Simple Improvement to Discourage Macroing in Mines

If you brought back the cave spiders, without the Queen Spider part, it would make using a macro and not being discovered significantly harder than it is today.
I have legitimately mined more than 60000 rocks, and as much as I enjoy not being attacked while I mine, I dislike cheating macro users even more. I have recently reported macro
users several times and the admins are not up to being able to figure out if someone is using a macro or not. I even watched one admin drag a macro user and
then stop watching them before their next movement pattern had them mining in free space. I've reported macro users mining outside the mine entrance but no admin
was available to catch the macro user. Every day I'm watching more and more people using macros and the admins are too busy with more important things or just aren't
well versed at spotting the telltale signs of a macro user. But that's ok, admins should be spending their time on more important issues and it's not practical to teach them
all the telltale signs. With the simple act of bringing back the randomly spawned cave spiders to attack people mining, macro users will be much more easily spotted and macro
usage will drop way down. It would be crazy to think it would be eliminated, but right now it's just too easy to do and more and it's on the increase.

I also think the penalty for using a macro mining should be to reset their rock collection experience to zero - (revert them back to maximum time to mine a rock) and remove any remaining rocks from their inventory. The penalties today, from what I can tell, (never having received one) are really pretty minor and not much of a deterrent or punishment.

Thank you for your consideration and comments.

I agree.

Um, you can't really define who's really macroing and who isn't.

Let me tell you something that happened to me recently.

Upon Ol West release, I was there doing some jobs. Mining was the first thing that had the most profit earned and so I did it. I was using FB to play my game. After being the first in mining with about 15k rocks mined, I was then being watched everyday. People thought I was macroing, in which I didn't since I'm using FB. A day after, some guy reported me and Alpho (lol) came and dragged me away, thinking I was really macroing.
I had my friends to told him the truth that I was not macroing, but using FB and placing something on my keyboard. And so he left, and I quitted the game.

So to be frank, you can't define who's a macroer and who isn't.
If you ever see someone moving or doing any actions for 24/7, then that is a macroer.

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Originally Posted by XSTARX

If you ever see someone moving or doing any actions for 24/7, then that is a macroer.

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It's generally pretty easy to tell. I mean, if you drag someone away from mining they will continue the same actions repeatedly even though they aren't mining it's pretty obvious they are macroing. Sometimes if you're just holding D while not really paying attention then I guess someone could see it as macroing but on Era (last time I played it) you had to actually move around while mining so just holding a key down would give no advantage.

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Originally Posted by XSTARX

People thought I was macroing, in which I didn't since I'm using FB.

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It's much easier to macro on FB as a pose to iOS and Android.

I wouldn't call it 'macroing' since I'm still there but doing some other things.

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Originally Posted by XSTARX

I wouldn't call it 'macroing' since I'm still there but doing some other things.

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I mean it could look like you're macroing from someone else's perspective, if you're mining and people are trying to talk to you and you didn't reply then people may just assume you were macroing.

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Originally Posted by Vendetta

I mean it could look like you're macroing from someone else's perspective, if you're mining and people are trying to talk to you and you didn't reply then people may just assume you were macroing.

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That's exactly what happens when people don't think properly and just falsely accuse others for macroing.
Macroing isn't something that can be stopped very easily even if you were to actually report a real macroer.

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Originally Posted by XSTARX

That's exactly what happens when people don't think properly and just falsely accuse others for macroing.
Macroing isn't something that can be stopped very easily even if you were to actually report a real macroer.

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Ok, this isn't about stopping macros - this is about making it more difficult.

All of the other discussion on this thread has exactly agreed with my point, it isn't always easy for someone with not a lot of mining experience to identify a macro user. I'm not going to go into details on what I look for and how long I monitor someone before reporting, but XSTARX is correct that it's not as simple as seeing if someone doesn't respond to a chat.

Right now, with nothing attacking, it's very simple to write a macro to mine. This spider idea wont stop sophisticated macros and it wont stop people who sit there watching their macro at work. But...for those unsophisticated simple macros and unattended macros it wont be much good to use one because you want be able to let it run for long stretches of time and you'll only get 10 or 12 rocks before the character is attacked and the macro gets messed up. When something is attacking a simple macro stops working and can get messed up. The macro program has to be more sophisticated. And not responding to something killing your character is another piece of data.

A case in point. One day I was mining next to someone I didn't know. Do to the repetitive pattern the person was using I thought the person might be using a macro. They did not respond to private messages or public messages. When a spider spawned I lured it over to the other player and watched it attack them. The person immediately stopped drilling to kill the spider. Pretty good odds that a macro wasn't being used.

From my experience when I was a GP on iClassic - I don't discuss the system how we know from 3,000 players who might be using but - we warp to the player and if we see someone that looks like macroing at the farm, we dragged them away from the farm - if the player still did the same movement, then they are macroing

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The cave will colapse sometimes, I think that's the iEra's system to prevent Macro users?

Can visit me my link here:http://era-go.com/forum/showthread.p...vs-Macro-Miner. If level 99 is 0.3 seconds than marcoing right.

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Originally Posted by Toshihiro Kijima

From my experience when I was a GP on iClassic - I don't discuss the system how we know from 3,000 players who might be using but - we warp to the player and if we see someone that looks like macroing at the farm, we dragged them away from the farm - if the player still did the same movement, then they are macroing

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The cave will colapse sometimes, I think that's the iEra's system to prevent Macro users?

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Yes, the cave collapse trips up macro users sometimes. It's frequency of about once an hour isn't as much of a deterrent as it could be.

Yes, grabbing and moving a suspected macro user is the most common method used by the admins to check a suspected macro user.

I really wish this thread's discussion turned more back to the question of the merits of turning the cave spiders back on rather than how do you catch a macro user.

My goal was to make disruptions frequent enough that no one get much of a benefit in using a simplistic macro. Which would then discourage their use.

I should also have mentioned in my original post that redesignating portions of the mine where corners are to be areas that wont work to drill in both directions would eliminate the most simple macro where the person doesn't even move, just mines in a corner. When the mine collapses or they are killed they warp to a hospital making it harder to see that they were using a macro but if you were at the hospital you would see them drilling in the hospital.

Falling rocks are better than spiders I guess..

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Originally Posted by Random22

I really wish this thread's discussion turned more back to the question of the merits of turning the cave spiders back on rather than how do you catch a macro user.

My goal was to make disruptions frequent enough that no one get much of a benefit in using a simplistic macro. Which would then discourage their use.

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I'm not a fan of the cave spiders, yeah they catch out the people who are macroing but they would get incredibly annoying for anyone who is legit mining. Maybe something which may push the player who is mining backwards a short distance every 5-10 minutes. This would effectively be like dragging them away which would both stop macroers, making it easier for them to be caught and discourage them from macroing, while not bothering people legit mining too much.

Or just add a random NPC to spawn?

But that would promote macroers to code in what is needed to make their character do the work for them.
I mean like, macro users should know how to script when they're macroing.

I just don't understand how people can't see if player is macroing. But adding spiders is one of the many ideas to stop macro users. In my opinion, spider can be a good way to spot macro users, but at the same time it'll interrupt real miners.

I love the idea and I want It to be added only if they will reduce spider's damage to 1-3

good idea! i liked it!