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Macrogoblin and SWTOR PvP
Hairyzac
Member Posts: 57
A good while ago someone made a post on the official swtor forums about a program that basically plays your character in PvP for you better than you supposedly ever could. Supposedly there are a couple different programs capable. Claims were even made that the best players competing in ranked war zones were using these programs to be the best.
Now a good amount of time has passed, and that post has since been deleted by Bioware. Now, basically the same post has popped back up with a different author: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=608444
If you can't be bothered to read the entire thread, it basically is back and forth with people claiming these types of programs exist and that they quit the game until Bioware does something...and the people who understand that programs like this exist but cannot possibly play your character better than you can in PvP.
Now I decided to post this here because on the official swtor PvP forum, everyone is flipping out that if they say anything directly about or regarding where or how to do any of this the thread will be deleted and Bioware will ignore them. So here, you can freely discuss the thread that I linked. You can tell us your experience with these types of programs and if you use them for swtor or other games. You can talk about if you know any people personally that are currently using these types of programs in swtor. You can elaborate on how it could be possible that a program looping scripts could ever possibly beat an experienced team of PvPers in ranked wzs.
The answer I personally am looking for is video proof of someone using one of these programs, such as Macrogoblin, to actually play their character in ranked war zones for them against teams that are considered somewhat good and winning these matches. I want proof of this person winning ranked games against decent teams with this program where they do nothing at all except move their character around while the program itself executes all the abilities itself and you sit there and basically do absolutely nothing.
Comments
No ne seems to be responding to you so I'll give it a whirl. I'm not an expert and I'm sure there are people who can write this up better than me. This will be long, but I will try not to mention any specific bots or cheating software by name.
Cheating has always been big in SWTOR.
The game doesn't really have any sort of anti-cheat software running. (Presumed since it already had peformance issues, anything added to increase client side/server side trafic would be bad.)
SWTOR Bots fall into 4 main categories:
The grind bot - Dump him somewhere cozy, and it slowly kills mobs for XP and loot, can be spotted and reported. - inefficient
(Although now SWTOR is ftp, it presents a unique oppurtunity to multi-box grindbots)
The craft-bot - Sends crew members out on crafting missions all through the day. - Efficient
Can't be reported. Drives up inflation slightly, not much since crafting in the game is pretty borked economically anyway.
The PVP bot- Not the nightmare drone you allude to. It just walks around a warzone picking up a modest of amount of share kills, victory/defeat points. It disquises itself by running through a script of "defensive" measures if attacked. Designed to help with the PVP grind - Inefficient.
The Space Bot- This is SWTOR's dirty little secret. Since the Space missions are undynamic, once programed, the space bot would run through the mission 24/7. Also since you are alone in space missions, unreportable. - ludicrously efficient.
There have been antecdotal tales of someone parking a toon and having the bot grind to 50, and gain 30 million credits in the process.
This directly affects the game inflation. Inflation creates the need for money sinks. Money sinks creates the need for more dailies for casuals.
This got so bad, that when the cartel market created another level of inflation, the game developers had to step in and finally address the space botting. This is way repeatable space missions no longer award credits. (Which hurt the cartel market's sales in ship upgrade parts, the problem was so bad Bioware undercut the demand for their cartel shop products.)
The Speed Hack: The other main cheat (which affects PVP mainly)
As stated, the game has no inate software sniffing this out. The benefits of the speed hack are pretty obvious.
1. Speed
2. Invunurability (the speed is actually obtained by warping around in small incremments, you can't target the speed hacker)
3. Weird phasing shit- The teleport affect can allow the hacker to discover ways to warp through walls, bypass shields, etc.
Policing was near impossible when there were millions of players. Once the exodus began, the developer seemed loathe to ban paying subscribers. Now there is little staff. A few months back, when the majority of the forums were denying that speed hacks exsisted (despite demos and videos on Youtube) one player used speed hacks all the damn time (not to win) just as a mini-protest and wasn't banned for weeks.
Scripting: This is what creates the rated warzone imbalance.
Scripting is basically stringing together a bunch of macros. It doesn't create an ustoppable charcter per se, (not is it a bot) but it gives the player such a competative advantage over players not scripting that it is essentially an "I WIn" button.
Other games combat this by making the use of both scripting, and non-ingame supported macros illegal. Officially SWTOR doesn't support macros at all, but then again it does.
Before launch, SWTOR made a deal with Razer to create officially sanctioned gaming hardware, which ships with macro and script authoring software. So since there is no offical macro support, anything goes for someone using macros, who's effect is amplified exponentially when strung together in scripts.
So the short answer is that there is no Bot which can by itself win a PVP warzone, but a player who use's macros daisy chained with scripts, and can even pepper his game with a bit of speed hacking, has such an advantage, the only way to beat him (or his team of people doing the same thing) is to do the same thing. The game becomes less of a game and more of an arms race.
There are varied strategies that allow a player to cheat through the XP grind, make tons of credits, blow through crafting, and get a huge edge in PVP.
Since Bioware seemed ill prepared to combat this activities (which do make the game a little less fun for everyone not cheating) many people say that Bioware just wasn't ready for MMOs.
Does cheating defeat the point of a game? Yes. But as the guy who said he was quitting because of the rampant cheating, being forced to cheat to be on par with cheaters sort of destroys the point of a game as well.
Does that answer your question, or was it just a big wall of whatever?
Thank you for the time you took to respond. It does indeed seem like people don't care to join the conversation here. However, what you typed up doesn't answer my main question. That is, can someone provide video proof of a player using a program such as Macrogoblin while doing rated war zone matches against a somewhat skilled teamed, and beating them purely because of this program playing their character for them almost entirely. This is what continues to be alledged on the official swtor forums but not a single person has provided actual proof. This is not the official swtor forum so people can link actual proof here. But I think the likelihood of seeing proof of something so ridiculous is far fetched.
I don't think you are going to find a feed or fraps (does anyone use that anymore?) of someone using a bot, or more specifically that bot. If they were silly enough to post the vid, I'm sure a little digging on the youtubes will yield something. However, I don't think you'll find anything. Most the folks who would run something like that usually do it so they have some sort of advantage, and advertising how that's done, would take away from that advantage, and thus they would no longer have it.
But I am curious, why do you want to see it?
All I did while playing SWTOR was PVP. In fact, I leveled two of my characters purely through PVP and the quest stories. I never did a single quest on them.
That being said, I find it extremely hard to believe that there is a true PVP bot in the sense that the player is simply not present at the keyboard in any way. Sure you can have a bot join a match and walk around doing things very badly, but not in the sense that it would be able to influence the outcome of a match.
On the other hand! I 100% believe that the best players are using macros. I know I sure as hell did. I play all of my MMO's with a G13 gamepad and a Razer Naga mouse. I put most of my abilities on my mouse, but I also used the macro software on my G13 to chain abilities for my characters.
For insance, my Jedi Shadow had a few "power up" abilities. I would chain those abilities and attacks on the same key. So I would hit the key that tosses rocks at people and that key would automatically chain the power up for it first. If it was on CD, that didn't matter, just nothing happened when it was clicked again.
I also had a couple of combinations of attacks that did maximum damage. When I would run up to a full health character in stealth, I could push one button and that would immediately chain in order: Knockdown attack out of stealth, power up the rock tossing ability, toss rocks at them, second stun, most powerful lightsaber attack. All with one button.
On my commando there was an attack that could be used against someone three times, each time it would reduce their armor by a certain amount. Then if you followed up with a power attack, it would do maximum damage. I believe it was Grav Round x3 followed by something called Power Bolt. I had a macro that would chain three grav rounds and a power bolt at the same target.
So yeah, Macros were a big deal and all of the top players that didn't have boringly simple classes to play, used them. Bots, on the other hand are pretty much inconsequential to PVP.
Do athletes on steroids advetize how great they work?
Anyway, you'ld have to find someone willing to lose their investment in the "bot" or cheating software, their investment in the game, their charcter, and account to make a video. Since they would probably be teamed up with like minded players, he would have to give them up as well; this is to find a video documenting the cheating software in action.
Also, any cheats is going to just give an advantage, let's arbitrarily call it a 15-25% advantage over someone equiped in the same gear. I never tried to imply it turned players into a GM godmode, or ran autonomously and beat up a premade group for you.
You can google SWTOR bots, hax, and the such. (There are some mild YouTube demos out there) They are pretty sensative about that stuff here as well.
I never could understand why people would cheat in games. Nor in any other area of life if that matter.
I never encountered anything suspicious in SWTOR, but then I did not look. It does not affect my fun in the game.
I hope that gaming community will send strong message against cheaters.
Sith Warrior - Story of Hate and Love http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxKrlwXt7Ao
Imperial Agent - Rise of Cipher Nine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBBj3eJWBvU&feature=youtu.be
Imperial Agent - Hunt for the Eagle Part 1http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQqjYYU128E
As an analogy, the non-cheating player has unguided rockets, the cheating player has heat-seeking guided missles. It doesn't take over combat for you, but gives the cheater a leg up.
Most MMOs use anti-cheat software. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_online_games#Anti-cheating_methods_and_limitations
SWTOR to the best of my knowledge does not.
Blizzard uses their home brewed Warden.
You might like reading the rest of the wikipedia link.
No such animal. If there was, Blizzard would have patented it.
You are dealing with human beings here. Human beings are clever and when anonymous are likely to do anything they can get away with... starting with eating your ice cream and progressing up to hacking MMOs and then onto REAL life impacting mischief.
You report and move on. Bioware security has the ball from that point on.
Um, no. Check link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warden_%28software%29
As I said, Blizzard uses Warden, it made a big hoopla in that people even sued for it being spyware, tons of articles, drama and controversey.
Andryah is either woefully misinformed or blatantly lying. This is unsurprising.
Some background.
I am a computer programmer with 20 years experience.
I have used Macrogoblin to build PvP scripts for SWTOR.
I was watching a video of some rated PvP and I noticed that the player's hands did not seems to be pressing the keys as frequently as I would have expected. I was aware of simple macro's to chain commands, but even that didn't appear to me to explain it.
I had used Macrogoblin to spacebot for leveling purposes. It occured to me at that time that maybe this, or something like this, was what the player was doing.
I spend a few days learning the full command set to macrogoblin as was able to write a script for my character. The first character I chose to script was a Jedi Shadow. My thinking was that since almost all of their abilities didn't require standing still, it would make the script easier to write.
The script was initated when I pressed my straff keys. I would use my mouse and straff keys to position myself behind the target, this is optimal for both offensive and defensive reasons. For the following 5 seconds after I pressed either of my straff keys, the script is designed to continuosly attack the target. It checks to see which procs are up and makes sure that I don't become resource depleted. It wil pop an offensive cooldown when the right proccs are up. It will also execute some defensive cooldowns if my health starts dropping. It will stop attacking if I cloak out or manually start activating abilities like stuns, AoE attacks, or grenades. As soon as I start straffing again, the script continues it's attack.
It will not fire things like stuns, reslience, wz medpacks and addrenals. Those are best activated by the player.
I was very surpised how effective the script was. It greatly reduced the amount of mental effort I needed to spend on my rotation and allowed me to focus on the big picture. It increased my damage in WZ total and allowed me to win almost all 1v1 fights. It allowed me to focus on timing my stuns, interupts, taunts, etc better. Most of these can be interleaved with the script easily as many don't even trigger a GCD.
Did it make me a PvP god? Yes and No. It made me FAR better than I was. It made me far better than most people I came up against. But, there are still players who can kick my ass. Just not very many.
After using the script for a while, I noticed that the other players were exhibiting certain quirky actions that my character also exhibited when using scripts. I am convinced that I am not the only one using scripts in PvP.
If there are any questions that I can answer please ask.
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
When a warzone ends, everyone is frozen and can't attack. After the scoreboard goes up, there is a small window where you can attack again. The script player's script is still running, so he starts his rotation automatically when the attack window opens up again. The character ususally doesn't even move. It's just a basic attack rotation going off. He realizes he forgot to stop his script and does so after a few attacks land.
I do realize that some players will intentionally attack during this period, so you can't be 100% certain from just this. I've made this mistake plenty of times myself, so it's pretty obvious when others do it too.