Age of Conan

As the title suggests I'm very concerned about how macroing is going to affect this game, in particular the combo system, which may be reduced from a complex set of keys to one simple button.

With the advent of keyboards such as the G15 and Zboard among others, macroing could be easier than ever, even time delays can be programmed in if necessasy in between each move of a combo.

This would put owners of such keyboards at a huge advantage over other players, being able to perform combos flawlessly giving them time to concentrate on other areas of pvp.

I searched through the AoC forums a bit and found this:

Yea I tried finding some info on that, to no avail. I think this issue is being underestimated, cause macroing would give a huge advantage over other players, and can ruin pvp combat.

I'm not sure macroing is an advantage.  It lets you take the 2 or 3 keys and just automate them which is a good thing in my opinion.  On the downside it means you are unable to react to changing situations and waste the energy doing the combo attacks if the situation changes.

Personally I hope you can macro it in game for those people that want to waste the flexibility for the convenience of not having to punch 2-3 keys or more to do an attack.  There is a /macro command in game to create your own macros.  I just didn't see a useability command or something like that.  I was hoping to create a message to go with using healing spells.

Ultimately if you can't macro in game all that has been accomplished is making people with macro keyboards having more flexibility then people without these keyboards.

I wouldn't worry to much.

I my self own a G15 and have used it in WOW for fun, but you know what? It doesn't help. Yes I can set it to perform a series of spels, but with the pingtime and other stuff, I end up with timeouts that are way to high if it should work everytime. The problem is that even thou the casttime is 2.5 sek it might take 0.2 sek to start and sometimes it ends 0.2 sec faster. For the script I wrote, I had to have the timeout above 2.85. If the spell ends faster that wastes half a sek. Even with 2.85 delay I still got a "Spell not ready" a few times, and since the G15 cant reed that it just continues, meaning it waites another 2.85 sec before it castes again.

In PVP this would be totaly useless.

It might be different for warriors then spellcasters, but for me it's no good (I only play Priest and Mage).

I would think tha AoC is affected by the same ping problem.

I'm not really worried about the macro thing too much. I think it's mostly just people being lazy and won't really give them any advantage. Once you get used to your char and the combos you will be doing them automatically anyway. I'm more concerned about people using 3rd party hacks because every pvp oriented game you get alot of that if they let it go unchecked.

These games can detect the G15 and such. That is normal.  They can monitors without a problem.  Where they have issues is the undetected.  If you read http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=12848 Blizzard is sueing because the program is undetectable.  There is no telling how much damage this has done to economy and populations of WoW.

From what I saw of the PvP beta weekend, I noticed that my friend had a HUGE advantage when using his XBox360 controller.  He would get his ass kicked all the time while using the keyboard playing a melee, but when he'd use his XBox360 controller, he'd own.   Saying that, I've seen with my own eyes that input devices will play a HUGE part of who win in AoC.

Originally posted by Bigdavo

As the title suggests I'm very concerned about how macroing is going to affect this game, in particular the combo system, which may be reduced from a complex set of keys to one simple button.

With the advent of keyboards such as the G15 and Zboard among others, macroing could be easier than ever, even time delays can be programmed in if necessasy in between each move of a combo.

This would put owners of such keyboards at a huge advantage over other players, being able to perform combos flawlessly giving them time to concentrate on other areas of pvp.

I searched through the AoC forums a bit and found this:

"Theres been a few threads about the G15 by now and in most of them I have said the same thing. You could macro the combos but with the way combat works it would do you pretty much no good."

__________________

Athelan -NPC/Monster Designer, Behavioral Control Center/Combat Guru, Age of Conan


Very vague and not very reassuring.

So does anyone know how this issue is 'really' being addressed, or is there some information I missed or didn't find?

 

Aside from the keyboards, intensive macroing should be okay.  SWG pulled it off back in the day, with the abilites to time delay and all the rest.  It was still a level playing field, macroing is still subject to cast times, recast times, animations, etc.  You shouldn't be able to macro anything that you can't do with your hands manually.

Originally posted by ethion

I'm not sure macroing is an advantage.  It lets you take the 2 or 3 keys and just automate them which is a good thing in my opinion.  On the downside it means you are unable to react to changing situations and waste the energy doing the combo attacks if the situation changes.

Personally I hope you can macro it in game for those people that want to waste the flexibility for the convenience of not having to punch 2-3 keys or more to do an attack.  There is a /macro command in game to create your own macros.  I just didn't see a useability command or something like that.  I was hoping to create a message to go with using healing spells.

Ultimately if you can't macro in game all that has been accomplished is making people with macro keyboards having more flexibility then people without these keyboards.

Leaving you VERY vulnerable if your opponent anticipates your move, and counters. No way to abort the combo, and react in time...goodbye lazy macro-monger.

Just going to have to suck it up and learn some skill.

Doubt me? Good....easy prey for the rest of us.

I do not know much about AoC but a bit about macroes. If you allow macroing in your game the first thing you will see are bots. It is fairly easy to code a bot that farms, automatically sells and stashes loot with just one  3-page macro script. Modern macroing tools offer a complex and powerful system where you can do virtually anything (even include visual basic commands). Imagine auto travel, item farming, easy combos (yes, you can detect spell speed variations via pattern matching on the screen) and auto levelling.

If you want to really make it harder to use bots then use something like Game guard. It does prohibit macroing quite well and forces serious botters to use root kits or remote desktop to run the macro programs. This way at least "amateur" Botters will be filtered out.

@Wharg0ul: You are joking I hope. There is no problem in putting a stop button into your macro. With a bit of coding you could even implement a few triggers that stop the current macro automatically.

PS: could someone please give me a quick and simple description of AoCs combo system?