Musician Archive
Thread: We need to ask TH when they are going to do something about buff-bots.
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Gknee
Sat Jun 19, 2004 2:15 pm
#2
Don't you think that once the grinding (Pub 10) goes away that they will just kind of go away??
Echinacea
Sat Jun 19, 2004 2:18 pm
#3
No, it'll get worse. There won't be the odd hologrinder who hangs onto Master Musician or Dancer long enough to learn how to buff and do some before they move onto the next profession, anymore. So more people will get second accounts to have a Master Dancer/Musician on tap for buffing, rather than be bothered to network and find people who pursue the performer professions because they actually want to.
That's the thing I don't think ThunderHeart or the developers are able to conceptualize. Making Force Sensitivity questable isn't going to fix the core problems in Music and Dance.
LeBob
Sat Jun 19, 2004 2:27 pm
#4
Gknee wrote:
Don't you think that once the grinding (Pub 10) goes away that they will just kind of go away??
No, I am not referring to AFK macrotainers that do it for the grind. There are now many popping up that do AFK FREE BUFFS.
MusicalDina
Sat Jun 19, 2004 3:00 pm
#5
It will get worse after pub 10. because there wont be the afk macrotainers to heal people, and SOE has chased most of the entertainers away, so people will think they need buffbots/healbots.
NewJedi
Sat Jun 19, 2004 4:39 pm
#6
I don't know if it will get worse, but it's certainly not going to get much better. To be honest, I don't see buffbots ever disappearing unless the devs abolish the recursive macro.
LeBob
Sat Jun 19, 2004 4:43 pm
#7
There are ways to prevent this other than aboloshing the recursive macro function.
Echinacea
Sat Jun 19, 2004 5:06 pm
#8
Image Designer style UI for buffs, at least. There'd still be Fatigue/Mind Wound healbots, but if there was no way around doing buffs other than 3rd party macroing that would get you banned if you got caught using, I think the phenomenon would go away
NewJedi wrote:
I don't know if it will get worse, but it's certainly not going to get much better. To be honest, I don't see buffbots ever disappearing unless the devs abolish the recursive macro.
NewJedi
Sat Jun 19, 2004 5:08 pm
#9
Well, there are ways to dampen it a bit, some of which may be a cure that is worse than the disease. E.g., sometimes people advocate popups or other periodic checks. Those are annoying, and people routinely circumvent them (in the case of surveying) with third-party macros anyway. Another possibility is an AFKtest for any mouse or keyboard activity, but again that sort of thing is easily circumvented. Something would be better than nothing, though, I agree with that. But none of these things will eliminate buffbots.
I honestly don't understand why this game has a built-in recursive macro.What a disastrous design decision.Being an entertainer was most funin the first two months after launch, when no one hadsuch things. I remember the first time I saw "Plava Laguna", a bot on Chilastra. We all mocked her. Heh, did we ever have another thing coming.
I've never played a MMO other SWG that has a recursive macro, and I've played a dozen of these games in Live or beta:EQ, Asheron's Call,Dark Age of Camelot, Anarchy Online, Shadowbane, Eve, Lineage 2, Ryzom,A Tale in the Desert, Earth and Beyond, Jumpgate, andSWG. As I recall, UO did have a strong macro, which was one thing I didn't like about it.
This game doesn't need a recursive macro. It needs a better interface. Yes, crafting is physically painful without a macro -- whichonly means to me that the crafting interface is poorly designed. But recursive macros give us buffbots, AFKtainers, and AFK Teras Kasi Artists. If the recursive macro is still in the game 5 years from now, buffbots will be too.
Beery
Sat Jun 19, 2004 9:03 pm
#10
"Don't you think that once the grinding (Pub 10) goes away that they will just kind of go away??"
Technically, the problem should get muchMUCH worse. Think about it - a bunch of leet dudez have just been forced to spend hours learning how best to create an AFKmusician bot. They didn't want to learn to play an instrument, but they had to in order to get to Jedi, so they scoured their info sources for effective macros and exploits. So allthese leets now know exactly how to create a buffbot. Now leets have always hated taking time out from their favourite activities of constant slaughter and male bondage - I mean bonding, sorry -to go visit a cantina. After all, why talk to some wimpy dancer who threatens yoursense of your ownheterosexuality (leets tend to be overly-sensitive about that)when you can be grunting Neanderthal-style and bonding with a lot of testosterone-charged muscular - and oftenshirtless (what's up with that?)-he-men (I dunno, as Bart Simpson says: "a bunch of guys, alone together in the woods - sounds kinda gay to me")while murdering innocent creatures.
So what's their solution? They'll get together to figure out some way to get buffbots as close as possible to their favourite hunting grounds. Buffbots will start popping up in the most out-of-the-way places, run via second accounts. These will offer buffs for free 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Heck, in a couple ofmonths I imagine the cantinas will be completelyempty of customers. Why would anyone (except the very greenest of newbies)come all the way to Coronet or Theed to heal andget buffedfor tips when there's a perfectly goodbuffbot available(that doesn't inconveniently turn itself off to go tosleep or go AFK to make coffee like some humans do)that offers the same service for free right on the planetwhere you want to hunt?
Now as this is happening, entertainers will see their tips dry up to nothing - again, why tip a real person when there's a buffbot closer to where you want to bewho never asks for a dime? So more and more dancers and musicians will quit their preferred profession out of desperation - they need cash to play the game, and mission terminals sure ain't going to give it to them. So they turn in their entertainment skills and learn some other profession, or they simply quit the game altogether in frustration. So now we have fewer and fewer entertainers in the cantinas, and thus more and more need for buffbots. Hey presto, we reach the "buffbot-event-horizon". Every player now uses buffbots. No one uses live entertainers anymore. What the developers couldn't do to destroy the entertainer classin 10 monthsthrough theirapathy and incompetence, the leets willhave done in the space of a month, purely byvirtue oftheir antisocial and exploitative nature combined with a desperate need (fueled perhaps bysome childhood insecurity)to 'pwn'.
Message Edited by Beery on 06-20-2004 12:46 AM
Shaizann
Sat Jun 19, 2004 9:30 pm
#11
We may as well ask. It might be nice to have some feedback and I can't think of us having anything to loose. We know the future has the potential to look bleak due to buffbot proliferation. We as a group need to stay positive and keep having fun in the intended ATK way we know how. Furthur, it would pay for us to be a tad evangelistic in our endevours. Go to the cantinas and "get 'em while they're young" as they say. Introduce what newbie ents there are to what we know it can be.
Drygo
Sat Jun 19, 2004 9:39 pm
#12
Heh...is it possible for all 3 (maybe 4 if the IDs want to join) entertainer correspondents to ask the same question in the next 19 questions? Or would that make the devs hate all of us? haha...if so, just to drive the point home, I'd love it if all 3 or 4 of the entertainer questions is:
What do you intend to do about buffbots?
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