Quote:
Originally Posted by Targren
They can be if explicitly defined as such. That's the key. Explicit definition. If you say a "macro" is something that performs more than one in-game action per individual keypress, or something that allows in-game actions to be completed without interaction from the player, etc... would cover ALL of those things.
Instead, they give you lazy lawyer boilerplate, and act on whims. Typical corporate crumminess, and I'm not giving them a pass for it.
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If all you're interested in is a "definition", as in a text of law, then yes it's perfect. But then, you'd have to be versed into computers to know how false this is (i.e., how easily it can be debunked in court), because the thing you mention ("something that performs more than one in-game action per individual keypress, or something that allows in-game actions to be completed without interaction from the player") cannot be attested by the GW client or the GW server in any sort of way at the moment.
I won't start discussing the technicalities of how the GW server can detect "macro-ing", but it's extremely ugly and Anet's announcement shows that it's very far from being exact. And the reason is hidden inside the examples I gave above: from the point of view of the GW client or the GW server, you can't make any difference between a device doing "stuff" for each "keypress" (so physically it's only a "keypress" but no one except the guy standing in front of the device can know that, because the device acts like a keyboard which sends complex signals to the OS, a bit like the G15 whose special buttons send signals to its dedicated software that works very close to the OS, and all that is very difficult to see for the GW client and server), or a proper bot. Both can theoretically be used for convenience (repeating a sequence of key strings) or botting (repeating a complex and repetitive behaviour, potentially with some kind of "intelligence"), the difference being of course in the complexity involved.
You could even completely defeat the purpose of your definition of "macro" by simply taking a bot and asking the botter to regularly interact with the program. A bit like saying that the bot program helps you, instead of letting him do the stuff. (FYI, what pro botters do is try to emulate human behaviours, but it's an arms race with the MMO company)
We even discussed on Guru the extreme case of a player
behaving (constant repetitive action) as a bot! Of course, if you look at GW packets, it can't look like a computer, but it shows how useless such a definition would be, unless it has to come to court like the recent case that Blizzard won.