and build up a fleet of Harvesters in order to supply himself with the resources he needs to get into a real profession.
Folks, don't even worry about it. Concentrate on getting your Harvester infrastructure up. Run Delivery or Destroy missions to maintain yourself until you start crafting markettable items. 1 or 2 hours of Delivery or Destroy missions yields plenty of credits to be able to maintain a nice fleet of Harvesters and Generators.
If you'd get up off your lazy Artisan arses and get to work, you wouldn't care about afk-macro-sampling. Do you honestly expect to sit yourself in front of a crafting station all day and generate income...AS AN ARTISAN?! If you were a Weaponsmith, I'd let it pass...a Droid Engineer...sure...a Chef...maybe. But a freaking Artisan? There's like 10 billion Artisans, we're like the Chinese! Nothing you can make is gonna sell...accept and live with that fact, and go off and run Delivery missions so you can support yourself. Else, pick up a weapon skill and start running Destroy missions for more cash.
I will keep this quite short :
To the writer of the thread : In school when i was young (not too long ago eheh) the punishment for that kind of behavior was a good "face scraping" on the boardwalk.
To the macroers out there : insert the command /afk in your macro, twice in a row, at every 10 minutes intervals. This should keep of the auto-afk thingie off (this is just a guess, gonna include it in the alias to see if it works)
That said, im at work, and i hope my macro is still running.
And btw, using a third party program is not allowed... is"intelligence"a third party program ?? Pls pls, great "watcher of the AFK-Macroers",use this program ! If i have to callSony to allow you to use it, ill do it...
mac1: /nerf whiners;/mac2
mac2:/facescrape whiners;/mac1
Yes, the original post disappeared. (bizzare) A few words on AFK and assumptions people make:
-There is auto-afk, which automatically marks you(AFK) after a period of inactivity. When you hit a key or move around, the tag immediately disappears. This is the system assuming you're no longer at the console, and letting others know on your behalf of that assumption. The auto-afk can be disabled so it never comes on.
-There is the /afk command, which manually places an (AFK) tag over your character, and it does NOT go away when you move. The /afk command toggles it on and off. This is the player politely telling everyone around him "I'M NOT ABLE TO TALK RIGHT NOW." So who's the fool, the person who is afk, or the person trying to talk to someone who isn't there?
So, don't assume an (AFK) tag means he's been away from the computer for 30 minutes or more. He might be in a /tell storm taking orders, or just cracking n00bie whiner jokes with his friends. Don't assume that someone has to drop everything they're doing just because you ran up to them and said "hi."
The way I look at it, I'm not obliged to answer anyone who talks to me. I don't have a (HELPER) tag over my head. Don't get mad at me for playing this GAME the way I want to. If every creature in the Star Wars movies were polite, it would have been a sad boring bunch of movies.
As far as macro sampling, itis most likely asimple matter for the devs to make the /sample command inoperative inside a macro. This is how they would stop it from being an "exploit" ... ifthey considered itone.The fact that they haven't done this (and they've had weeks now to do it) means that it isn't considered an "exploit." Get over it.
If you don't like other players being able to play a multiplayer game the way they want to,within therules provided,goreinstall yoursingle player games and get out of my galaxy.
There is no auto-afk kick as far as I'm aware, unless it kicks you after doing _absolutely nothing_ (ie just standing, not even macroing.) I regularily macro for hours on end; I always set a macro before I go to bed, and before I go towork. Works out great; I get enough resources to sell for some money and plenty to build my little CDEF things to sell (I can actually sell; sell in places like Bela Vistal where there's not much competition. I've sold even junky CDEFs because I labelled them (ie, "18-34 CDEF Pistol" or whatever)). Anyhow, I digress. Macroing is not an exploit or bug. I use no third party software at all; just what's built in to SWG. Maybe one day I'll be able to afford a large harvester farm (Did You Know: Even at a 70-80% spot; a Survey IV using artisan mines FASTER than a Large Harvester); until then, I will be afk as much as I need to, regardless of what some whiny player thinks.
BTW, how does that patch hurt macroers? Sure, I get like 1/3 the yield, but I make like 500 or somethingresources per hour no problem. It hurts the "honest" surveyors who actually sit there and watch, not people like me who do something interesting while we wait for our resources.
Just what SWG needs, a Gestapo. Hey, you could join the ISB; you could probably RP it great, Adolf, I mean, Brad 
James
I think the reasoning behind them allowing long sampling times is because if that's what you want to do with your game - fine. Even though someone may sample faster than one of my harvesters, they can't sample more than 8 or 9 of my harvester.
In the grand scheme of things, someone macro-sampling for a while (most people do it at the start then tire of having to manage a guy sitting all by himself) is a drop in the bucket of what some power player who has multiple harvesters running is going to achieve.
To the guy who started this thread - have you also warned your dancer friends?
Are these people still your "friends"?
It makes me think of Ferris's sister from Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The scene where she's trying to rat out Ferris and Charlie Sheen asks, (paraphrased--it's been a while since I've seen it) Why do you hate your brother so much? She says, because he's always skipping school. Sheen says something like, why don't you just skip? She replies, because I'd get caught.
Don't be a Jeannie Bueller.
Brad,
THe Devs did not fix macro sampling. All they did was make auto-afk set on by default. Yet, they have left the option to turn that off...so that means to me they don't mind ppl hanging out.
BradBradley wrote:
"Hall monitor" my hindquarters. What did you think, that this game has enough GMs that they can police all misbehavior without player help? As if. Never gonna happen. If players don't report exploiters, they'll never get stopped, and the exploiter subculture will spread like kudzu.
Brad, what can I do to stop this growing menace? I afraid that they may also spread other negative behaviors such as, smoking, use of illict narcotics and premarital relations. What with them growing like Kudzu, how can we possibly PROTECT OUR NATIONS YOUTH. I'm afraidMY children could get caught up in this Exploiter subculture. I can only supervise them so many hours of the day, and I am concerned that they may be macro-auto-sampling when I'm asleep. Possibly even turning off their monitors so that I THINK their computers are off when IN FACT they are actively exploiting! I hate to mistrust my children, but the threat is too great. Fellow parents, I encourage you to shut off the power to your homes, whenever your children(or spouse, we can't trust even them) is not ACTIVELY playing Star Wars Galaxies. This way we can be sure that no macro-auto-sampling is occuring. Together we may be able to stop this great threat, to our familes, our nation and our way of life.
PodDrifter wrote:
Yes, the original post disappeared. (bizzare) A few words on AFK and assumptions people make:
-There is auto-afk, which automatically marks you(AFK) after a period of inactivity. When you hit a key or move around, the tag immediately disappears. This is the system assuming you're no longer at the console, and letting others know on your behalf of that assumption. The auto-afk can be disabled so it never comes on.
-There is the /afk command, which manually places an (AFK) tag over your character, and it does NOT go away when you move. The /afk command toggles it on and off. This is the player politely telling everyone around him "I'M NOT ABLE TO TALK RIGHT NOW." So who's the fool, the person who is afk, or the person trying to talk to someone who isn't there?
So, don't assume an (AFK) tag means he's been away from the computer for 30 minutes or more. He might be in a /tell storm taking orders, or just cracking n00bie whiner jokes with his friends. Don't assume that someone has to drop everything they're doing just because you ran up to them and said "hi."
The way I look at it, I'm not obliged to answer anyone who talks to me. I don't have a (HELPER) tag over my head. Don't get mad at me for playing this GAME the way I want to. If every creature in the Star Wars movies were polite, it would have been a sad boring bunch of movies.
As far as macro sampling, itis most likely asimple matter for the devs to make the /sample command inoperative inside a macro. This is how they would stop it from being an "exploit" ... ifthey considered itone.The fact that they haven't done this (and they've had weeks now to do it) means that it isn't considered an "exploit." Get over it.
If you don't like other players being able to play a multiplayer game the way they want to,within therules provided,goreinstall yoursingle player games and get out of my galaxy.