I think that sounds like a less desirable strategy, both from a business perspective, from a tecnological perspective, and from a community perspective. You do not want to get rid of Automaters, they are customers, and in another game they would have been called Modders, and a lot of their features would be downloadable from game launch or steam. You just want to get rid of those botters that grief other players. If you coukd create a bot-server (gold accounts only), and you could have people playing there (well, actually computers playing there), you would have a money machine with very little hazzle. It is about making the largest number of customers happy, from all segments. If you update the code every day in a way that require the client to be updated, you will create a lot of complexity, and grief a lot of customers. As a united community, raiders, casuals, boxers, automaters, etc, we stand a lot stronger against cheaters and gievers. I think we have reached a point where we can stop polarizing us away from each other, and instead find solutions that makes us collaborate. 5 years ago, attitude towards boxers where quite... split... in the fora, witth a lot of people beaing quite against boxers, and ISB. Now boxers and ISB are accepted, and their (our) playstyle is accepted. I think next evolution is to device a strategy that is including towards automaters, without loosing the qualities we have today. Grieving boxers is a PAIN, and should be remedied. How about we (ehh DPG) implement nudging technologies, and also give them a bot-server, Gold only, where they can play? Get relations going between the modder communities (ISB and... Macaroni? Brilliant name ), and counter some of the less desirable cultural undertones of counterculture? I think there is money on the table that should not be left there, and I think that there is a path to grief-reduction without antagonization. I realize this is very, very skandinavian of me. But it works. We have a tradition for including countercultures, (and understanding teenagers). It takes some patience, but the effects are remarcable. I I may flex a touchy subject: our police officers have a 3 year full time traning and education programme, before they can become ploce officers. They kill in average one person a year (on a 5 million population), and it is almost always related to gangs or organized crime. I think that in my lifetime, I have heard of 3-5 police fatalities in the line of duty. They don’t car-chase unless it is absolutely necesary. They wait, let them get away, and pick them up a few days later at their grandma’s or something. They always ask people kindly to adjust behavior, with that well trained energy that no one has any inclination to challenge, it is genious. I realize this is a very hard topic, and I apologize for the flex. We are just really proud of our police force, and I want to share the skandinavian trick: embrace and integrate misbehaving people. In the long run, it is incredibly more cheap, and you get a lot more societal cohesion. About the teenager thing: few things are as funny as to watch a rebelling teenager deflate when you express understanding at recognition of their feelings... many a youth rebellion has been quelched by this sinister tactic...
Personally, I consider "automaters" cheaters and want them gone. They are not playing the game as the developers intended, but are instead getting advantages they were not intended to have through third-party means. "Automation" changes boxing from a concept that takes skill in management, control and "supervision", into something where you just pay for additional accounts for better dps output(and tanking and healing capability). You basically pay real money for "super-mercs" In short: Automation changes boxing into "pay-to-win", rather than an extra challenge with "earned" advantages. I am probably a minority with that opinion though. The reason why I accept Gina and the other "legal" mods, is that it doesn't give you anything you can't get ingame anyway(I think? it does have some visual enhancements though). ISB is more of a windows modification that isn't really related to EQ, but a bandaid to windows's own awkward window-management. Gamparse is just a textparser, that only shows statistics from the log-file(it even works when you are "offline"). None of those really changes the difficulty of EQ in any aspect.
GINA changes the difficulty of EQ dramatically. If it didn't, why would every raid guild REQUIRE it to be used? If nobody used GINA, triggers would be missed often and raids would wipe repeatedly.
Im in a raiding guild. we are progressing nicely through ToV and TBL. We do not require GINA, ingame AT's are sufficient, GINA is optional.... Our guild does not require ANY third party tools at all. People are seriously underestimating ingame ATs for some reason...
Ingame ATs are not bad. The main issue is : it's audio only, and exclusively. For very important things, ok. But if you want to track emotes, your own cooldowns, procs, plus group cooldowns, and so on, it becomes rapidly a noisy fest I'm 6 boxer, or 3 boxer when I play with my hubby, and if I want to track Cds and procs ... there we go zwong swoosh klong kaboom boing yadaaa ping hooba hooba What did you say honey? Oh, yeah, sorry, I missed the zwoosh between the 2 zlongs, just before the yadaaaa. Sorry again, my bad.
Fair enough, I guess "no-boxers" can get away with much less feedback: I only use AT for raid emotes, for when my rune disappears(and need a recast), for when my manaburn runs out(so I can tell the next wiz in the rotation), and for when someone in my group says "evac". People rarely box on raids though, so all the "box" related ATs are not needed there. The point was that GINA Isn't that essential on raids, Im sure it is a help with some setups though, but I still wont call an unfair advantage. I personally never felt I needed it.
Teach me how to broadcast a keystroke in everquest wit default window os to all eq instances. ISB is much more than just a windows modification
Part of the problem isn't that ISB is so powerful, it's that EQ is fundamentally so easy to play. You can achieve pretty good results by adding a character that just /follows the main character and blindly spams a few buttons.
Broadcasting keys is an OS thing(it works at the OS-level), not an EQ thing. I view it as a "Windows MOD". it is probably also used in other games too(or maybe even general programs/editors?). I have never used it though, is there anything EQ related in ISB? It sounds like an useful tool for a lot of different tasks(not just game related) if you multi task with fullscreen apps. Hmm, maybe this can be used? https://www.techrepublic.com/article/automate-tasks-with-windows-script-hosts-sendkeys-method/
Well, you're right ... partially. ISB, or any equivalent system, is required for EQ because this clunky old lady of a game still uses DirectInput (and SendInput), and the client needs to be condidered foreground to receive inputs. With ISB (well, Inner Space, and Uplink), you can encapsulate game sessions inside containers, and use these containers to make each EQ sessions think they are foreground individually. But this limitation is only due to this very old input system. If you take a more recent game, like WoW, for instance, you don't need ISB or equivalent to send keystrokes to background windows. Tools like HKN, AHK, or whatever, can send your keys anywhere.
So what you are saying is that ISB fundemantally changes EQ's input but you do not consider that a cheat just a limitation of an old game design. You could make the same argument for the other program. A cheat is a cheat.
If you use multiple computers, and a KVM/multiplexer, to broadcast your keystrokes to each computer, is this a cheat? And I haven't tested, but technically, you can probably run EQ sessions on different virtual machines (VMWare, VirtualBox, probably Hyper-V, and many others) and use the top level OS as a hub, and split your commands to each vitual session. Somewhat overkill, clunky, and you'll need to reinvent the wheel , but technically doable. And you won't need ISB
Doing any of the following on ANY server may result in action being taken against your Daybreak Account: Unattended Gameplay: Any method that lets a character take actions while you're not at your keyboard. Playing on virtual machines. Any attempt to circumvent the /pickzone timer. The KVM/multiplexer is undetectable and probably the main reason TLP has key spamming detection. Moving the goalpost away from software to hardware /shrug
Yep. What's funny is this results in people using "emulated virtual machines" that functions like a VM . I'm using one that happens to be a commodity laptop sitting next to my PC that I use a software KVM called Multiplicity for. I also have a Logitech G13 gamepad connected to it that I use for a few hotkeys on my boxed cleric. The key spamming detection is pure nonsense though. It stops exactly zero people from rebroadcasting and just boots confused people for trueboxing. It also lets people exploit it to /q out safely.
Well, many are paying/Krono-consumig customers, they are people, and as long as they are not grieving others, it is meaningless to impose playstyle norms on them. Firstly, because playstyle puritanism is merely an opinion, of the my-fun>your-fun, but more importantly, because EQ is a business, and is governed by owners who want to get the most out of their investment. (There are plenty of factions in EQ that has individuals that think less of others factions, it being TLP/Live, Casuals/Elite, groupers/raiders, etc etc etc. ) The task for DPG is to make the most money for the owners. I think it is fair to say that grievers cost some minor revenue in loss of population, but likely not enough; however, it seems very unlikely that the player base will shrink due to automaters.
Fair enough, Im well aware that my opinion is "only" an opinion, and not really worth more than other peoples opinions. Which is why I am limiting myself to "forum-questing" when the subject comes up. After all, we are all playing the same game in the end, and who knows, I might end up playing with people I don't agree with! And yet I still expect to have a pleasant game session even if that is the case. Everquest has room for many different opinions...
Except all you'd have to do is just stay logged in or not run the patcher. *It* would only validate when the game or *It* is launched, and would only throw an error if the client didn't match the latest timestamp. The only way to force people to update the client is to bring the servers down or boot people after X time. Which they'd never do because it would make Bazaar mules redundant (a sizeable portion of revenue) and destroy the game's economy. Even aside from that, everyone would quit the game if they knew every day was a patch day. No offense, but it's probably the worst possible solution, costing DBG money and driving players insane.
One wonders how hard it would be for them to just make Bazaar mules be brought back up automatically, if they were in auto-trader mode before the downtime. I always hate logging in after a patch, and need to buy something in the Bazaar, only to see that hardly anything's back up yet
