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Imagine instead that a user could automate some actions as long as he was chatting or getting a small hit in % success while doing so.

That would probably reduce the need for macros.

Honestly a few of the ingame tasks are boring and incredible repetetive.

I used to macro quite a few actions back in my days, mainly mining and imping of equipment, but honestly there wasn't a single action ingame that couldn't be macroed and even " randomized" to make it look legit.

I was lucky to have the right connections and to be honest i doubt that the people behind the really good stuff will be caught since they still seem to do good ingame.

If macroing is still something that people are being caught and banned for then I'd say that there's an ingame reason for its existence ( repetetive grinding ).

Im pretty sure the reason for the existence of macros is a out of game reason. Wanting all the top skills but too lazy to put the time and effort into it like all the other boys and girls do.

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side note: you don't have to click n times, just suppress the key to fill the que

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Imagine instead that a user could automate some actions as long as he was chatting or getting a small hit in % success while doing so.

That would probably reduce the need for macros.

Honestly a few of the ingame tasks are boring and incredible repetetive.

haha...take a minute to remember the repetitive 'bulk' tasks before they were newbiefied with shorter timers....much shorter timers....Remember the excuse for macroing back then was timers are too long...fixed....now its booring ......hahahaha will never change

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You can click M 5 times and chat for 15 seconds.

You can't click G1 1 time and let it do the 5 mining actions for you.

I find that pretty clear to understand.

Why does the wurm policy constantly change in this regard? I got the green light from a GM to where I can have my G key perform my mining action 4 times. I was told this GM also uses his G keys for this function.

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Differences of opinion is the biggest issue. No collaborative answers.

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If your client sends either 1) input device generated commands or 2) commands that emulate input device generated commands to the server when you are not sitting in front of the screen actually using your input devices, it's macroing.

Can anyone poke a hole in that definition?

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Entendu:

Clicking G and having it do the 5 mining actions for you ALL AT ONCE, is sort of a grey area. Its not really within the ToS but its not really breaking the spirit of the rule either. I personally dont see anything significantly wrong with it, as you could get the same effect by holding down a single bound key for a few seconds.

As long as you arent building in delays or chaining together multiple action types that would require you to press multiple keys you are probably ok.

It is a little ambiguous in my above posts, and I admit that i sort of glossed over this specific situation to zazz because it IS just a bit grey, but I personally would not consider using the gkey to que up a SPECIFIC number of the SAME action all at once to be in violation of the intent of the rule as i understand it, tho it could be argued that it IS in violation of the specific wording of the rule, and i am not willing to speak for the GM team as a whole on that specific point.

I will seek the opinion of the rest of the GM's regarding this and see if we can get a definitive ruling from oracle or enki.

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Now if you had a key programed to mine repair mine repair mine type thing with one push then that would not be something that can be done on a regular keyboard. I am guessing that is what a lot of people are doing in some form and why this tread was started really. Unless they are looking for key strike timings then I don't see how they can even know but I don't know how they check for that kind of stuff either.

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Its not unusual for a lower-ranked GM to mention an interpretation that ends up over-ruled by a higher rank (notice spellcast's comments for further evidence). The Head Gm has the final say; though, typically its on important matters, and I understand theres internal discussion on some cases.

Course Rolf could even over-rule; however, thats been pretty rare as far as I can recal.

EDIT: My personal rule is when a situation comes up that might get me banned, ask the Head. Everything else can be mitigated to the rest.

Edited by Klaa

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Hi,

lemme add some thoughts to this.

For one, I'm doing stuff (among other) with one of these macro-programs, for my living. There's even a free version of it, with a slightly reduced feature set.

These are mighty tools, with a vivid community of developers, and you can make things with it that greatly ease the life of your customers. For sure, there's no free lunch, it's not exactly easy to learn, and to get things going.

Disclaimer: I do not use this tool in MMO's, and this explicitly means Wurm here. It would be wrong, it might get me banned, it would spoil the game for me. And I invite everybody to prove me wrong, my logs are available, my stats (and these from my alts) as well, you'll not find anything. I'm not among those that need to be "the best" â„¢, for me it's much more important to be legit, and to have fun in the game.

This said, I can tell you that it wouldn't be too complicated to make a "miner bot", for instance. Reading the in game submenus with OCR isn't this hard, reading the event log is easy. Checking the water/food isn't this hard either, and moving along when a wall has disintegrated neither.

You'd fill your char with water and food, chose a direction, fire up the macro and it would mine on and on. If hitting a vein it would play a loud sound, to wake you up, and to receive further instructions.

I know that there are ready-made WurmBots that are sold for money. You might not want to check for them, because visiting the sites where they are hosted will infect you with one trojan at least, with a high probability. But they exist. Don't even think of asking me for an URL, I'll not even respond, I'd forward your inquiry to the GMs. But if searching seriously you'd find, too - it's not that I'm this Uber.

So we can be sure that macroing in Wurm is an existing fact. That it's a so much heard quote "Don't do this, it would make macroing too easy!" could be read as "Don't change this, else I'd need to buy a new version of my macro!" easily. But who knows ...

In fact, Wurm is a paradise for macro makers. This much repetitive tasks running over huge amounts of time, crafting skills gained by doing very similar things over and over, I very well understand why there's ppl that make such macros, and make a nice income of it.

What could be done to prevent this?

At first, forget any measures relying on IP or MUC. Too easy to fake these.

Second, no way to count the time between actions. A simple random(x,y) instruction will make this fail.

Third, don't relay on GM's chatting the bot - it will throw an alarm, and the botter will respond in time.

So what could be done then?

One thing would be to continually change the interface. For sure, not this good an idea, because it would hamper most legit players, too.

Another thing would be to invent something like the macros are offering already. Off-Line crafting? Off-Line mining? As a game function?

And finally, maybe lowering the benefits of being the most macro-skilled crafter on a server?

Think of this. I tried to offer some insight, what's more is up to you.

Have fun!

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May I use my laboratory rats to press binded keys for me? That little friendly beasts are clever. They could, for example, pray with my priest, while I'm AFK watching Star Gate ...

I think, it cannot be considered as Key locking :rolleyes:

Nice rat. I am current attempting to train my snapping turtle to play wurm but all she wants to do is bite so far.

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Entendu:

Clicking G and having it do the 5 mining actions for you ALL AT ONCE, is sort of a grey area. Its not really within the ToS but its not really breaking the spirit of the rule either. I personally dont see anything significantly wrong with it, as you could get the same effect by holding down a single bound key for a few seconds.

As long as you arent building in delays or chaining together multiple action types that would require you to press multiple keys you are probably ok.

It is a little ambiguous in my above posts, and I admit that i sort of glossed over this specific situation to zazz because it IS just a bit grey, but I personally would not consider using the gkey to que up a SPECIFIC number of the SAME action all at once to be in violation of the intent of the rule as i understand it, tho it could be argued that it IS in violation of the specific wording of the rule, and i am not willing to speak for the GM team as a whole on that specific point.

I will seek the opinion of the rest of the GM's regarding this and see if we can get a definitive ruling from oracle or enki.

anyone ever get this definitive ruling?

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One thing would be to continually change the interface. For sure, not this good an idea, because it would hamper most legit players, too.

This would cripple everyone's muscle memory, while macros won't even notice the change.

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Creation lists always move anyway -- so that's step 1 to a random GUI.

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Hi,

One thing would be to continually change the interface. For sure, not this good an idea, because it would hamper most legit players, too.

This would cripple everyone's muscle memory, while macros won't even notice the change.

and:

Creation lists always move anyway -- so that's step 1 to a random GUI.

Exactly. The first step is already done, and it's a pain where it hurts - for the legit players. A macro just scans for the text, and doesn't care else.

To make this more macro-proof, there'd need to be different ever changing texts for the same action in the menus, or maybe ever changing graphical representations, or a combination of both.

For sure, not this good an idea, because it would hamper most legit players, too.

My opinion about this. It would make the game actually unplayable for legit players, it would make Wurm a game only populated by advanced macro-bots. Because these would quickly learn the different texts and symbols, and wouldn't care else.

Funny, right? Trying to make the game more macro-safe would actually make it a macro-only game ...

But how we'd get rid of these macros?

Not at all, I fear. Any measures invented in the game industry until today are already circumvented, and mostly hit legit players. Do we want to have a software coming with Wurm that scans our computer for maybe illegal processes and software, with a high probability to ban perfectly legit players that have some exotic software running? Should Wurm stop writing easily readable logs, that make great tools like "Wurm Assistant" possible, because they are a great help for macros, too?

As long as there's a demand, there'll be people offering a solution. And there'll be a race between the macro-authors and the Wurm team, swallowing up huge amounts of time better spent in game development but in anti-macro wars. IMHO.

So what to do?

There's no simple solution, I fear. "If you cannot kill your enemy with brute force, strangle him with embraces" - maybe?

Let's think about this - but be warned, this is no easy task. It's about making 3rd party macros useless, and we'd have to face a storm of unpleasant things from those that don't want their expensively bought "helpers" made obsolete!

And we'd have to be most cautious not to kill the soul of Wurm, after all the slow pace and the justified pride of those that reached a high level (legit) is fundamental for this game. Making Wurm another game is no solution.

So I thought about some measures that could be discussed. It's all rough ideas, not really thought through, and will, for sure, contain a lot of fallacies. Keep your "fire pillar" holstered, better think of alternatives, show me where I'm wrong, you'd be welcome!

  • The current action timers are fine. No change.
    .
  • The recent "easification" of the creation process might be overdone. A small chance to loose the materials might be present, as it is now there's no pride anymore to create something with low skill - it's just a matter now of trying again, and again, and again ...
    .
  • The sleep bonus might be changed - less max. time, but a higher skill gain. Encouraging not to do endless hours of grinding burning out slowly, instead encouraging shorter times of concentrated skilling, in the end giving the same results. A zero-sum game, but allowing for more time for other activities.
    .
  • Changes to the Mind logic mechanism. Not anymore using the simple formula, better using a "complete action time". For instance, 4x digging comes in fraction of time compared to 4x mining, so if we'd have 10 seconds base time, 20 at ML 20, 35 at ML 35 - understand? ML wouldn't limit the numbers of queued actions anymore, but the time frame in that queued actions could be started.
    .
  • Following up the above, stamina control would become important then, because you'd need to watch your bar. So we'd need different commands: "Dig once" and "Dig on". Shouldn't be rocket science.
    .
  • And now, don't burneth me, Off-Line-Working. Yes, like in Eve (as I guess, don't play it). The possibility to have your char set up for a prolonged span of time, and to do some simple tasks while you're asleep. This may require thinking, even programming, to set it up, and may have the chance to fail badly (mining to where you really don't want to mine, for instance).
    You'd have no chance to use SB, and would receive seriously reduced skill gains, 1/4 maybe. But it still would be useful in certain cases.

    I'd love to see a Wurm-controlled LUA-API for such (as it is in WoW). This would make it possible for the community nerds to shine with their capabilities, to provide the community with quite sophisticated "legit-bots", without spoiling the game too much. Rolf could at any time adjust the API, and prevent abuse, and preserve the soul of Wurm.
    .
  • And at last, as an addiction, why not change from "RL-time span" charging to "online-time" charging? Provided this would be made in a zero-sum manner, not hurting anybody but maybe the most excessive people? A lot of players would benefit, we'd not pay during our offline holidays anymore, and those that would use the above feature would pay for the advantage they enjoy?

Disclaimer:

Any numbers used above are pure fictional and are meant as examples. Up to Rolf to find the correct values, it's ways above my abilities to give a certain guess even.

And again:

It's all rough ideas, not really thought through, and will, for sure, contain a lot of fallacies. Keep your "fire pillar" holstered, better think of alternatives, show me where I'm wrong, you'd be welcome!

Tl;dr:

As I see we have a problem with macroing. The macros are existing, and their sheer existence spoils the justified pride of any perfectly legit person that has reached a high skill, with hard work and perseverance. We cannot fight the macros, so let's make them useless, carefully to preserve the unique features of this game, and it's soul.

Have a good time, and plz excuse this wall of text. Thx for reading!

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Xandra, While I find your posts on this issue to be very informative, I believe that the Wurm staff is doing a reasonable job in preventing this problem from accelerating to anything but a minor one within this game. They seem to be doing a good job to keep it in check and I would hate to see too much more focus put upon it to the detriment of the 90-95% of the playerbase that has no interest nor desire to use any bot type programs as adjuncts to their Wurm gameplay.

For that basic reason I see your suggestions as unnecessary steps and prefer to leave it up to the Wurm staff to determine how they want to handle this macro problem in whatever proportions that it exists within the game. They have made some comments about this situation recently which give me confidense that they have it under control, so I don't devote much of my concern into this situation. Less stress for me as well.

=Ayes=

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Hi,

Xandra, While I find your posts on this issue to be very informative, I believe that the Wurm staff is doing a reasonable job in preventing this problem from accelerating to anything but a minor one within this game. They seem to be doing a good job to keep it in check and I would hate to see too much more focus put upon it to the detriment of the 90-95% of the playerbase that has no interest nor desire to use any bot type programs as adjuncts to their Wurm gameplay.

Thank you for this, you remind me of something I forgot:

I'm very much appreciating the work of the Wurm team, and I have still to find a case where they have judged wrongly (that may exist, but not to my knowledge), and where this couldn't corrected quite easily. I bow to their enthusiasm, and I embrace the way they recently reacted regarding this topic. This is not a problem, IMHO. The team is aware, and has my fullest trust.

What I see as a problem is the fact that:

a.) There's (obviously) working Wurm bots out there, and

b.) that the Wurmian community feels hurt by them.

For that basic reason I see your suggestions as unnecessary steps and prefer to leave it up to the Wurm staff to determine how they want to handle this macro problem in whatever proportions that it exists within the game. They have made some comments about this situation recently which give me confidense that they have it under control, so I don't devote much of my concern into this situation. Less stress for me as well.

I very much appreciate the efforts of the team, but lemme tell ya, sometimes my fingers are itching. It's just too easy to gain a serious advantage in Wurm using a bot, and this spoils the justified admiring of the high skilled chars - is it legit, or just botted? As long as I know that I could do this with a self written script with reasonable ease, the achievement of this other player is spoiled.

I'd really love to see a game where botting wouldn't be such beneficial anymore. But I know it's a hard task. To start to think of such, I offered some proposals.

Another crazy idea:

How if we'd be able to set up designated (GM-approved) accounts to use macros on, on Test? That would then be especially monitored, and those who'd set up a special new (undetected, working) bot would get a small reward, depending of the effort?

This is a can of worms, and I don't know if I should really write ahead. It may make me a suspect, because I'm doing such things (in other environments) on a daily basis. I can only declare again and again that I happily accept all and any measures to prove that I'm legit.

That I know how this works doesn't mean that I'm using these tools in Wurm. Even if it's often tempting, to keep pace with those that obviously use 'em. But fighting this is the reason I write here.

I'd love to see Wurm as an at most bot-free game. This cannot be reached with rising the walls more and more, this can only be reached by making bots in Wurms obsolete. And this was what I proposed in the quoted post.

We might think of it, or not - it's not that it would hurt me (too much) either way. I think it's the only serious way to go - but, as ever, your mileage may vary. And I'll accept.

Have a good time!

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There is a very easy way to discourage macro use, without convulting the UI to the point that only a bot can actually figure out how to use it.

Make it so that any grindy automated activity results in inferior quality and quantity, such that it has no player value and thus no market value, such that anyone would recognized these are macro derived results and thus be shunned as inferior and non-worthy. Add those automated methods to the game, but make the result so that 'noob for hire' can still get you a better result.

You do this by replacing activity timers with interactivity. I do not mean mini-games like you go play Tetris and higher score gets you better mining, but rather activities that require interactive feedback with a human. The trick is to do it so that it is not carpal tunnel wrist breaking foolishness, no follow the bouncing captcha BS. Just think of simple logical things that someone in that profession would actually do if they are paying attention to their craft.

Visual and audio cues like swinging the pickaxe in this part at this time more likely gets you a gem and higher QL ore of extra quality, making mining a more entertaining and rewarding activity. To truly defeat macroers you would add fail that for not swinging the pickaxe the right way. We have bellows for stoking the furnace, why are they not available for interactive use to improve your smithing result, do away with the text log examining the fire status which is easy to macro and replace it with 3-D visuals and sound to indicate same so that you have to pay attention to the fire or fail.

A balance of automated fail and suck vs. interactive reward needs struck, but you have to be careful so that momentary non-macro AFK is still possible so you can do the occasional chat (say to the GM asking if it is time for a bio-break....) yet not have a total fail because you did not swing the axe on that pixel that specific ms. Increased the interactivity by creating an intentionally convoluted UI though just makes my wrist hurt to the point I do not want to play anymore, as that timer is not really long enough for the physical therapy I need to recover.

Applying interactive thinking to crafting and resource gathering is consistent with the action RPG trends already being applied to fighting. Yes it adds player interaction on top of character skills (which is what makes it different than a pure FPS), but that makes it simply more fun to play, and you just accept that character skills only gives you worse results in the name of making any bots a pointless waste of programmers time. I mean lets face it the only thing that makes mining remotely entertaining now is the rare woot of I found gold, or a gem, or a rare, yet those rewards require absolutely no player feedback to obtain, so a bot can do better than a human can at that woot game.

Edited by yarnevk

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Without going into too much detail, a good bot coder would still be able to automate the process. EQII had/has a system like this, and I know there were bots used for crafting which produced superior quality products. The problem lies in the way those prompts and the user/bot input are tracked, it requires a signal both ways, and good coder would know how to look for, identify, and respond to it.

Using an even older game, EQ, as an example. There were bots fairly early on that could find creatures outside the clients draw distance, navigate to them, fight them, heal themselves, loot and move on to the next one. To combat this, the team inserted bogus mob id spawners that only bots would see, so anyone showing up there and trying to fight was flagged and removed.

WoW had a similiar problem with a similiar outcome.

I'd outline a system to combat this in Wurm crafting, but doing so may untintentionally "out" possible countermeasures already in place. While I have no knowledge of the systems in place, I'd rather not take the chance lol. As a FYI, the issues listed above are public knowledge and should be available via webquiry.

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I thnk not feasible if the user interactivity feedback is done in the 3D world itself. Unless the code is cracked accessing the 3D engine with named objects where it says put mob over there, all you can really have is a 3-D ripper that intercepts polygons. It is not that simple to pattern match 3D (really 5D if considering it is multi-modal with time and sound) that can be at any viewpoint. I am not talking about crafting windows that have icons and are simple 2D point and click.

Even if it is possible to pattern match in all those dimensions, adding feedback interactivity would require an AI more complex than the game. You would be literally writing a game on top of a game. So I am doubtful, but even so just forget about the macroers and make people NOT desire to macro by giving them a FUN interactive feedback game to play instead of suffering boring timers, that alone reduces the percentage of macroers thus diminishing their impact to the overall population. Every single sandbox game seems to realize the same thing, to control what people can do and not become uber you have to slow them down, with always the same solution of timer bars. Skyrim did it right, there are NO timer bars in crafting, however crafting still occupies time by interacting (and watching) 3D animations although it has a text icon UI for selecting what to do on what which would be easily pattern matched if it was an MMO, at least it is fun to craft in Skyrim.

Edited by yarnevk

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What you don't seem to realize is that bot's don't need to work like humans, they don't even have to "look at" the screen. They can monitor network communication and catch the command to display the visual clues, then they can aces the RAM to read the position of the relevant gui elements and give an appropriate response.

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The 3d is only on the user view, at it's base, it's all 1's and 0's. A 3d engine just compiles the data into a set of points that it connects to show what those 1's and 0's mean.

When you're talking about client to server code, servers generally tend to be "update this data set" senders while the client does the "heavy lifting", bots can operate between these layers.

But again, going into more detail/conversation on this opens us to areas that are best left alone lol. Lets just leave it at, it is possible, it has been done (you can web search the things for EQII specifically), and it is in the best interest of the players for the GM to continue to combat these things.

Edited by Hussars

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I was toying around with how to design a crafting MMO (mostly for fun, I know I won't have the resources to make it) and I saw macro-prevention as an interesting challenge. You don't want to punish the 95% legit players in order to make life harder for the 5% that might macro. Especially since the hardcore macroers might find a way around it eventually. However if it prevents all the casual macroers who make their own macros you might cut it down to only 1% macroing.

My best solution: make random events (like the drumrolls) that happen once in a while while doing actions. At random intervals - maybe every 30 minutes on average, maybe every 100 actions on average. But make it unpredictable. When these events happen it's something that rewards the player (kinda like drumrolls) so it will be exciting instead of annoying. When it happens make it as unmacroable as possible. For example pop up a window that gives you a capcha or some other sort of hard-to-macro thing. Lock all other game mechanics until you've solved it. If you come up with a good solution make it happen even more often.

This would still allow people to start a macro and make a noise when the challenge comes up, but at least it prevents long-term unattended macroing.

(yes capchas are annoying as hell, so something else would be preferable. Maybe an extremely simple minigame with random scaling and fractally generated textures. Something that doesn't ruin the game immersion too much would be preferable)

Edited by DKSprocket

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That is really bad idea to completelly cut out player (or possible bot) from control by some capcha or minigame. In wurm it is more than common working in dangerous areas. Anytime can spawn somewhere close or run there some aggressive beast or player (in PvP).

In most cases I need just take better position (jump on horse or move higher than attacker) or do step away when I see attacker preparing some dirty trick (hell hound aiming my head)

Other time, when I need fast reaction is when some of my friends say c ya or good night. There are usually only few seconds to react. I do not want to be blocked by stupid capcha in such situation.

Edited by Zakerak

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