A request to ANet regarding cast bars.

Please consider changing the hues of cast bars in such a way that it more difficult to utilize scripting programs to perform certain tasks for you.

The current castbar is predominantly a single shade of black, with a steadily increasing contrast of green indicating where the current cast-point is. Any part of the cast-bar that is not separated by brighter gray line exactly one pixel wide, whose color appears to range between #0x303030 and #0x606060.

With little effort, I've made a number of scripts that take advantage of the consistency of the bar color. The first of which is an interrupt macro that can interrupt skills with inhuman accuracy. It hits 1/2 casts 100% of the time, and under ideal circumstances (<50ms latency and 16 fastcast mesmer interrupts), the macro can on occasion, catch 1/4 second casts reactively. In addition, the purple bar that indicates when a player has been interrupted or canceled a skill also uses a single horizontal white line one pixel high. This allows the macro to roughly identify the speed of a cast, and avoid attempting interrupts that may be too fast, or have already finished casting.

A second macro reads healthbars (as the hue changes when one dies), and targets a player, and uses skills when health drops below a certain threshold. The only use for this that doesn't disrupt regular competitive gameplay is as an infuse-bot. While a skilled human player is as strong, the macro works in practice.

A third macro identifies the player number of your target, when in PvP. In combination with other simple mouse-move macros, I can effectively control each of my heroes' skills, and which target they use the skill on, without interaction. The macro does a series of tabs/shift-tabs in rapid succession reads the player numbers, and performs an instantaneous mousemove/mouseclick on the hero's respective skill when the player is identified.

These are all possible because of the relative simplicity of the castbar and healthbar hues. Please consider making slight changes to the gradient and contrast so that they are not constant over the length of the bar, allowing for easy screen-scrape based macros.

put on yr flameproof vest, cuz i suspect some people are going to chew you up for that!

but i'd suggest using texmod to change the colors of the bars and make yr macro work with that.

With texmod available, I'm not sure arenanet changing those bars will have much effect.

I hope your wearing a firemans flame retardant suit.

I've heard rumours of interrupt and infuse bots but never took them too seriously tbh. Yours seem to work quite well, unfortunately. Wonder if ANet will take action or leave GW to find it's way to Diabloville. It'd give them a get-out-of-jail-free card to shut down the servers when it comes time to.

The only solution I can see would be to make the game unmodable (is that even a word?). But that would seriously suck for us lazy cartographers.

I see you like breaking things. I also like breaking things. Wanna make out?

Huh huh huh!


(but seriously, you pwnd that barrel hard. Good thing you can't bring that many heroes into halls anymore).

anet invited this upon themselves when they allowed modding, and it's a small logical step to move towards macros which read casting times to give an advantage in pvp

I'd say since Anet, and Gaile, have allowed modding, they've given tacit approval to things like this, so don't entirely blame the modders.......

Wow when did this happen? *crawls out from under rock*

Holy crap, nice Ranger spike macro...

Agree~!wqfqfwqfqwfwqfw

This comment is, frankly, idiotic. Those macros all work WITHOUT mods.

As for the advantage conveyed by the macro's, I'm not sure. I'd really have to see them in practice before I'd worry. MY theorycraft is that #3 is the one we got a video of because #3 is the only one that's really useful. It seems to me that the interrupt macro would suffer from the same problems as the hench AI - plenty of speed, but no ability to pick the right skill to interrupt. The infuse bot seems suicidal, since it could override your kiting and/or infuse when you can't afford the health to do so.

On a side note, all of these should be easily serverside detectable. Just scan the PvP logs for someone with consistent inhumanly fast reflexes given their ping. 15 interrupts/infuses in a row with a reaction time equal to the player's ping shouldn't be hard to find, and cannot be explained in any other way.

uh you don't need to mod GW to do this..

you just need a third party program that 'watches' GW for the right changes.

ie. If this pixel turns black, do this

-.- nothing to do with modding GW, jesus people.

semantics, and point taken

semantics?

This has nothing to do with whether ANET allows it or not. This is a THIRD PARTY program that can be used with any other game like Guild Wars.

Where's the semantics? You're just wrong. Gaile Gray and ANET didn't 'invite' this upon themselves. This kind of triggering and macro usage has been going on long before Guild Wars was even sold.

Wow, evidently reading comprehension is at an all-time low. Mods were brought up not because they enable these macros/scripts/whatever, but because:

Even if Anet changes the visual style, Texmod can (can it? I'm not too familiar with the program) change them back to what works best for the script.

And people wonder why games like this can never be a professional sport. Ha! - I say.

A professional sport is in a controlled environment. Yes it can be a professional sport. You never play on your own comp in a live tournament so something like this would never pop up.

Since Anet has stopped doing live tournaments I'm sure it will be abused.

Ignorance is bliss! Ha!- I say.

From now on i suggest that every time we use a skill one has to type in a 5 digit randomized garbled confirmation code before.
that would work...yeah.

Using a program to help interrupt/spike/whatever is a violation of the user agreement. ArenaNet doesn't need to do a thing except detect such programs and ban the accounts. There have been several generations of interrupt bots that have all been banned.

And because the OP admited to, and provided video of, using such a bot I wonder if any action will be taken.

And exactly why did you post this? Macro's are against the EULA, which you agreed too...

So why the hell are you asking ANet to change something about guildwars so that you can break their EULA easier?

I was wondering the same exact thing.

Their name isn't visible on the video so there not much to go on.

However, Mr. Yang was very unwise to host the movie on his own student account in an unprotected directory. I would recommend closing the directory by adding a trivial index.html, and/or rehosting that video on Youtube.

he uses teh macros!! ban hims!!!

*ahem* Well, to the OP, how would you go about fixing this problem? surely if ANet changes the colour from Black to red, you can just change your macro accordingly?

That link needs deleted ASAP.
His student directory has the macro in it.

You miss point.

Point is that you get curious, download "interrupt.exe" and then kiss your account goodbye.

interrupt.exe is just interrupt.ahk "compiled" by AutoHotKey.

Bale Shadowscar answers your question.

No amount of complicated gradient tweaking is going to make this sort of macro impossible... or even significantly more difficult to write. Random variations in the activation bar display generated on-the-fly would make it harder, but it would not become impractical up until the point where the activation bar became quite hard for humans to interpret as well. (Btw: random variantions generated on-the-fly would also make that UI component un-moddable via texmod.)

Serverside detection remains the best approach to this sort of thing.

Mr. Yang apparently interned at Microsoft. Hence the focus on security.

However, given the other contents of the directory in question, I'm reporting the post to get the link removed promptly.

lol, I didnt even notice that the macro was hosted there as well. This guy is just asking for the "ban hammer" isn't he.

He even has a file named GWmacro.zip!!

Am I the only person who read this as "I exploited an obvious flaw. If you don't want more people to exploit it too, please change it"?

No you arent the only one. Most people just saw macro and went BOTTER BOTTER BAN BAN BAN QQ

Personally I think Anet should hire this guy to help them make it less easy to macro it up.

Yes they do, but by allowing modding, even if Anet changes things so it doesn't work normally. One could then still mod to make it work. Anet allowing user-end mods effectively stops them from preventing this. SO while these macros work without mods there is nothing Anet can do to stop it, because people would just have to make a mod to get it to work again. So while his comment may have left all that out I think it is yours that may be, frankly, slightly more idiotic.

As for your other comments, it would only be a bit of work to make your macros conditional. For instance have it check your health before even looking for people to infuse (or look for people to infuse but check your health before doing it). Same with interrupts, you could compile a list of skills that you deem important to interrupt and just have the macro check the skill being used against that list before taking action. It might slow your macro down a tad, but no human can reliably interrupt 1/4 cast (in most cases) anyways so no big loss there. If people take the time to make the macros you can assume they'd take the time to make them effective.

I'd point out that Gaile is merely PR, she doesn't make the rules. She only relays them to us when they need clarified. I believe the phrase is "Don't shoot the messenger." I'm not for or against modding so I don't care either way, just don't blame/give credit where it isn't due.

Macros are against the EULA.

Yes, I deleted the link as well. Don't repost it.

Closed.