Game Guides Archive
Thread: Recursive Sampling... aka Infinate loop sampling.
One person pays $15/month and stays at their keyboard playing red-eyed for 20 hours a day...
Another person pays $15/month and sets up the following:
Slot12Macro:
/hop; /ui action toolbarSlot12;
They hit the hotkey and head out, leavingtheir fat short wookie hopping out in the wild forever while they go about something else.
Does either person have more of a right to server time? No, their money is exactly the same. SOE doesn't market SWG as a right to play only 20% of the time, it's a right to play the game. It'sSOE's responsiblityto insure that the game is playable for everyone who pays their fees. However, it's also within their rights to disable this sort of recursion loophole if they consider it a bug/exploit.
3rd party utilities violate the EULA, so that issue is a no brainer.With free services like Blizzard's battle.net it's clear that afk botting degrades the gaming experiencefor others and the botters are doing nothing to support the upkeep / upgrade costsof battle.net servers.
Just stating my thoughts... but I may leave a fat wookie hopping on TC tonight on general principle. 
They've already stated it several times. They would rather have players use the in-game macro support than a third party program.
In regards to this "ruining the economy" get real. It's now 30 seconds between each sample. With the apparent increase in failure rates even if you have Survey IV, you're still much better off with harvesters.
The amount of time it would take one AFK sampler to sample 1k minerals using infinite macros, a person with one or two harvestors on a halfway decent spot could get twice or even triple that. A lot of you that say it ruins the economy cease to forget that while sampling, with a macro or not, you are somewhat limited with what you can do. Sure, you can craft, but guess what, you can't experiment unless you have the ability to create camps with personal crafting stations in them.
Before you start saying that this and that will ruin the economy, stop and look at all the variables involved, not just the ones that piss you off.
Scrimpy wrote:
Just another thought:
It'd be good if we could get an OFFICIAL stance on using macros to sample from the DEVS. I'd really like to know what they think.
Scrimpy
Cloudspinner wrote:
HI,
I was playing around with the armor macro when I realized I could apply it to sampling. No longer will I have to check the comp every so often to see if my sampling has stopped.
BTW the only way to break the loop is to logout.
Make the following macro and place it into your 13th slot on your first pane of hotkeys.
********************** START MACRO ***************************
/stand; /sample; /pause 500; /stand; /sit; /pause 200;
/ui action toolbarSlot12;
********************** END OF MACRO **************************
...you get the idea... you can play with the pauses to get the most benifit. The last line of code is what recalls itself. Yes and the capital S in Slot does matter. The code ...Slot12 calls the 13th slot on your hotkey because your hotkeys are numbered 00 - 23 for a total of 24 hotkeys per pane(page).
cherryred wrote:wouldn't weapon switches be queable if each weapon had a toolbarSlot?
Well ... weapon switches do not go into the combat queue. Try putting a whole bunch of special moves into the combat queue for the weapon that you have equiped. Now unequip your weapon. The weapon unequips instantly and all the remaining weapon dependant specials die. So using this technique to queue up a combination of specials for several different weapon types would be tricky to synchronize for a single click macro.
Man, getting all bent out of shape worrying about what other people are doing. How pathetic is that?
Anyway.
To clarify before I make the statement I'm about to make, I'm against using a macro to help alivate some of the tediousness that is the sampling curse. Since most people that have progressed above the basic professions know that the resources you really need are usually in areas where you really don't want to do any afk sampling. And it's usually just the zelots the cluless, or the clueless zelots, that are all up in arms over using a macro to sample.
I would think that using a keystroke mapper in conjuction with SWG would be considered for the most part, being bad. You can either set up a 6 to 7 hour running aliasor a recursive macro in the game as it is, and I think that's pretty acceptable, regardless of what the zelots and taddle tales may say. However using the 3rd party app is sort of against the EULA as stated when you lanch the game, so I think the high lords and masters could probably come down on you for that.
Gosh Darn not being able to edit your own posts!!!!!!
The above should say that I am *NOT* against using a macro to sample.
Sorry.
*mutter mumble* **edit** second rate cheap butt forum sytem.
This is an exploit and should be removed, and I'll tell you why.
First off, you are getting xp for doing nothing. But that is only a small argument.
If you can do this sort of thing it removes the need for harvesters.
Right now the main benefit of harvesters is that they can obtain resources even when you are not online. So you can leave them, while you do other things or go to sleep. The cost of this is the cost of maintenance on the harvester.
But if every night you can set your macro, and go to sleep, and come morning you have tons of resources and don't have to pay a thingwhy do you need a harvester?
You don't, which is why this is an exploit which allows you to bypass an aspect of the game.
BTW, I believe the macro system was set up so you could combine speech with actions, and a combination of actions to enhance roleplay. This is how it is depicted, where I have seen it. Not to allow you to go have dinner while your avatar works.
I don't see what's so wrong with this. How can anyone tell I'm not in the game if I have a script set up to pass command line text to the game? How is this any different from setting up a harvester? Sure there are no maintenance costs but harvesters grant you the ability to harvest more than one resource at a time. I think the advantage is still squarely with the people who build harvesters.
The reason I am using this, as I said earlier, is because it makes the game more accessible. Say I need 1k of fiberplast but I don't want to pay to put up a harvester. I set up my character to harvest fiberplast overnight, just like a harvester would do. Think of the "maintenance" cost being that I can't harvest any other resources at the same time.
People seem to be getting mad because others came up with the idea and implemented their rendition of it, a basis which hardly seems reasonable to me. How does this negatively affect the ingame economy? I'd like some more answers so I can understand where you people are coming from.
Scrimpy
Actually Scrimpy, the argument has been hashed over so many times already it's retarded.
I don't think they'll ever convince you that macro sampling is a bad thing, while you'll never convince them it's not. Each side has an argument that they feels counters one put forth by the other, and niether side considers any of the other sides even remotely valid.
Sort of like Israel and Palistine.
The Christains and the Muslems.
The Hatfields and the McCoys.
The . . . ah, you get the idea.
ok here is how it affects the ecoomy.
Lets say you want that Fiberplast for whatever you are going to make. By using your method, and not having to pay for / maintain a harvester, or a wind generator. Your cost of resources is GREATLY minimized. In fact it is brought to zero. While the non-exploiters are paying sometimes very high maintenance costs. Oh yeah, and one harvester can only gather one resource so if you want to gather more you need more harvesters, and those harvesters need energy to be run. Which must either be bought or generated, which costs more money to build and maintain.
Now you have lots of Fiberplast, if you need other resources you can do the same the next 2-3 nights then have a HUGE stock, that cost you nothing.
Now when you make your items and go to sell them you can sell them at a much cheaper price then anyone who has been paying those prices would have to.
If you accomplished this by staying up drinking tons of coffee while you clicked away at your computer then you deserve to undercut prices, but that is highly unlikely. (although not impossible)
but with the exploit it isROUTINELY possible, thus the economy gets ruined by the exploiters.
Now in order to keep up everyone would have to use the exploit thus eliminating the need for harvesters.
This is how it affects the in-game economy for the worst:
Infinite, recursive sampling allows players the ability to build up a large stock of resources at zero cost other than time. This is not a problem either for some who have found ways to have the sample loop such that they aren't kicked from the game for being afk. From my experience, I generate quite a bit more sampling for say an hour or two at an abundant locationthan any harvestor can running all night long at a decent location. And again this is free product gain if you set up the loop to go overnight for example while you are sleeping or all day while you are at work.
So, what we have then is a huge resource influx at basically zero cost. Harvesters were made with maintenance costs so there would be a money sink to help the economy out. Without the sink provided by the harvesters, then people are able to accumulate resource and credits, and as with the recursive sample loop, this accumulation will loop as well...and because people have millions of samples ofdifferent resources, the economy will also take another blow because the value of the resource will decrease. Supply will be huge, demand will decrease and decrease, no one will want to buy quality resources because they are free and easy to obtain in bulk. People will have saved millions upon millions of credits up with no maintenance costsand have tons of supplies to boot. The value of the credit will as a result decrease...Reminds me of UO's economy...
Such is the way of uber amounts of resources gained at no cost...