I cant see how it would be putting any more load on the servers than players doing it themselves,its still having to go through the game client after all and is bound by the UI speed limitations like humans are
Long running macro's threat by FD - What exactly is a long running macro?!
- Thread starter clinton
- Start date
I cant see how it would be putting any more load on the servers than players doing it themselves,its still having to go through the game client after all and is bound by the UI speed limitations like humans are
Good point.
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I suspect if it were hammering the servers, the devs would have noticed and taken action before single-unit trading became common knowledge.
That's exactly what I was talking about. A blind macro sending keys - ok, it only spares your wrists. A bot that can completely automate operations - we crossed the line.
The line is crossed when you use macros to do things faster or better than would be reasonably expected of manual control, or when they do things unattended.
Voice Attack is mostly used as a control aid and there is little difference between someone using it to fill gaps in their control of their vessel and me using my HOTAS that has all the buttons and axes I need to do without such things.
Having Voice Attack sell 100 tons of cargo, one at a time, with one command, would certainly be crossing the line and this should not be hard to infer or surprising for anyone.
You agreed to play by certain rules, and there are certainly rules you can break without violating consumer law or doing anything illicit with your hardware.
If you use a macro to play the game for you, you are a cheater and steps should be taken that you aren't able to do so for long and don't see any benefit from the cheating you've done.
You are fully entitled to use your property as you see fit, and Frontier is full entitled to kick you out of their game for cheating should that use constitute such.
I'd personally be inclined to ban all macros, but given the complexity of the game and the desire to make it accessible without having to write software of one's own, allowing control aids like Voice Attack sounds reasonable...at least until you start to see the sort of wild leaps of illogical and mental gymnastics people will do to try to justify blatant cheating.
Still over the line.
If you can't be bothered to execute or command each transaction yourself, you shouldn't be doing it at all.
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Took 2 years
atfer I reported it and Im sure many other did too over the years. I wonder what the fix will be
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Took 2 years
all requested trades to be turned into batches, instead of a single item type trade of varying quantity? Perhaps coming with a "complete trades" button that animates something loading/unloading your ship accordingly to introduce a delay that would make macroing it for single units an extremely lengthy operation
Took 2 years
The fix would be to treat a transaction of X items as being the same as X transactions.
I would go on and remove this malarkey of preventing capable players from having more of an effect wherever else it may be.
Yep, total value of the transactions is all that should matter.
The system in place now where you can sell a ton at a time, or run back and forth to a CZ and cash on bond at a time, and influence the BGS more than if you sold 720 tons at once or won a battle yourself and came back with 2 million in bonds is total nonsense.
Of course, the system being stupid and broken doesn't let anyone off the hook for abusing it, especially if they do so with automated tools and no their own damn button pushing/command shouting.
Being careful and only making assumptions... Based on this I can see why they would won't to stop it as that is a clear exploit. There are of course other ways to detect whats going on and have a script react but they are highly illegal and I won't mention them. If this is the case then why bother to mention macro's at all as this is pure script/cron job stuff.
I still find it rather sad that people will spend money to play a game only to then try their hardest to avoid playing the actual game.
Took 2 years
A tap on the wrist by a cease and desist email, as that seems the currently preferred method of fixing issues which they seem incapable of sorting out in code.
There are a lot of assumptions in this thread and elswehere that transactions are the only counter. That is far from confirmed. Many Cmdrs have reported significant moves in small pop systems based upon 1 relatively high value transaction. (usually bounties). Such a move would not be made based upon 1 small value transaction.
It is not as simple, or indeed as catastrophic, as some are painting it. Its horrible but not the end of the galaxy. The Devs are aware of it and are considering fixes.
As with many others in this thread, I'm of the opinion that they should fix the original cause of the issue rather than trying to ban the solutions that some players have come up with. It's very much the epitome of the "stop having fun" mechanics, where it actively rewards you for doing something via an extremely long and tedious method that offers no real gameplay.
We all have different opinions for what parts of the game constitute "grinding", but I'm pretty sure that we can all agree that spending 10 minutes going through the same motions on the same set of menus does not constitute meaningful gameplay.
We all have different opinions for what parts of the game constitute "grinding", but I'm pretty sure that we can all agree that spending 10 minutes going through the same motions on the same set of menus does not constitute meaningful gameplay.
Well in all fairness this has only become an issue becuase of peeople abusing it. To discover the 1t trade effect took a lot of testing by players poking around under the hood of the game and resulted in discover a 'flaw' that is being exploited. Cant really blame Fdev for not making a perfect galaxy simulation. If the idea was a system that would account for the actions of individuals no matter how 'powerful' or wealthy then Fdev succeed. It's really nerdy mini maxers that are abusing this kind of thing. I think Fdev will fix it and it will take time, especially considering the scope, scal and size of the game. I wish them the very best of luck with it and look forward to how they deal with it. It might be as simple as only one transaction of each type being registered each time you dock / visit a station. So spamming and multiple transactions would be meaning less in a single station visit. Dunno. All in all this game is constantly getting better
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.Funniest thing I've read all year, thanks for the laugh. Its only the interaction of every action taken by every player in every populated system according to an ever increasing set of rules.
You know nothing John Sylow
Sorry, but i dare to counter, that you probably know too little. I've spent some years administrating different kinds of data processign and storage systems. So please read again what i wrote: "sorry, it's large but as far as i know not utterly complicated". So i am very much aware of the problems you run into with huge loads of data and requests and know that this is a very own pit of snakes. But despite that, i stand to my statement that the underlying logic, from all we know about the game, is not terribly complicated.
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Mind you, i am well aware that getting a system with high throughput to perform well is a challenge and nowhere do i try to claim otherwise. But hey, i guess you rather laugh about my posting than pondering what is written, Schlack Snow?
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Goodness I didn't know that existed. Why do people bother with this crap. One guy on there said he'd lost 11 accounts which he'd been using to try to debug ED and find memory offsets where you could manipulate the game. What a massive waste of time and money. Maybe I should hire him, with that level of determination he could come and debug stuff that actually needs debugging... then again..
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This is one reasonable solution. It has the massive advantage of keeping transactions low. My idea would've been different, instead of counting transactions, i'd simply multiply their value by how much goods were transfered. So one transaction of 200 units of a "good" commodity would in the end add the very same value as 200 single transactions of the same commodity. If both the single transaction as well as 200 seperate transactions lead to the very same end result, there's simply no reason and no advantage in macros for this any more. Considering that the disadvantages (it will still be work to make the macros and it will be slower than one big transaction) remain, this should kill the macros effectively.
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That all of course under the assumption, that the problem is as described in this thread.
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This is one reasonable solution. It has the massive advantage of keeping transactions low. My idea would've been different, instead of counting transactions, i'd simply multiply their value by how much goods were transfered. So one transaction of 200 units of a "good" commodity would in the end add the very same value as 200 single transactions of the same commodity. If both the single transaction as well as 200 seperate transactions lead to the very same end result, there's simply no reason and no advantage in macros for this any more. Considering that the disadvantages (it will still be work to make the macros and it will be slower than one big transaction) remain, this should kill the macros effectively.
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That all of course under the assumption, that the problem is as described in this thread.
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I've been pondering the BGS for more than 2 years now! As regards complexity I will defer to the insider view of the developers who built and manage the sim rather than an outsider without the detail. I may be wrong but experience has shown that apparently simple suggestions from our perspective are far from simple from a development perspective.
One of the main issues is that the background sim was intended to be just that, the background. It was never intended to be a balanced game mechanic. We, the players, made it into a game. As a consequence we unfortunately have to accept some of the limitations of the design that was never intended to be played the way we play it. Fundamental to that design was that every player action was intended to drive changes in the sim. I think it unlikely that the BGS will evolve fully into the game that many of us would like.