Artisan Archive
Thread: The *official* Please nerf macroing instead of other stuff thread
I wish everyone would stop calling this an exploit. It's not. Macro'ing is a feature that is in the game (press ctrl+A please) that is working as intended. You cannot loop, there is a character limit, etc. Advantage, ie gathering resources, is obtainable. HOWEVER, since the feature is working as intended, it is not an exploit.
If there was a bug in the macro commands, then it could be an exploit, however there is not. this IS a moral debate, with unsubtantiated terminology being thrown around. Until a dev or CSR (rofl, a CSR actually with something to say) comes out and states that their implemented command structure is buggy, then your point is not that people are exploiting.
Your point is that you suck.
Daou, please read a thread before posting. I've specifically said it's not an exploit. It's simply unbalancing and helping to ruin the economy.
And the devs *have* already said macro sampling wasn't working as intended. That's why they nerfed sampling.
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Philomorph wrote:
Logic and rhetoric students take note. This is what's known as the "Straw Man Fallacy".
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People take note, the above is what's knows as "The pompus and pretentious ass approach."
And this is how you deal with it: *Ptttthhhbbbttph* >
"To answer your other question, yes, people who do this *do* affect my gameplay, and rather directly I might add. I have harvesters and I pay upkeep on them, as well as the windmills that power them. This means I have to either sell some of the resources they get or spend time crafting items to sell to keep them running."
They affect your gameplay in as much as you allow them to.One of the many points of resource collection is to either sell the resources or sell the items you use to them to craft with. Or not, if you would rather use them forjust xp gains. If you choose to do this, don't blame everyone else.
"Someone who has a macro gather a lot of resources while they are not actually present essentially gets the same resources for free. Now of course, they don't get as many from one character as I get from 6 harvesters. But they cold just as easily set up 6 harvesters, then have them and a friend do macro sampling in addition."
First off, it's not for free. We're all paying the same ammount to play the same game. What exactally do you mean by free? Do you mean time spent? Well, we're all allotted 24 hours a day in game time that we've all paid for, so it seems that it's more of a choice of how a person's time is spent, be it staring at the screen pushing buttons or doing other things. Again, here it looks like a matter of personal choice. You yourself state that the person doesn't won't get as much resources from one day of macro mining versus your six harvesters, and that bit about friends working with friends and setting up harvesters is a ghost story.
"This is even worse when compared to someone who only samples legitimately, while actually playing (who gets far less than the macroer)."
No. If they have the exact same skills and mine in the exact same place, they have the same chances of obtaining the resources available. Again you're arguing personal choice. We all have the exact same tools available to us. If and how we choose to use them is up to the individual. Legitimancy is in the eye of the beholder and the words of the developers. Otherwise, you're just projecting your own personal biases on other people, and that's pretty much accepted as the wrong thing to do.
"Either way, the macro users are using a technique that completely violates the spirit of any online game to gain a financial advantage over the other players."
Again, your projecting here. The "spirit" you refer to is defined by each player and by the developers who preside and rule over these things. As much as you don't want another player dictating your actions in game, neither does the other.
"Not only that, but they are able to sell their resources and wares for less than I can, because they have less overhead. This is similar to if two businesses existed on the same street, and sold the same items. But if one of the businesses is buddies with the tax collector, and the taxman therefore only bills them half as much as they charge the other guy then they have a serious advantage, and will likely drive the other guy out of business with lower prices"
No, you're wrong. Not that a person can undercut your prices though, but your reasons are once again your personal projections on what you belive is right and wrong. Simply put, there are several other ways someone can undercut whatever prices you want to sell resources at. You see, you might not have noticed this, but there are these things called "missions" that are continuously handed out to people. These missions provide a vector for lots and lots of new money to enter the game at a rate I wouldn't want to concieve of. The results of your little example there is easily done by someone like me. Somone who, although is an artisan, does not rely on being an artisan to pay the bills. You see, I do a lot of these missions, so I get a lot of money. I don't need to sell resources or even the items I craft to fund harvesters. I can undercut anything you can put on the market for sale. Why? Because I can. So can everyone else who chooses to do so.
The bottom line here is it's all in how you choose to play the game. There is nothing about macro mining that can possible keep you from playing the game how you want to play it. If you want to run harvesters, you can. If you want to use all your resources to grind your skills, you can. If you want to sell your resources you can. And considering the outragous rates resources are going for, you got no leg to stand on with me if you're not happy with the profits.
Resource collection is generally considered by most crafters to be the most tedious and annoying aspect of any game system. Sony was kind enough to provide several ways to lesson the tediousness of it. One method is by using harvesters. These do use some in game resources to use, but no real world resources as they run regardless if you're in game or not. One of the other ways is to write a macro to do it while your charater is logged in game, which does in fact use real world resources to do. By your own admitance, running harvesters is the more effecient way to go.
End result of all this: We all have the same tools, the same options, and the same opportunites. You're just being a spoil sport spending way too much time worrying about how other people play the game instead of just having fun and playing it the way you want to. Sorry Cosmo, we all don't live in your world. Face it, you're being a zelot.
As for me, I'm just going to keep on playing the game as I feel I should play it using whatever tools Sony provided for me, beit with macro mining or not, and not giving two hoots how someone else is playing the game, because in all reality it has zero effect on my enjoyment of the game.
I suspect most people are going to do the same.
if people don't like macro-surveying and resource harvesting and grinding they should try:
a) learn to love the CDEF wpns -- since it'll be months before anyone can make anything better
b) learn to love scout camps -- since it'll be years before anyone can make a house
c) start buying ribbed shirts by the dozen in assorted colors!!!
d) create a market for all the low lvl junk you are able to make before you become a decently skilled smith
I'm sure the tera kai guys love nobody else having wpns equal to their skill... but aside from them I know you wouldn't turn down a nice suit of armor and a shiny gun just because the guy who made them used macro-surveyed resources... not to mention avoid joining any guilds who macro-surveyed to get a PA hall...
I think you are just mad because you can't macro-kill stuff... but hey you can always spend 100cr and become an artisan and do your own surveying... and sell to the poor crafters who can't keep up!
Phil, I've read your posts, and others. read your thread. others are calling it an exploit. You're just crying nerf. And when you cry nerf, you don't get "back" what you feel you lost, you just get carebear crap.
Philomorph wrote:
Daou, please read a thread before posting. I've specifically said it's not an exploit. It's simply unbalancing and helping to ruin the economy.
And the devs *have* already said macro sampling wasn't working as intended. That's why they nerfed sampling.
"Ahh, the time-honored tradition of calling names "
Nope. It's the time-honored tradition of calling B.S.
Dispite your fixation on macroing and straw, you fail to grasp that macroing is not the only thing that can and does distort your idea of how the economy shoudl work. The same end result of someone gaining resources through macroing is also affected by somone's scout buddy handing them a huge pile of resources. Also by by someone handing their doc buddy a huge pile of resouces. Now the doc is healing people for free, and the artisan is cranking out a ton of bone armor for, as you put it, free.
Macro miningis not a problem. For your idea of how the economy should work, they would have to remove mission terminals. You see, as long as I can get my money from running missions, I can sell whatever I build for whatever I want.
I craft like mad. I don't buy any resources off the open market unless it's super convienent for me to do so and they're priced at or less than 3 credits per unit. I don't have to macro sample. By running a couple low level missions killing off kreetles and the like, I harvest more than enough bone, hide, and meat for me to craft with, even more when my scout friend hands me huge whoping piles. The missions also more than pay to run a couple harvesters which provide all the non-organic resources I care to use. I then can and do put my wares up for sale on the market for a paltry ammount compared to what the pirates out there are gouging for.
You've stated areadly stated that a macro miner cannot gather the same ammount of resources you can with your harvester fields.
That admission alone should clue you in to the fact that macro mining isn't what's really distoring your view of how things should work. Despite the fact that things are working just fine, and it's pretty much only you and a few other crybabies who are yelling out for nerf bats.
The rest of us are doing just fine.
So it seems that the yay-sayers are whining "Please swing a big nerf bat all around the game, because we are failing to look at how the system works and finding a place in it and need to be spoon fed." While the nay-sayers realize that swinging nerf bats around is senseless, especially in this case. Get with the program. If something is bothering you this much, you're probably doing something wrong.
Time for you to dye your underwear and lean to live within your limitations.
I'm out of this thread. Have fun arguing your low to no-value points with the wall. Maybe you can head over and tell thedancers and musiciansall about how macros should be nerfed. I'm sure it'll be entertaining.
Plier wrote:
macroing is not the only thing that can and does distort your idea of how the economy shoudl work. The same end result of someone gaining resources through macroing is also affected by somone's scout buddy handing them a huge pile of resources. Also by by someone handing their doc buddy a huge pile of resouces. Now the doc is healing people for free, and the artisan is cranking out a ton of bone armor for, as you put it, free.
Feh.Trying to compare macro-sampling to completely unrelated activities isn't really useful. Where did your scout get those hides? He didn't get them by macroing, which means he doesn't have nearly as many hides as someone who macro-sampled for 3 days straight has steel. I have a scout friend whomakes maybe 100-200 hides a day, and that's from a lot of playing (solo). How many units of polymer can you make macro-sampling in one day? Ten times that?
The game economy is designed for scouts who harvest a few hundred hides a day, which is where most of them probably max out at low-medium levels. And they don't do it for free; they have to buy weaponsand armor, and requiring healing; all of which cost resources. Macro-sampling costs absolutely nothing;no resources, no credits, and there's no limit other than the 24-hours in a day to how long it can be done. Another useless red herring.
Macro miningis not a problem. For your idea of how the economy should work, they would have to remove mission terminals. You see, as long as I can get my money from running missions, I can sell whatever I build for whatever I want.
Like scouting, running missions is a self-limiting activity. You can't run missions for days on end and have a real life too, so almost no one will do it. If you do, that's fine, but there won't be a hundred others doing it on the same server, so the overall effect is negligible. Most people I've talked to run maybe 5-6 missions a day MAX, unless they really need a lot of money fast, or are going for faction points. And if you are running combat missions, it's just like the scout. It's not really free, because you will need weapons, armor, and healing.
So it seems that the yay-sayers are whining "Please swing a big nerf bat all around the game, because we are failing to look at how the system works and finding a place in it and need to be spoon fed."
This is just silly. I'm trying to get them to *not* issue the giant nerf, and instead tofocus on one, small, very specific thing that would only actually be a nerf for a much smaller percentage of players.
Instead what they did was lay down a giant nerf on every single crafter and most medics. I'm asking them to REDUCE the negative effects of a nerf by giving us back the old sampling rates. If they don't nerf extreme macroing, I fear they will next deliver bad news to entertainers because AFK Dancing isn't working the way they intended either.
And I really don't know where you get the idea I want something spoon-fed to me. I run harvesters and I pay a lot of credits to keep them going. I don't want something for free. I apparently want to make the game harder, don't I? That must be why you are so resistant. I want to take away your ability to power-macro-sample, which makes it harder for you to become uber-l33t in the first month I guess.
Time for you to dye your underwear and lean to live within your limitations.
Boy, I don't have a cluewhat this means, butit sounds like the typical "Quit whining because you aren't as l33t as me" argumentubers always make.
Your idea would actually make macroing worse. Most people just use the in game macro tools to macro for as long as they can set up a macro for (somthing like 15 lines) this adds up to something like an hour and a half. If you made it so that you could only macro a max of 80 characters, most people would invest a lot more time into figuring out how the srcipting language works, and then would see you can macro for days at a time if you wanted.
Personally I see nothing wrong with macroing. The economy right now is mired in inactivity. No one can make decent weapons, and most people have excess cash with nothing to spend it on. There's wouldn't even be any novice weapon/armorsmiths if it weren't for macroing. Macroing was included in the game, it's not like people are running an external program. I really can't see how anyone has a problem with this other than just complaining because they have bad connections, or family members who need to use their computers. I don't post on here saying I think they should close servers down while I'm at work becasue I can't play then, so no one should be able to.
KaFin Tella
Ahazi Server
Doaba Guerfel
I agree with Dee...leave in-game macroing alone. What should be adressed is people who use the third-party scripting to macro all day while they are at work. Let anyone who wants and knows how to macro with the built in "language" all they want (heck, we ALL do it in some way or another), but find a way to shutdown the people using the third party stuff.
BTW - I saw a couple of peeps today that were sampling with no apparent intelligence behind them (I sampled for an hour next to them and they didn't answer repeated tells) so I ran trained some banthas thru them hoping to disrupt their macro-sampling session. Afterwards, my wife (my voice of reason) said to me "So, was that any fairer than what you thought they were doing?" God, I hate when she's right! So,to the twopeople who fell prey to myantics (I forget their names) I am truly sorry. (There, I apologized, will you go cook something now, please?!?)
Plier wrote:
People take note, the above is what's knows as "The pompus and pretentious ass approach."
And this is how you deal with it: *Ptttthhhbbbttph* >
Ahh, the time-honored tradition of calling names ("Ad Hominem" for the pretentious among us).
They affect your gameplay in as much as you allow them to.
If it distorts the economy, as it has, I have no control over it.
First off, it's not for free. We're all paying the same ammount to play the same game. What exactally do you mean by free? Do you mean time spent?
By "for free" I mean "without in-game cost of resources". It doesn't cost anything in creditsfor someone to macro for 2 hours while AFK.It also doesn't really cost "time" in-game.When you design an online game, you assume people will have a limited amount of time to play, and you calculate desired acquisition ratesbased on that assumption. There will always bea *few* people who may stay on all day, or all weekend, gettinglots of resources. But most people won't.Macro-sampling I think has greatly increased the number of people gathering far more resources at no credit cost than the devs designed the game to accommodate.
This is a good pont, btw:
Valishin wrote:
Is it surveying vs harversting or is it achieving objectives while not at the keyboard?
For many this is indeed the problem.But that'sjust sour grapes. Some people are able to leave their computers on all day and night and leave the game running. Some people aren't.That's not my point.
Maybe I haven't focused on the part I'm concerned about, so I'll try again. The devs have *already* said that macro sampling wasn't working the way they intended. They obviously did not intend that a large number of people be able to acquire so many resource so quickly without having to set up harvesters.When I talk about the "spirit" of the game, I'm talking about the same one as the devs. But again, that's not the heart of the issue.
In beta, a lot of the testers complained that there weren't enough "money sinks". In order for an online economy like this to work, there has to be something for players to spend their money on, which takes money back out of the economy (meaning it can't just go to other players, it has to disappear). Since there are no NPC vendors, the most traditional one isn't there. Instead, we have harvesters. They give us resources, which we turn into credits. In turn, we feed them credits. In the ideal, we make a profit, which can then be spent on other money sinks. The desired result is generally to keep almostas much money and resources flowing "out" of the economy as comes in, with a little left over so people's standard of living crawls up slowly.
What extreme macro sampling does is it allows a *lot* of people to get a lot of resources and sell them without having to spend anything on harvesters, which means they end up with "too much money". I know some of you will say "stop complaining about people having more money than you. You're just whining". ButI couldn't care less about people having a lot of cash. If they do, it means they can pay me to make them big houses (another money sink), which I rather enjoy.
The problem is, when someone gets their hands on a lot of resources that didn't cost them anything to procure, they tend to sell those resources (or the goods they make) for far below what someone who had to pay for harvesters can sell them for. If a lot of people do this, itdistorts the economic. People start expecting to buy a house for 7000 instead of 13000, or whatever.
We've already established that the devs themselves didn't like the way macro sampling was being used. They never said exploit, and neither did I. It is, however, a *balance* issue. UNfortunately the devs tried to balance things out by reducing the rate at which *everyone* gets materials.
I think the result will be that the former power-macroers will continue to do exactly as before, getting eitherhalf as many resources, or doubling their macro time to stay even. The other, unintended result will be that people who used to only macro a bit, or just manually sampled what they needed, will now turn to power-macroing. The solutionthe devschosewill not fix the problem they identified, and indeed it will probably make it worse (according to their idea of how it should work).
Limiting the execution length of macros, and/or fixing the logout timer tonot allow people to stay logged in just from executing macros would fix the problem. And putting the sampling rate back to what it was before would allow everyone to get a decent, usable amount of resources for their low-level pre-harvester needs without being forced to macro-harvest for hours on end, which detracts from the time they get to actually have fun playing.
I thought the previous sampling rates were perfect for everyone. It was the use of extreme macro-sampling that distorted the economy, not the actual rate of manual sampling. So my solution, as I've said, is to nerf macroing so it's only usable for short periods, which leaves them perfectly functional for everything that marksmen, TKs, medics, and everyone else generally uses them for.
Most of the naysayers hereare basically whining, "don't force us to play the same way you do, because that won't let usruin the economy and get rich & powerful as fast as we like to (which is how we like to play)." (sort-of straw-like, but accurate I think). This is the standardargument given whenever one group of people say"nerf something cause it's screwing up the game for most players" and the group of people most hurt by the nerf don't actually have a good reason why it shouldn't be fixed.
DeeSnider wrote:
Your idea would actually make macroing worse. Most people just use the in game macro tools to macro for as long as they can set up a macro for (somthing like 15 lines) this adds up to something like an hour and a half. If you made it so that you could only macro a max of 80 characters, most people would invest a lot more time into figuring out how the srcipting language works, and then would see you can macro for days at a time if you wanted.
I'm not sure if you just didn't read the whole thread or maybe you don't really understand the built-in macroing. First of all, you can currently set a macro that runs well over an hour and a half for sampling. I was testing this and had one that runs for over 30 minutes that took about 1 line of code.
Also, the in-game macroing isn't a "language" per-se. There's no looping, or referring, or anything that would allow people to turn an 80-character macro into an all-day affair. That's why I suggested it.
And you completely ignore the other crucial aspect of the change: the pause limit. If the pause command is limited to 10-20 seconds, then no matter what you do, your macro will never run for more than a few minutes.
Hanno wrote:
I agree with Dee...leave in-game macroing alone. What should be adressed is people who use the third-party scripting to macro all day while they are at work. Let anyone who wants and knows how to macro with the built in "language" all they want (heck, we ALL do it in some way or another), but find a way to shutdown the people using the third party stuff.
I don't think anyone is using third party stuff. Maybe they are and I just haven't seen it. Why would they when they can use the built-in one to do everything they need for macro-sampling.
Anyway, it's obvious the thread has reached that critical length where no one is actually reading it. They just read the initial post and restate arguments that have already been made. Anyone who posts a new message that brings up the same old junk I've already addressed 10 times over will be ignored. Hopefully the thread will just die now, as the devs obviously don't care that they've screwed the casual crafter in an attempt to nerf power gamers while leaving power-macro-sampling basically intact. I'm having enough trouble with in-game bugs right now to worry about this anyway.