Game Guides Archive
Thread: Recursive Sampling... aka Infinate loop sampling.
SkydogHex wrote:
...Thanks for hogging up one of those tremendously valuable 3500 sever connections. I'm glad your character is pulling in tons of resources while you flip burgers at McDonalds, meanwhile I can't even log into my favorite server because it's to busy. Yeah buddy....
I pay $15.00 per month to have access to one character slot on each SOE server if I so wish, that is the service they have agreed to provide when I put in my credit card # and hit accept. When and what server I choose to log into, and what I choose to do while logged into said server is my business as long as it is in compliance with the EULA. If you have a problem logging into a server that is something to address to SOE not the end users who have paid a subscription fee to use the server.
You can try to rationalize any way you want. Plain and simple...you are cheating. There is no game created for the purpose of people setting up a program and walking away from the game for hours at a time. We are not idiots. You can try to work your little loophole in the written text of the EULA, but you know and everybody else knows that you are going against basic moral values. You are taking up other people's time on the server just to satisfy your own virtual greed. What you are doing is WRONG. Have you ever heard of sharing? Do you actually feel comfortable knowing that what you are doing is infringing on the rights of others to have enjoyment in the game? One of you based your whole argument on the fact that you don't want to pay for a harvestor...TOUGH!!! That's how the game was desighned. If you want to harvest resources while not at your computer, then you buy and maintain a harvestor. This is nota complicated thing. I don't want to pay taxes, but I do. I know ways to get around paying taxes, but I pay them anyway, becaus eI know that if i don't somebody else will have to pay them for me. Remember, your rights end where another person's right begin. You are just wrong because you are cheating. You are a bad and mean person because there is some poor 15 year old kid out there who just wants to get online and shoot some aliens and live his dream of being in the Star Wars Universe but can't becaue of your need to cheat to satisfy some sick need. I will say it over and over again...You are wrong.
Kai'Long
Tarq.
[quote]There is no game created for the purpose of people setting up a program and walking away from the game for hours at a time.[/quote]
There is such a game. It's called ProgressQuest. 
How is macro-sampling, cheating? Your character still has to go through the motions of sampling, regardless of whether you're sitting there gawking at it. Putting it in a macro in no way removes the requirement of time. The only difference is, you don't have to sit there mindlessly sampling, sitting, sampling, sitting, sampling, sitting, etc.
Macro'ing it isn't cheating, it's just being lazy.
And everyone whining about the economy getting screwed over needs to shut the hell up. The bazaar system is already virtually useless for finding anything a Novice starting profession can find/craft/start-with. Especially since you can rename any item you like to be any other items name. And you can't always tell whether that GDN-XJ13 Carbine Rifle of Godliness is any better than a CDEF, without examining it. Thus wasting everyone's time.
The economy is already dodgy, people macro-sampling isn't going to make things worse. It's just going to put the required resources out there for people to get their hands on so everyone can have an equal chance of actually *getting* the materials needed for things above newbie gear.
It would take dozens, probably hundreds of people doing this on a single server before it would start to be a big problem. People using harvesters are still going to end up with more resources and greater variety of resources. Plus they can always do some macro-sampling themselves....
After 5 samples (or 10 samples, or even just one sample) make it so a PC has to get up and move to a new location. It can be a client-specific thing. Another PC could sample in the same place, of course, but after X number of samples, he/she too would have to get up and move.
I also feel this business of random results is quite silly. Instead, the results should be guaranteed, and directly proportional to the resource concentration and player's surveying skill. An example (and I'm not a dev so I can't judge balance) would be (10 + (Surveying skill *5) )* resource concentration. A Novice Artisan with no surveying skill would get 9 units of Fiberplast (10+0)* .90 if sampling in a 90% concetration area. An Artisan with Surveying IV would get 10+20 * .90 = 27 units per sample.
Again, these are just examples, and probably ones that wouldn't work. Once the Surveyor took the sample, though, or took serveral samples, then he/she would have to get up and move.
The key is to make it more interactive while still allowing Artisans to extract enough materials to craft objects and gain levels.
Kailong wrote:
I don't want to pay taxes, but I do. I know ways to get around paying taxes, but I pay them anyway, becaus eI know that if i don't somebody else will have to pay them for me. Remember, your rights end where another person's right begin. You are just wrong because you are cheating. You are a bad and mean person because there is some poor 15 year old kid out there who just wants to get online and shoot some aliens and live his dream of being in the Star Wars Universe but can't becaue of your need to cheat to satisfy some sick need. I will say it over and over again...You are wrong.
That is not a very good argument in many ways. For one, not paying your taxes is illegal, and the fact that it is illegal is well known and stated. The laws that govern what we do while logged onto the SOE servers are contained in the EULA and there is nothing saying that you are not allowed to go AFK andstay logged onto the server twenty four seven (weather it be macroing or sitting in the middle of the town square so everyone and there mother can see that you are AFK). The fact that such language is not in the EULA is not a loophole as such but an area of the game that either SOE has not made a decision on yet, or that they do not believe is a problem. Hence doing what you are claiming to be cheating is nothing more than playing the game in a legal way, but in a way that bothers you, not SOE.
When it comes to what is morally right or wrong I have to say that it is a game and as long as I am not breaking the LAW or EULA than I am following my morals just fine. And to tell you the truth if I were the specific player logged onto a server while AFK for the whole day and you couldn't play because of me than I would get a little amusement out of it because I think you are a cry baby and I got there first. Besides like I said before, that is something that you have to address with SOE, not a player who has paid for the service and just happens to be using it more than you.
Sabonis-sr wrote:When it comes to what is morally right or wrong I have to say that it is a game and as long as I am not breaking the LAW or EULA than I am following my morals just fine. And to tell you the truth if I were the specific player logged onto a server while AFK for the whole day and you couldn't play because of me than I would get a little amusement out of it because I think you are a cry baby and I got there first. Besides like I said before, that is something that you have to address with SOE, not a player who has paid for the service and just happens to be using it more than you.
Well, how sad for you. Morality isn't always governed by laws.
Is it immoral to cheat on your wife? Is it illegal?
Is it immoral to eat all of the cake at a birthday party without sharing it? Is it illegal?
Laws are only created when issues of morality rise to a level that morality must be MANDATED. I assure you that if SOE ever comes to the conclusion that afk sampling is damaging the economy in a significant fashion, it will become 'illegal' and thus the soft 'moral' issue will become a hard 'legal' one.
Of course, your little statement regarding getting amusement out of keeping other people out of the game reveals all we need to know about your personality. Some people in this world - like you - ENJOY 'getting away' with something, and often not only do not MIND 'getting away' with it at someone else's expense - they SEEK situations where someone else has to pay.
Personally, I don't really care that much about AFK sampling. I *think* (but do not know) that the volume of the SINGLE resource an AFK person can get over 24 hrs compared to that of a harvester will allow the people with harvesters to compete. I'm somewhat concerned about the population hard-cap issue, and if people could self-regulate and do the mass afk thing only during low pop times it wouldn't be a problem...but oh yeah, heh, there I go expecting people like you to actually care about other players...
I guess what bothers me most is the idea that if government/daddy/SOE doesn't step in and FORCE you to do the right thing you are then incapable of doing the right thing on your own.
Kierstad where did u get that info about a person with harvester being able to harvest twice or even tripple of a ressources, on a half decent spot than a afk sampler with survey IV can?
Because your dead wrong
I know for a fact that my harvester on a 90 % spot wont harvest near half of what a afk sampler at a 70 % spot will harvest.
I already compared this with a friend so your actually wrong there
But anyway.. I have no problem with afk macroing as long as people use the ingame macro system
and by the looks of it some seem to use third party programs like that program a poster suggested
Thats clearly an exploit and bannable offense
Why using such a program??
u can easy afk sample using the ingame macro system and u dont even have to use an alias
Then there is the people who want to use a program to craft for them because they say its boring and "work" and they are playing a game and dont want to work
well all games got crafting these days and crafting is "work" and thus is u dont like "working" then dont be a crafter
There plenty of people who wanna play by the book as a crafter..
on a final note. I doubt afk sampling will ruin the economy
because u know what?? its already ruined 
and not thx to afk samplers
but to ingame bugs and exploits that dident get fixed before release
I am an architect, and as many know I blow through ore like there is no tomorrow... I have all of my lots used by harvesters and generators.... The real issue isnt wether or not macros are bad, the issue I have is I can sample next to any of my given harvesters for the same period of time and I by hand can sample more than it can. Yes that is right.... hearing people argue back and forth about macros or no macros is avoiding the true flaw here. Either the harvester sampling rate is to low, or the hand sampling rate is too high. Just my opinion, and people don't forget to try and have some fun out there.
"Now if some guru out there can figure out how to stop the thing?"
Just remove it from the toolbar or change toolbars. When it's finished cycling it'll press that "button" on the toolbar again and do... nothing.
"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? "
People who think like this... confuse me.
What is the difference between sitting in front of your computer for 8 hours and drooling on the keyboard, pressing the same button sequence once every 5 minutes or so... and running a macro like this?
Answer: Theonly difference between the two is one player is not bored to tears because they're not there at the keyboard drooling on it, and the other is. This is no different than someone setting an egg timer while they go off to watch a movie or something and going to the computer every 10 minutes or so to change from sampling to sitting and back again. If you don't have a problem with that you should have no real problem with a macro to do the same exact thing.
/shrug
The way I see it:
- Macros are a useful and necessary part of the game I'm glad that the Devs gave us this ability
- Regardless of what you do in the game, macros will help you get the most out of it
- Macro abuse is gonna happen (if you wanna call it abuse) so I don't understand why so much time is spent trying to prevent it... Ifinifinite sampling is the worst thing a person can come up with, is it really that bad?
- Give everyone the ability to loop and it will no longer be an exploit! people will still build harvesters... especiallyif some aggromob bites there head off while they are looping
- My point is there are other ways to prevent undesired behavior without making the ENTIRE macro system suffer unnecessarily
- Allmacro users should not suffer because of one questionable potential exploit
- No matter what you use a macro for (especially the "good" ones)it would be useful to have an easy way to end it
- I can't figure out why the Devs haven't provided this ability yet
- I think the Devs should just go ahead and throw in thetowel... allow us to call macros from a slash command like /macroname
- I also think an/end macronamebutton should be added today
WillieP wrote:
The way I see it:
- Macros are a useful and necessary part of the game I'm glad that the Devs gave us this ability
- Regardless of what you do in the game, macros will help you get the most out of it
- Macro abuse is gonna happen (if you wanna call it abuse) so I don't understand why so much time is spent trying to prevent it... Ifinifinite sampling is the worst thing a person can come up with, is it really that bad?
- Give everyone the ability to loop and it will no longer be an exploit! people will still build harvesters... especiallyif some aggromob bites there head off while they are looping
- My point is there are other ways to prevent undesired behavior without making the ENTIRE macro system suffer unnecessarily
- Allmacro users should not suffer because of one questionable potential exploit
- No matter what you use a macro for (especially the "good" ones)it would be useful to have an easy way to end it
- I can't figure out why the Devs haven't provided this ability yet
- I think the Devs should just go ahead and throw in thetowel... allow us to call macros from a slash command like /macroname
- I also think an/end macronamebutton should be added today
This is a very well thought out post, I really enjoyed it and I agree.
Historicaly Andrew Carnige owned US Steel and was a champion of labor. His labor force took good care of him (high production) and he took good care of them (paid as much as he could) Mr Carnige changed this position when he spent huge amouts of his money to retool his steel mills to get much higher prodution with less and safer labor for his workforce. The union responded by wanting a proportional pay increase for teh increase in production which they did not work for and did not pay for.
If you want to loop macros, you need to spend time learning to write, writing, testing, and editing the macro until it works properly. You also cannot do other things with your computer, much less your SWG account while you run the macro. This is what it costs you. Running harvesters produces more, faster, and more safely. I do a bit of both. I have some harvesters and I leave myself sitting on a good resource for a while now and again.
I do not believe that any of this hurts anyone else. Nor do I intend to change any of my behaviors until they stop contributing to my fun factor. (BTW I enjoy the challenges of tweaking a macro among other things)