Entertainer Archive
Thread: looping macro's, not the great satan. Unattended play is!
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rickon_stark
Tue Aug 17, 2004 5:14 pm
#1
hmm i'm gonna get flamed/1 starred for this 
*grits teeth*
*grits teeth*as a fencer, doc and dancer i use looping macro's religously- fencer attacks every 0.6s, crafting a batch of buffs is ludicrously clicky, and trying to keep up the flourishes whilst talking in the cantina and guildchat and pst's tends to frazzle my fragile lil brain. oh, and i love my magical mutli coloured hotpants macro 
ok, so i can write longer macro's, but if i'm paying attention to something else in the game then i'll prolly miss the end of the damn macro. i am not an afk player, in fact if i have any problem it's that i'm far too atk and involved. a lot of other professions use looping macro's to do thier jobs, in particular crafters. so, in general, i'd say that the looping macro is a damned important tool for a lot of other people. as far as i can tell, the only community that in general doesn'tapprove oflooping macro's is the dancing community, and then only because of the afk aspect of it.
ok, so i can write longer macro's, but if i'm paying attention to something else in the game then i'll prolly miss the end of the damn macro. i am not an afk player, in fact if i have any problem it's that i'm far too atk and involved. a lot of other professions use looping macro's to do thier jobs, in particular crafters. so, in general, i'd say that the looping macro is a damned important tool for a lot of other people. as far as i can tell, the only community that in general doesn'tapprove oflooping macro's is the dancing community, and then only because of the afk aspect of it.so, rather than ban looping macro's, may i propose the following... that looping macro's automatically stop when a player goes afk. this solves the afk dancer syndrome in one fell swoop, and lets the rest of us keep our loops. would this be agreeable to the community?
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just to head off some counter arguments;
"but then someone can just come back every 10 minutes and move their mouse"- they can do that with a long macro too.
"but someone can just turn up the timeout for afk"- the devs make it a set time such as 10-15 mins
"someone can use third party software to move their mouse every couple of minutes"- if they're gonna do that, you don't think they're gonna set up the taskbar and have it run thru f1 to f12?
"you're just being lazy! you should have to hit a key for every action!"- get real, try crafting for four hours straight without a macro and see what your hands feel like afterwards. you want to hit a key for every action, get the devs to make the game interface simpler.
and before you ask why i'm not posting this in the dev forum, it's because the dancing community is the main (if not only) community that has a problem with the looping macro. and i'm gonna post it over there as well
please note that i am not saying that afk dancing is a good thing, or buffbots are a good thing, or powerlevelling is a good thing. they're not and i personally disagree with them. nor is this an attack on anyone or any group in particular, it's a problem with the game, not the people.
rick
nb- if someone is using a spammacro to shout, does it keep them atk as far as thegame is concerned because they are speaking?
DarkY0da
Tue Aug 17, 2004 5:19 pm
#2
It was suggested tons of times by different people. It's not us it's the devs that decided on this.
Xyrdre
Tue Aug 17, 2004 5:36 pm
#3
Yep... truth here is that it's AFK "gameplay" that's the Great Satan. It's just that recursive macros are one element of that.
When the entertainer community had the party to rival the destruction of the second Death Star at the announcement of all this, it was cheering for the hopes of the end of AFKing and buffbots, not for the end of recursive macros alone. After so long of having the cantinas flooded with spam, andbeing totally alone amidst50 animating characters, and having buffbots replace our primary means of income, and having the laziness of AFK grinders ruin the respect for our professions that yielded our secondary incomes... hearing that something was being done to try to stop it was like the voices of the Gods coming down to finally say "We have heard you!" After 11 months of no responses to any of our issues...yes, we were elated. 
And yes, there are perfectly legitimate uses for recursive macros. The whole issue is in trying to get people to "Knock off all that AFKing!" (my new cantina battle-cry, by the way... )
)We're all hoping that the devs come up with a better way to combat AFKness in SWG, especially considering that it looks very well like removal of recursive macros alone just won't do the trick. Some of our best minds are working on the issue as well. Entertainers were never the enemy... except to those who started the war in our backyards - the ones who would totally replace our entire game playstyle with automation and macros.
fett3041
Tue Aug 17, 2004 7:22 pm
#4
One doesn't need to go through all that fuss to avoid being flagged afk... all you have to do is toggle off your Auto AFK. That's how many get around the AFK server dump.
rickon_stark
Tue Aug 17, 2004 9:16 pm
#5
guess they'd have to make afk mandatory as well then. personally ihate the logging out when you go afk thing... i keep my afk timer set fairly low so if i go off to make a cup o tea or sumtin and someone wants a buff they get the afk message, i just regard it as good manners. it's a real pain if i forget to set my macro and have to spend the next five mins to logging in again. i know a couple of people who just have looping sit/stand macros to stop it when they go off to do whatever. about the only point i can see in it if they take out macro's is someone could stand there and just dance with no flourishes (which lets face it is gonna happen anyway with the grinders) or stand in moenia or somewhere and blast thugs for combat xp. if we loose recursive macro's i guess that's gonna mean upping my afk timer or turning it off completely. *sigh* do you get the feeling they're causing more problems than they're solving?
ok so how about a slight amendment: afk is mandatory and is a set time, at which time all paused commands will be dumped and all skill animations will stop, so your character will not do anything or react to anything, even being shot at, but will not bedropped from the server.
one day i'm gonna find a dev and submitthem to a kind of water torture... every hour or so i'll turn on the lights, playthema clip of a bug, ask "what were you thinking?", then turn out the lights again.
rick
rickon_stark
Tue Aug 17, 2004 9:35 pm
#6
btw xydre i completely agree, it's just in typical dev stylee they seem to have thought long and hard about how to solve the problem in the most complicated and inconvenient fashion possible. there are lots of potential ways to stop afk buffbots, and removing what many people regard as a key component of the game is one of the worst. there's 28 pages of posts already on the (second) "recursive macro's are going away" thread, and the vast majority are people screaming blue bloody murder.
i think the entertainment community, as the main driving force behind the decision, is in danger of seriously pissing off a large amount of players. granted,we weren't the ones who made the decision to remove recursive macro's, andwe were absolutely right to want buffbots stamped out, but...running aroundgleefully in various forums about a change that has a lot of people majorly pissed is not a good way to go about making people want to watch live entertainers. an end to buffbots? fantastic! an end to recursive macro's... erm
rick
Tiaga
Tue Aug 17, 2004 9:56 pm
#8
fett3041 wrote:One doesn't need to go through all that fuss to avoid being flagged afk... all you have to do is toggle off your Auto AFK. That's how many get around the AFK server dump.
Of course, they could NEVER add a different timer triggered the same way as the AFK timer, but with a set time and without an option to disable it. They would have to make the AFK timer mandatory and a set time instead.
(Yes, that was sarcasm.)
Of course, none of us know what exactly they have planned, so calling it bad, a blight to AFK play, easily circumvented, or overly complicated is a bit premature.
Message Edited by Tiaga on 08-17-2004 09:58 PM
DarkY0da
Tue Aug 17, 2004 10:05 pm
#9
rickon_stark wrote:
i think the entertainment community, as the main driving force behind the decision, is in danger of seriously pissing off a large amount of players.
Clearly though we aren't the main driving force behind ANYTHING that happens in this game. This was done to stop unattended gameplay of ALL types and shapes and forms. They want people PLAYING their game. New blood coming in with JtL won't stay if all they find is toons all over NOT playing the game and instead letting the game play for them.
We have NO idea how they are going to do this. But I have played all sorts of games that let you run macros and had different ways of insuring that you weren't able to run them forever and non-stop. Hitting a CoB macro every 10 minutes honestly isn't a huge deal. Crafting can be a pain which is why hopefully they put in some of the great ideas on how to change it.
And honestly at this point in time with the majority of players using buffbots and not even bothering to look for an atk entertainer. They can be talking to an entertainer and still want to sit there for 4 minutes and wait to get into a bots group.... do I care if I piss them off at this point in time ? Why what are they going to do ? Run around with 900+ BF LOL. No I don't give a crap. They will adjust and they will learn to live with it. New players will not have a clue and be happy with the way things work. Vets that do care just might/maybe/hopefully get back the cantinas as the HUBs of this game as they were designed to be.
Amythen
Tue Aug 17, 2004 11:21 pm
#10
I don't have any problem either with or without recrusive macros. Right from the beginning all I saw was the problems that they could bring. Maybe I have better motor skills then most, but I have not really needed any macros that did more then one key stroke. All that I ever used them for was to create new hotkey-able commands. Like bandflourish commands. I have considered many other macros, and designed some, but they quickly were deleted since I so rarely used them. I much prefer hitting the flourish hotkeys over a macro any. I've always thought macros for performances did little for allowing creativity. I play as I feel. I still have plenty of time to talk to and greet my fans.
Your idea is fine. Although I like the idea of making unattended gameplay an exploit and giving CSRs the tools they need to combat it much better.
There have been many suggestions given. We have regularly asked the players themselves to curb their unattended gameplay. Its not the entertainers that should recieve the guff, its the people in the mirrors. We didn't start it, we didn't continue it, but we will end have unattended play removed or we will all be gone well before the precious JtL. I guarantee it!
Apparently, according to the dev team and TH, the recursive macros are the major problem. I agree, without them, there vehicle for unattended gameplay will be severely crippled. Its unfortunate that the people that use them for legitimate gameplay are going to be sacrificed. Yet I am sure many of them can come up with other ways to get the job done. I really feel this is a small price to pay for such a great return. The general plans of a macro tester and a macro timer will be difficult to circumvent. Yet again they need to police those that do manage it. Delete characters who have advanced this way, ban accounts of players that make it a habit,it will be for the greater good of the game, its players, and the SOE pocketbook, in any case, once the unattended characters are removed or unusable.
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