This thread is intended to apply to any game where competition between players is a factor. I've been playing online multiplayer games for quite a few years now. Platformers, First person shooters, MMORPGs, I'll give anything a try if it provides some interesting gameplay aspects. A year or two back I was banned from my first MMO for using an anti-idle macro that I scripted in about five minutes (It was one of my first attempts at scripting anything) in AutoHotkey to farm items while away from my keyboard. I'm not here to whine about that, though.
Online play has become a large basis for a lot of games for the past few years, and in every one of these games comes opportunity to shave off those few precious seconds for every repetitive action you take, via automation. It can come in a variety of forms, but I can't think of anything that doesn't boil down to saving yourself some time and effort. First I would like to list a couple examples that I feel people would commonly encounter.
1. The Bot. It's the guy you see in the same area, killing the same things, day after day after day. That's a really narrow and imprecise description, but I'm sure everyone knows what I'm talking about.
2. The shortcut. In most FPS' you can jump. Sometimes you can duck. Sometimes you can duck while jumping. It doesn't seem like much of a difference, but having a smaller hitbox while moving in midair can be an important technique for gaining the edge over competition. Timing and hitting an extra key can be a pretty big strain on your hand when you're already hitting two or three at a time. A simple tweak will turn it into a single key for both actions, timed to perfection. This applies to every single action in the game; Why press one key for every action when you can combine actions into groups?
I was thinking of adding one or two more, but they are pretty weak examples and I feel these two represent the extreme sides of scripting; One is full on automation of gameplay while the other is a simple little tweak to simplify something you are doing anyway. Finally, I'd like to bring "gaming grade" mice and keyboards into the equation. One of the most common features in these components is that the keys and buttons are fully re-programmable, and often come with a scripting tool built into the drivers. Use of 3rd-party programs is against the rules in most games, and the fancy $60 keyboard you just bought will often fall under this rule depending on how you use it.
The prevalent botting in MMOs is commonly seen as a festering wound on the community, but how often is this the case? I've never played a game where I felt this was directly harming my experience in some way, but I'd like to hear about some other people's experience with this. Everyone has a limit to when these things are acceptable, and when it steps the border into "cheating". My limit comes down to abuse of the game in question; Aimbots in any FPS, or abusing a glitched skill in an MMO. What's your limit, and what do you find acceptable? Do you think automated players in an MMO can ruin the game in question? Any thoughts on how game makers can accommodate player scripting while minimizing abuse to core gameplay? And finally, if well-respected manufacturers (Razer being the big name here) are making it easier for everyone to access these functions, to what degree can game moderators denounce it as "unfair"?
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Topic: Automation in Video Games (Read 928 times)