CoH, Bots, and RMT

Without physical access to the fobs and the encrypted seed records, that would be a neat trick.

It's also somewhat of a grey area to define automation in a simulation environment to begin with. You do not have to individually control the animation sequences that make up a Power, or even control each movement in the animation separately. You press a key, and the attack is produced by automatic means, both as a gameplay element represented as a single Power which is executed, and as a potential series of graphical effects and applications of modifiers to the target's HP. (With accompanying "floating numbers" as additional graphic effects)

It's all an "electronic device", so it comes down to your interpretation of "reducing human intervention to a minimum." In some MMOs the human interaction is reduced far more than in CoH, you can press a key, and activate a sequence that will cause you to attack until the foe is dead. CoH is built on the concept that you have to maintain continual interaction with the game, pressing keys to continue sequences of attacks, but it could still be argued that it is automation. You don't have to maintain toggles, and often you don't have to move, or track your target as you aim.

I think the point is that we're agreed that in some cases automation is botting and some cases it's not, but the disagreement is over the exact definition of when that is.

Just not in any sane sense within this context.

A common longing.

I just ordered one. And another as a hawt spare.

My Mother? Let me tell you about my mother...

In Dragonica, I would often get asked to answer a simple logical or mathematical question based off pictures. If I answered correctly, I was buffed. If I answered incorrectly or did not answer at all, I was teleported "back to town."

Lemme' tell ya', it's a lot of fun when a massive window pops up in the centre of your screen in the middle of a busy fight to make sure you're human. And I don't believe it cured death.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The only bot that should be permitted in any game is the Autocamp 2000 or one of its many successors. The City of Heroes version is currently in beta testing.

That was "Operation Unholy Rage", back in 2009. It wasn't a strike just against the bots, but the entire sales networks that CCP had been able to uncover. Here's their announcement.

I petered out on Eve well before this, but still get their e-mails; I think I woke the upstairs neighbors shouting "YES!" when I read this, just on principle. I think they noted something like a 30% drop is server usage after cluster-banning began.

That's not necessarily true, Arcanaville. AFK farming could easily include automation - just put a self heal on auto-fire.

Is the difference between AFK farming with and without a heal a good place to draw the line between botting and macroing? It seems a somewhat vague one to me. That's not to say that I think your definition is bad, just that I think it makes some sacrifices in the name of simplicity.

-D

Even this is not necessary. All you need to do is Rest with one weak minion bopping you.

The problem is that game designers put things that require the excessive repetition of completely mundane tasks to achieve rewards. In order for characters like corruptors and dominators to get the Born in Battle accolade you need to get the Ironman damage badge, which requires taking 1,000,000 damage. When these characters are played the right way, they take no damage at all.

Recently the requirements for these and other similar badges were reduced, but the values are still ridiculously high for certain ATs. Playing my Fire/Dark corruptor in the normal fashion, it would take literally years to suffer 1,000,000 damage (by the time I reached 50 I'd taken only 300K damage, and at that point I had soft-capped ranged defense and my prospects for taking damage in normal play on teams had dropped essentially to zero).

Many of the defeats and damage/debt badge requirements need to be further reduced, to remove the incentive for players to do Bad Things. It may also make sense to have different values for different ATs.

The best weapon for combating automation in game play is to remove the need for repetitive play. CoH/V has made several decisions along these lines already: for example, there's no concept of mining ore deposits used in crafting like in other games -- here you get raw materials (salvage) for crafting by defeating mobs.

There's nothing wrong with badges for taking lots of damage per se, but when they're far beyond the reach of many players and you link them to accolades that provide a material benefit, you're inviting abuse.

When this doesn't interfere with the game you're trying to make, I can accept this. But this suggests that all repetitive play games deserve to be botted, and by extension players that are looking for games that involve repetitive play don't deserve them.

Suppose a lot of people actually *want* to play a game like, say, Farmville. Are you saying that if it gets botted, the game itself is at fault, and by extension the people who want to play the game "normally" don't deserve to have a game created that satisfies that desire?


Removing "repetitive activity" from your game is the easy way out. But "repetitive activity" has a fluid definition based at least in part on the sophistication of available bot technology. Is the act of defeating enemies a repetitive activity in CoH? How about running missions? How about leveling? The game "makes you" level 49 times. What if I only want to level three. Do I get to declare that leveling is an unnecessary repetitive activity and automate it, and then blame the game for making it so?

There comes a point where the player does not get to say "its the developers fault that I am forced into bad behavior." You're supposed to say "this game is not for me" and walk away. Banning is what the game does when the players don't arrive at that realization on their own.

I want to make an internet equivalent of the A-Team, roaming the countryside and beating up scumbags like this. Unfortunately, it's very hard to beat somebody up over the internet, especially by welding sheet metal to a van.

While I agree with this for the most part I do feel it necessary to play devil's advocate a bit. What if farming doesn't appeal to you?

One of many parts of WoW (sorry for those that hate on it) that I liked was that there were TONS of ways you could make money and despite what some have said here it didn't take much effort. Yes it would take more than a couple hours worth of play to make large sums but to me this never felt like a grind... I could usually make 2K in a couple hours with one of my toons with minimal effort the only thing that took a long time was waiting for it to sell... so those that found it difficult merely lacked patience.

I liked gathering and crafting... it was a way to lose yourself in another part of the game.

This I agree with... I think WoW's addons are a bit excessive but they're useful if you want to take the time to set them up.

One in particular I was thinking about I would love to see in CoX. I would love it if when on my WP/SS tanker if I could have a timer showing me the 10 seconds that my attacks were worthless because of the rage crash so I didn't use end on knockout blow or foot stomp.

Because they REALLLY hate villans.

That could be due to either it becoming much easier to make inf, so that they're getting 'overstocked' and trying to dump it, or the demand has cut back, again causing overstock. It was funny in Aion watching the RMT stores that would park out in front of the building where the broker and warehouse was in the prime city for each side as the price of a million kinah slid from the original price of about $10 down to $2, then rebound about halfway.

And that, I think, is something that the devs have done well with CoX. By making all the recipes "world drop", they eliminated one of the 'justifications' for botting in other games -- farming a 'boss' or 'elite' mob to get the rare drop(s) that you can only get from that mob.

/monitor_attribute damage bonus will give you a small window displaying your current damage buff, when it goes red and displays -9000%, you are in rage crash.