Life is Feudal Official Forum

[Stormsblade]

You can get infinite of the following resources using a clicker/sequenced macro, without moving or doing anything other than one to five keyboard/mouse inputs:

1. Fibre
2. All farming goods
3. All herbs used in Herbalism, Alchemy, and for flux.
4. All fish
5. Flint
6. Water

The following tasks can be semi-automated with the above:
1. Tunneling
2. Terraforming
3. Farming

These are hardly inclusive lists, they simply include tasks tremendously easy to automate.

Unfortunately, unless the activities are fundamentally changed, forced to require a minigame, or botting is otherwise managed, players will have infinite access to the above resources, ruining the economy for these items and their byproduct.

[SirWinston]

Yep that is true. I'm not sure if they plan to change it or to introduce minigames in LIF:YO.
If the minigame is optional people will always prefer to automate it.

[Sirspliffington]

Every player has access to infinite amounts of those items, not just people using macro keyboards etc. They just have to click more and put up with an aching finger (or buy 1 of those Drinking Birds). Aside from herbs and crops, which would be extremely inefficient to gather using a macro anyway, none of those items are even that trade-able. I'd be surprised if there are many people at all that gather herbs/crops using a macro keyboard, let alone enough to go about "ruining the economy". I will admit that fishing could be a problem given it's low catch rates and use in 5 ingredient recipes, but using other recipes is far easier and less time consuming. I'm now looking forward to the day when I see a macro user trying to trade 10,000 flint stone/water/fiber for x amount of flux though.

These actions should be automated anyway (apart from herb gathering) rather than making players click 100's of times and falling asleep at the keyboard. This is EXACTLY the situation I bought a macro keyboard...oh and for autorun in DayZ! Let's see what the mini-games introduce before complaining about hypothetical situations that I doubt anybody has even encountered yet and certainly hasn't been reported.

[Stormsblade]

Lol @ Inefficient.

Go to work for 8 hours, come back and have 800 herbs in your bag.
Run it overnight while you sleep, come back, and have 800 herbs in your bag.

Who cares if its slower than doing it by hand?

Its free loot.
Few would gather by hand for 8 hours without a bot.
Few would gather by hand for 4 hours a day without a bot, even.

With a simple macro you get the same reward for 0 effort, and can do it *every day*. You would have more herbs than you could even use.

The herbs, therefore, would be worth --->0<----

Argue all you want, but these facts do not change.

[CaptainAmerica]

Remember if you create a macro and go to sleep or go to work then your character will stop once you run out of food.

[Stormsblade]

Not an issue.
Script loop 800 times then end.

[Sirspliffington]

Yup it's inefficient, you could gather far more herbs in the same time frame if you did it manually. If you owned a macro keyboard you would realise leaving it going while at work/bed doesnt work. As CaptainAmerica said, food/stam would block macros as would your tool breaking, default action changing, server restarts, CTD's and, as Bobik mentioned, other players. There are way too many factors to account for if you leave a macro running without any supervision at all, I've tried countless times. Heck they normally don't even last longer than an hour or 2 and they definitely won't gather anywhere close to 100 herbs per hour.

Again, you're dealing in pure hypotheticals on an issue that you haven't even tested out yourself, hasn't been reported and has already been addressed by Bobik anyway. Even your assumptions on players gathering habits are conjured up purely to fit your argument so they're hardly "facts". I repeat; wait for the minigames to see what they bring before complaining about this mythical 800 herb macro gathering bot. I'd also love to see an example (or even a story from "a friend of a friend") of this happening yet alone ruining the economy.

[Stormsblade]

Not hypothetical.

I run a macro that gathers herbs.
I left it on for an afternoon and came back to hundreds of herbs.

Continue to deny this reality, the botters will not.

[Willbonney]

You forgot branches...

I'm not getting your arguments Storm, no matter the number of times I read them. You seem to hate any and all ideas of Auto-gathering and even use infinite as a term to describe it. It's not infinite, it's very finite, based on the amount of time the "bot" is running and how effective it is at gathering.

That said and done, what exactly is the problem? You say some stuff will be worthless in the game, but well, isn't that kind of the point? Even with currency, the penny is the most worthless, but add enough of them together and you have something of value. I'd say if there are so many botters out there, wouldn't that rather point to a broken system? If so many of your customers are doing something in a certain way, wouldn't your company be better off supporting that way, instead of resisting it? There already is Auto-Gathering in some forms in the game. Why not just support it, but maybe put limitations on it?

For instance, make it so gathering plant fiber will repeat over and over, but increase the weight of fiber/fish/branches so you could carry less before becoming encumbered. I don't think anyone really cares about Water or Flint. We're probably good with it being mostly worthless. For herbing, I haven't come up with a good enough solution to post, yet.

A question I'd like to ask you though: How exactly do you rationalize telling others how to play a video game that they have paid for? I keep reading these posts of how "botting ruined this or that game," but in each and every case, the examples of what games those were were either vague, or those games had more, and bigger issues. Please give a good example of how Auto-Gathering, because that is really what you seem to be against, has ever "ruined" a Sandbox video game.

Sure, let's do our best to keep out hacks, cheats, aimbots, and other systems that would give a tangible advantage to one player over another, but your war against any and all botting in terms of gathering, well, it's starting to seem rather petty now. Especially with many of the responses I've read on the topic.

You can't always get what you want, the world, even the online one, doesn't work that way.

[Stormsblade]

You say some stuff will be worthless in the game, but well, isn't that kind of the point?

Clearly this is where we fundamentally disagree. Items that are worthless through botting are damaging to the economy and increase relative grind for players that do not bot.

Herbs will be entirely worthless because the effort required to transport and list them on the trade exchange is greater than their intrinsic value. Ergo, anyone who bots will have them. Anyone that does not bot will need to spend hours gathering. The people that don't bot will have less time on average to do other productive tasks, and will therefore be less wealthy, fall behind in material competition, or simply have to play for hours more a day to compete with botters.

The question here isn't how much you want to grind. Make no mistake, to produce in this game you need to grind.

The question is, if you don't bot, do you want to have to grind more every day to compete with botters?

[Willbonney]

Quality of herbs matter to make high quality potions, flux, and others. Getting high quality isn't actually easy, as when you herb, that cell of soil loses quality. Thus, herbing too much in a single area will lower the quality of the herbs you get greatly.

I regret having to give away this trick, as it's helped me quite a bit in multiplayer in having much better quality stuff. Only effective way to get high quality herbs I've found is to gather herbs in an area of a farm that has been recently harvested, you know, when it's still the rough soil before being fertilized or tilled. It will still start around 90q, but after an hour or two of manual herbing, the area drops to mid 70s. After which time I till the soil, fertilize it back up to 95 or so, and replant.

If others aren't doing it this way, they aren't making very good steel, potions, or anything else.

So sure, low quality herbs, flux, napthia, and the rest will be commonplace. I personally don't care, as I wouldn't personally use anything less than 80q, nor would I trade for anything less than that.

That is one system to reduce the effectiveness of bot herbing right there.

Another addition I wish they would add to things, is make weapons and armor crafted with good steel better. Also, make it so the higher level stuff (lvl 60 and 90) require steel ingots for both weapons and armor. Make it so high quality steel is a must have late in game.

[Stormsblade]

Sure man, you take your q90 potions you work hours for.

I will take my q60 potions that I have infinite of with 0 effort.

Q90 potions are only 19% better than Q60.