Macros/Add-on's are the same as Hacking/Botting
Well someone had quite the argument of this on another forum that I was on and I thought this would be a nice read for anyone that has the same view as the subject.
wrote:That being said allowing add-on's and macros in RoM is a horrible idea. I urge the GM's to stop this and make it a banable offense. Allowing them creates an unfair advantage over other players. Using Macros is a lazy way to play and is the same as botting. Press 1 button and the computer does all the rest, you would ban a botter than why are you allowing Macros? There is no skill in using marcos, there are no bragging rights in beating someone when you use Macros. There is NO combo skill's.
Add-on's are just as bad if not worse then Marcos, you changing files and creating codes for the game to do things differently. In KO (Knight Online) we had people editing there table and created what we called "God Mode" they were unstoppable and you could not kill them.
By allowing a "legitimte" way of changing the game with Macros and add-ons, it opens a BIG door for hackers to ruin this game. I could go on and on about how I feel about this, but you get my point. These things are horrible for the game, and please GM's stop this before it gets out of hand.
Macro's and addons are not evil at all. You see there used to be a bot addon for this game now I know this only further proves your point but hear me out. The developers make an API for addons to use now what this is, is basically a set of commands that give the addon certain data it needs to work correctly. A botting addon is only possible if the developers give the addon creators the commands they need to make such things possible. The addon that was a bot no longer works. The addon lead to some of those commands being removed thus breaking the addon and stopping all future addons like it.
As for macros they are far from cheating. If you research how to use them you can make macros that lets say sell all white items in your inventory. Or make a good combo out of 2 skills. You can't make a macro that will play the game for you it only makes certain tasks a bit easier. You can't have a macro fight a fight for you by any means there is no macro that will handle all situations and they can't be that long anyway to make one that can. Basically that said even if using a macro they are usually short 2 second things that you could have did anyway you just made it so instead of having to press 2 buttons to execute a certain combo you only had to press 1 the results are all the same.
As for your game Knight Online that is the developers fault entirely if a game is made correctly from the client a user will not have access to any information that could potentially give them an advantage in the game. What should happen is every time you do something the server should check to make sure that what you are doing is possible. For example if you lock your hp in the game to get a God Mode like effect. Your HP should not be stored on your game you should only be viewing your HP from your game. The server should be calculating your actual HP thus by hacking the game and making it so your HP doesn't go down you end up only fooling yourself. In your game you HP will appear to be locked and not moving but even so you will die. All games that use anti-cheating programs you can come to the assumption that they calculate some sort of vital data on your home computer because they are trying to keep you out of the game. A game that is made correctly by a good developer would have no anti-cheating software because you simply can't cheat/hack the game. All of the information is calculated on the server and thus there is no way for you to access it.
EDIT:
Reading above me botting is an entirely different story they are truely having something play the game for them. This is not possible through any in game mechanism thus why they are using 3rd party programs like mentioned above. Why you can't really ever stop botters because they aren't using anything in the game to their advantage. What it comes down to is needing a good group of game GMs and a report system. The problem with this is people often report people for things like "he stole my kill" which by no means warrants the player to get reported. Small things like that in games often flood the report system making it all the harder to find those bots. I'm going to go ahead and say that is why this game doesn't have a decent report system although they did add the report spam thing which is highly valuable because of the gold sellers that spam the zone chat. They used to sit there for days saying the same thing over again but now they it seems they disappear in a matter of hours not days.
Similar to what bake said, I think that if people can get a big advantage using third party applications (hacking disincluded), it just goes to show that your game is lacking a feature. If people constantly use macros to hit a certain sequence of keys, why not add that to your game?
Simply because no matter how you make your game some people will always prefer something to be slightly different. For example I prefer my HP/MP etc bars to arc around my character (in 3d games that is) rather than be stashed in one of the corners. Generally when I'm in a fight I focus on the fight and dont notice that I'm about to die. Thus by moving the HP bar there I dont have that problem.
some games fix that by letting you switch that on and off.
WoW has pretty much proven the usefulness of addons and macros. There are addons for everything from moving action bars to completely restructuring the UI - (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/default.aspx).
I think that there's a definite use for them; I'm not sure that we should be focusing on them this early on, though.
Yeah, I was going to mention WoW, but I have only heard about the add-ons, never used them. I hear they are incredibly diverse and flexible, though, and remove the need for just about any kind of 3rd party tool.
Not really.
That's not what I meant when I was talking about my HP bars. For example...
# - my character
( - my hp bar
) - targets hp bar
(#)
That would be my character in the game as you see my HP bar curves around my character thus making it always in the center of my screen where I'm usually focusing.
EDIT: A picture is worth a thousand words...
Default Game UI:
My Game UI:
how clone can you get? at first i thought that was a wow screenie xD
i definetely recommend having GUIs customizable.
Via Addons or not, we have a list of stuff players can change.
will probably offer minimum 3 different GUI Varieties,
and each will have each window visible/lockable/etc
so "most" players should be able to become happy with the GUI.
Controls are also adjustable in good games
(we want to have mouse movement and keyboard movement switchable)
but yeah its definitely nothing bad.
Its more of a big bonus if its customizable.
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That game is far from being a WoW clone. >.>
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Dude. It looks EXACTLY the same.
These are WoW, good luck telling the difference.
I assume Ariler is talking about the game itself, not the looks, but its not like we can determine gameplay from a single screenshot.
Aion gameplay is a lot different, but being korean it requires more grinding per level. Gameplay is better, quests are not as stupid, but they still both suck imo. 
Yeah but regardless the garphics are different too. RoM has a more of a CG graphics style while WoW has a cartoony one. The only thing that is similar is the gui...
LOL, someone actually plays Knight Online?
OOooo, you just got SERVED!
this thread is about Macros/Addons/GUIs/Controls.
So yeah I looked at the GUI, and even the GUI GFX itself are very wow copied.
enough of off topicness now xD
but yeah, some people still have bots running on KO.
as I played back then there were no cheaters, at least i never saw one.
If that's the case then they should ban game-pads because they allow you to press buttons faster than keyboards.
RTS players have up to 400 actions per minute (can go faster but atm not humanely possible), Knight Online the maximum you can do is like 50 because of things like cooldown times, so any sort of macro is not going to make any difference unless you are a noob. Macro's are also a double-edged sword, macros can only press the same buttons in a certain pattern which means you have no control and your attack pattern becomes completely predictable.
The only reason macros would be useful in PvP is if spamming the same combo over and over again is more likely to win you the game than adapting to the situation, which just means the game is poorly designed. As for client side add-ons allowing you to god mode, well yeah, that's just due to having to design the game for low budget korean servers.