Fist de Yuma - March 4, 2003

Non-Macros need not apply I'm going to try and make this as dry and factual as possible. The reason for that is if I let my disgust for this show I'll be breaking my word from last week. I was already at the Tusker Armory. When I logged in Tuesday morning I decided to head over to the 60+. I had heard that is was mostly macros over there. I was sure it was an exaggeration, as MS had to be doing their job a little bit. I hit the portal after the typical nasty run. Why the 60+ is in a much harder spot than the 70 and 80 I'll never know. I would have at least swapped the 60 and 80 myself. I was greeted by two Rampager's, which I quickly dispatched. I started forward and got around one bend and saw a guy with a pile of Rampager bodies around him. I asked him if there was room in the fellow, no answer. There was a spawn and we fought it off. I asked him again and again no answer. Finally after several minutes he said there was room and who the fellow leader was. I sent the fellow leader a tell and got a canned response instantly. It was sent far faster than anyone could ever type. It said that I should search the dungeon for him and he would then see if there was room in the fellow for me. I asked him where he was and got the same reply. Then he said that he does not have time to search the dungeon for me and I should find him. After several answers that did not fit the questions I asked if I could speak to the human please. It turned out that he was not even in the dungeon! He was likely getting comps or something but all this time he was sending computer responses. I met him at the start with an archer who was also waiting for him. When he arrived he said there was only room for one and played a pick a number game. I lost so the 90lv archer got in over the 63lv BM. Gee that was lucky for them. As I went down to get the Tusk I saw that each corner had someone standing with a pile of bodies around them. None of them talked or moved except to attack when there was a spawn. When the fellow leader left to go to his corner he told me; XXXXX says, "if I am online when someone leaves" XXXXX says, "I call ya" That was at 8AM. At 12:14AM (16+ hours later) he was still there. ElTank Most people who macro today use a program called ElTank. The creator of the program has gotten around the macro restriction by adding is this disclaimer. "This program is for attended use only." I wonder if a crack dealer could get around selling dope by labeling it, "For external use only". ElTank had one problem. Turbine changed a few things before putting in the ban so that programs like Sixth Sense could not detect +admins. They did not want to warn unattended macro users to rush to their computer and avid a ban. ElTank got around this by making a warning flag if a +admin asked them a question. The ElTank creator said that he put the program in because people were missing +admin questions in the heat of battle and getting an unfair ban. I guess the big guy in the bright red robe was not a good enough hint. The ElTank creator has stood firm with this. He says that his program does nothing wrong and it an asset to the game. I'll admin that I don't believe a word he says. Still that is only my opinion, you may see it different. All I know is that great hunting spots are for macros only and here is why. A guy sets up a macro that automatically accepts people into a fellow. This can be setup even if there are other fellows going as real people tend to get tired and quit. Given time, and a macro has all the time in the world, they become the main fellow. They have a scrip running that sends messages to people to find them if they get a tell. They also set up so it sends stock replies so it looks like there is a person there. The program cannot tell if there is room or not because there is no way to count the number of people in the fellow. It depends on an error message if they try to add someone to a full fellow. When someone shows up, the macro attempts to add them to the fellow. If there is no room they get a canned response about trying back later. After a few hours the fellow fills up with macros. Being macros they seldom leave. They stay on for hours on end, only leaving when they run out of comps. Sometimes the macro user will use another account to bring comps and the macro never ends. So when a macro replaces a real player that slot is lost. After nine macros get into the fellow there is no room for the live players. The live players are relegated to single hunting until they quit in disgust and go to a dungeon that is not filled with macros. After a time there are no dungeons not filled with macros. The macro users have gotten very sly with this. They know that their alarm will let them watch TV, read or in some cases sleep and still get to the computer to answer a +admin's question. After a lot of this the +admins will get tired of it and stop responding to macro reports. Then they can let it run 24/7 and not worry about anyone responding to complaints. Like I said a few weeks ago, making attended combat macros within the rules made a loophole any smart immature person can drive a truck through. Rightly or wrongly, I'll let you decide, the high level Tusker dungeons are for macros only. Go get a tusk and leave because the will not let you in the fellow. MINE! Little kids have a saying when they see something they want. It goes like this, "Mine". Most grow out of that but some still think they can get what they want by saying, "Mine!" There are several dungeons where there are long lines for the fellow. The 80+ is one of the worse. Having a line for the fellow is understandable. What is not understandable is their claim on the dungeon. Several places demand that if you are not in the fellow you are not allowed to hunt there. If you try to hunt there anyway they will have several people follow you around and try and prevent you from getting any kills. Given that the response time for +admin calls vary from 2 hours to never they are getting away with it. Why anyone can think the own a dungeon I'll never know. Strangely it is the same people who condemned me for not wanting people to hunt below their level who do this. Combine this problem with 24/7 macros and you see there is a very big problem. No Player Answer There is really only one player answer to the two problems above. That is to get a load of high-level players into a fellow and to take over. Given that most good player don't want that kind of grief I don't see that happening very often. It would only be a temporary solution at best. The real answer would be a ban on attended combat macros and have the +admins respond to griefing complaints in a timely manner. Both would require MS to do something so I don't see it. Given that it took us three years to get a halfhearted attempt to control macros I don't see anything happening soon. Someone told me that AC is degenerating into "Lord of the Flies." While I don't see that everywhere, I do see it on Tusker island. To bad it is such a great place to level my mule. If it was a normal PPL I would be leveling far more slowly and seldom go to Tusker Island. My rush to 85+ is putting a sour taste in my mouth. What we need is another Tusker island with a maturity test to get in. Anyone who ever says, "Dude, can U tell me how to get in PZ?" would automatically be rejected. Meanwhile After my foray into the 60+ I headed back to the 50+. The Tuskers there are far too hard and the dungeon far to small for Macros to take over, or so I thought. With all the bigger dungeons filled with macros I expect the 50+ to be the same in a few days. So far the players are fighting back rather well in the 50+. Attempts to set up macros are have the other players stealing all the kills until they quit. After school lets out things are different but for now the morning/early afternoon is free of macros. As I move up I find that adding a skill points and leveling is taking longer and longer. I made it to 65 but the last level seemed to take forever. My goal was 250 in both Creature and Item. I made that goal and was able to add some endurance along with two points into War and Life. It was a great fellow filled with humorist players. We had a blast until school let out and we had to leave. Worse than I thought During the week I have been reading the boards on the macro problem. It turns out that the 50+ dungeon I'm in may well be the only one that is not packed with macros. I expect to be run out of that one by macros soon. Rival is a great player that was a vassal of mine for a short while. He started a thread on the developers board that I hope becomes a catalyst for change. Here is the results of a test done on MT. Rival's post On a lighter note, in case no one has noted it yet, several people on a few servers have taken to crashing the landblocks that contain the tusker dungeons nightly with the expressed intention of forcing the logging of macros. I happened to be witness to this event several nights ago. It was very organized and well done. A census was taken in 6 tusker dungeons. (I personally checked the Lacuna for my part) Of the 19 people in the Lacuna, exactly zero returned within a half hour period after the crash. Reports were similar in the other majorly macro'd dungeons. For the rest of the night, the dungeons were available, and quickly filled with actual live players in fellows. I hung out in the plated dungeon with 6 other people, had it all to ourselves, and brought in an insane amount of XP. 2 more people would have been perfect. While it is obviously a serious violation of the rules to crash landblocks, (I did not participate in that part) it does illustrate just how bad the problem is. Those people filling those dungeons were running UCM's. Not a single person in the Lacuna fellowships answered my tells, nor did they log back in after the landblock crash. Perhaps one guy was dozing on his couch listening for +admin alerts for all of his buddies, or maybe not even that. So to suggest that there is no impact to live players from macros, or to deny that there is a great deal of UCM going on is just blind ignorance. It is sad that people like Elgar cannot use their talents to make things better for the playerbase instead of proliferating problems and making them worse. I also see now why people like Elgar play AC. It is the only real haven for people who believe macroing is not harmful to the rest of the population. If they ever fix the macro problem, he and his kind will have to give up gaming forever, as there is nowhere else left to go. Maybe, Maybe not Elgar is either been misjudged by me or trying to prevent a ban of his program. He says he is putting in code that will allow him to boot people not attending their macro. On the board he is calling for volunteers to receive this power. I'm not sure if it is a full boot or just a disconnect from the ElTank server. In any case this would help if he got enough of the right people. Getting it back in the face Shortly after Elgar posted what he was going to do with ElTank he found out what type of people he has been helping. This was posted to his call for volunteers. lemme put it in stupid terms. I have the code for El Tank. When you start the process of "Admin Control", I'm just gonna post the code for El Tank. Then, if anyone doesn't like what you are doing, they can just remove/add whatever they want, and make up their own El Tank. The internet is such a lovely place sometimes. So, hardy har har har. Put "tank police" out there all you want. They won't be intruding in on my fun time. And I guess I might as well say this again. After the code is posted, that means that anyone with coding knowledge of any sort will be able to either a) compile it and run it, b) edit it and make it their own, or c) download the new improved version. Me? I'm gonna make my own, and post it on geocities, along with the source right beside it. I really wish you hadn't decided to try and play God with the people who decided to use your plugin for what it is. But, since you have to listen to the complaints instead of the praises, I guess your fans now become your competition. Good luck. El Tank was fun. Leveling break While I had a goal of getting to 70 with FA this week I felt I was burning out on it. After three or fours I was starting to nod off. When it is not exciting enough to keep me awake there is a problem. First thing so do was check out North ML and see if there had been any changes. If there are any changes I did not see them. After an hour there I sold off and muled the material. Next few days were just hanging around the mansion and doing tinker work. That can be a full time job when there are a lot of people there. Thursday evening I took Fist out to get the last of his strength fixed. I'm not sure if I'll take the last 10 point of endurance for anything. Endurance is costing 94 million now and I would hate to see it go lower. Nevertheless 10 points to quick or focus would be nice. The run to the sell back temple is nasty. I ran across my first Olthoi Warriors. While not really tough I was surprised that I missed a lot with 596 UA. (470 +27%) Things like miss, miss, hit, miss, miss should not happen at my level. They also hit me and with my melee defense that should not happen either. The spec/increase temple was not as bad but that could have just been my route. A later trip had a lot of monsters I normally see on the plains. That lowered my endurance to 194 and got my strength to 273, not far from maxing it out. I had been meaning to swap my armor out to something different. I tend to switch armor a lot for some reason. With having life now I did not need some of the armor. I had an al 200 set of armor with minor self on the leggings. I'll be tinkering it all up about 120 points over time. Final goal is to have a good set of armor for each player. Swapping out all the time is a pain. Aegis Shield Friday morning I decided it was time to go get an Aegis shield. Like most new quests I wait for them to thin out a bit before going. I was not sure if I could solo it but was willing to give it a shot. There is a lot of debate as to what skills the shield uses. Most think it is based on magic defense. One developer has hinted it isn't or is combined with something else. In any case it has me looking at spec'ing magic defense with Fist now. My base is 236 and buffs out to around 300 with a major I have. Spec'ing it would add 32 points. From experience with Mage I know that 330 magic defense is not effective against the harder stuff. Given that Fist only fights the harder stuff I did not think it was worth the points to spec it. If the Aegis is at least partially based on magic defense it may be worth spec'ing it now. I'll be getting the gems to un-train stuff and watching the boards. When we find out for sure that magic defense is worth spec'ing I'll be ready. The drawback is my loss of missile defense. For the most part I never see missile-tossing monsters but ever so often I'll run into the Lugie rocks or undead bows. Of course we might find that missile is part of getting the Aegis working and I'll have to lose lock pick. Lock pick is very useful but if missile defense will lower war damage that will swing it into the keep category. I can see why Turbine is keep some information from us but cannot totally agree with it. Players like me like to plan and play a mental game. We need all the information we can get. In any case someone will figure it all out and give us the information so they might as well have told us anyway. Quest The only hint I had about the quest was you should see Leandra at Martine's place. That is a short run or a portal from Mage. I took the run. She said I needed high grade Chorizite. A quick check of ACE showed me the path. I got a ride to the subway from a bot and then hit Mayoi. With only a short stop in Mayoi to kill a Pyreal Golem I got to the house portal close to the high Chorizite mine. From there I buffed up and was ready to go. The run was kind of nasty but I was in no danger. I got to the portal and headed down. I'm use to dispel traps that only effect level VI and below spells. I was surprised to find that this one dispelled my VII spells as well. So I hit the bottom with no buffs at all. To make matters worse I had neglected to grab my Lightning weapon off Jr. This left me with a fair, well-buffed, Acid weapon. I'm not sure if I had ever been in this dungeon. I really don't remember one way or another. I sure don't remember fighting this many Blue Lugies before. This was where my base melee and missile defense was key. My only real worry in the entire battle was stamina. With no buffs there was no way I was pulling my Drum out. I ended up sucking elixirs. One of them had the pick so I just needed to find a bit of ore to mine. I found some in a side shaft. It was guarded by six big Lugies but they were no match for me. It was a touch faster this time as I applied a few buffs after the first battle. From there it was back to Mayoi to get the next portal. Housing portals sure have made traveling a lot faster. It was a long run to the fortress before. Now it is a short, if nasty, jog there. To give you and idea how nasty I found a Coral Golem camping the fort's gate. I turned in the ore and got what I needed to give to Leandra. I ran back to Martine's and she gave me a paper and a bottle of something. The paper said the shield would be in a place along the beach of the Southern Landbridge. My only debate was north side or south side? I had run the south side a lot and it was a lot easier to get to. Nevertheless I figured it was going to be the north side. I guess I should have checked ACE but I was trying to do this with as little help as possible. The text said an old Armory. I had never seen anything like that before which made me try the side I don't go to often. Of course they likely made a new dungeon rather than re-worked one but that was a chance I was willing to take. If worse came to worse I would travel back over the south side. From the Landbridge portal in Qbar I ran north. I hit some Bandies around a chest. Luckily I had gotten my Lightning weapon off of Jr by now so I had the best attack. I had to get the weapons off of Jr as he had the fire weapon and I would need that for the undead. The eight Maulers and Mangles fell with little trouble. It helped that three of them spawned after I had killed the first five. While my attack is still weak against some things for others it is outstanding. New weapons are really helping. Or course with my adding 30 points from endurance to my main combat stats did not hurt. I hit the beach near a Mansion. I see a lot of mansions with no one there. The Elder mansion is seldom without people so I cannot see them being so empty all the time. I ran west and kept my eye open for a dungeon portal. A few clicks of running got me to The Abandon Armory. That named sounded right so I ran in. Yep, lot of undead. I had heard there was a horde of them there so I felt it was the right place. Someone told me the route was to keep going down. Most places are like that but it is good to have it confirmed. I came to a large room with around ten undead. They varied from Revenants to Dark Magus's and Leaches. As long as I did not give them a good target I was able to pick them off in groups of one to three. Their favorite spell was drain mana. I also had a lot of magic de-buffs on me but I had not intended to buff there anyway. Fortunately I had stamina elixirs with me because I was too debuffed to use my Life skills. After clearing that room I took the right passage. That curled around to another room with a room in the center. There were two doors and a passage opposite the side I came in. After clearing the room with some difficulty I was ready to hit the doors. Tactics A little hint on tactics here. When fighting a lot of monsters there are two schools of thought. Take out the weaker because they die fast or take out the ones hitting you. Which you use depends on a few factors. When I was fighting the Lugies none of them could hit me. This meant it behooved me to take out the weaker as stamina was the big problem, not damage. In the case of the undead another factor was there. Several of them had shields. All had the ability to hit me with spells. Fortunately those spells were de-buffing and drains. If they used war I would have had a far harder time. What this meant was I had to target the ones who did not have a shield first as they would die far faster. After all the non-shielded were dead I turned on the shielded ones. This meant I was cutting the spells casters down faster. The entire battle takes about the same time but the non-shielded ones were dead faster. I never had this problem today but there are times when you face things that hit you mixed with those that cannot. In that case I depend on stamina elixirs to get me through and target the hard hitters/spell casters first. Get the ones who can kill you out of the way and then clear the trash. Back to your program I was stuck. The doors said there was a different way to open them. Using the " [ " key while moving around the room failed to show me a switch or button. While switches and buttons will show with the " [ " keys a plate will not. So I figured there had to be a plate somewhere. I ran up the other passage but that just lead back to the first room. The spawn rate was such that I had to clear the second room several times. Finally I heard a click when in the room within a room. A quick check shows one of the doors was open. I headed up that passage into still another big room, with a room in the middle of it as well. It also had two doors that needed a trigger. After clearing the room I started running around the center room until I heard a click. I traveled along another passage until it split. One side hit a door. That did not look right so I backtracked and took the other passage. That lead down so I knew I was on the right track. Without warning I ran into another room. The rooms I had hit so far had a bend before each them so I was surprised when I ran into this one. Before I had a chance to figure out what was happening I was at 89 hit points. 89 hit points may seem like a lot but that meant I had lost over 200 points in that few seconds. I made it back to the ramp and away from danger. A quick heal had me back full. Following me up the passage was a Wisp. Well now I understood where all the damage came from. There were several Wisps in there chain casting. That might take out about anyone. Of course I did not have a piercing weapon buffed. I hit a dispel gem and watch about 20 lines of de-buffs disappear. That let me buff up my piercing weapon and attack the Wisp stuck in the passage. I would run into the room and kill a Wisp and run out. After the Wisps were dead I cleared the remaining undead. At the end of the room were the shields. I'm not sure if the color means anything as to their use. I figured I could always come back if I needed a different color. I grabbed a white one because it matches my armor. I hope the different colors are all the same but I have a bad feeling we will need one of each. I felt it was quite and accomplishment to solo it. Of course Balash will show me up by doing it naked. Alliance fun It all started with MS (Miss Smurfette) was on a quest. She did something, not sure what, that made her look very evil. They took a screen shot of it and had a few laughs. Then MS started getting majors up the wazoo. She sold three of them on the VN board. She has always been lucky with majors. One of my majors, with high missile requirement, she gave me. So Moby made a post about how she sold her soul for majors. This was proof that she was the Evil Smurf. --- Moby's Post This evil smurf in our midst has currently got TWO major items on sale on the boards and just finished selling another major! She has sold her little blue smurfy soul and is obtaining majors in return! Beware of thy evil Smurfy she will corrupt all around her with visions of piles of sing keys! Hear her tell tales how the ascendant drudge dropped the major or how the black rabbit dropped uber heaume. Guard yourselves against such wicked black smurfy magic. --- Now the fun begins. Wuyung and Heid called MS to the mansion saying they had something for her. When she arrived they started placing torches around her saying they were burning the witch. Then they chased her around the mansion with torches. It was all in good fun and we had a great laugh over it.