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Or, for that matter, an FPS where all players have autoaim).

Sounds like any console FPS... guess what.. there's proxying cheat tools for those too. All you did was reduce the amount of skill required and dumbed the game down.

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Others have already said that there are some MMORPGs out there that have succeeded with this approach.

They were wrong. There's bots and cheats for every single one of those games. Just because you don't have access to them doesn't mean they don't exist. There's gold farming operations paying developers pretty good money to develop bots for every single MMORPG out there with more than 100 000 subscribers.

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In general, the more strategic a game is, the less likely a macro system will be useful.

Yeah chess is generally not seen as a strategic game at all.

As I said the only game I can think of where you'd not have any advantage on any significant level is GO. I'm sure that one will be broken as well given the amount of research going on with that game. There's probably other games as well but they're pretty damn few.

Quote:Original post by asp_

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Or, for that matter, an FPS where all players have autoaim).

Sounds like any console FPS... guess what.. there's proxying cheat tools for those too. All you did was reduce the amount of skill required and dumbed the game down.

Quote:
Others have already said that there are some MMORPGs out there that have succeeded with this approach.

They were wrong. There's bots and cheats for every single one of those games. Just because you don't have access to them doesn't mean they don't exist. There's gold farming operations paying developers pretty good money to develop bots for every single MMORPG out there with more than 100 000 subscribers.

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In general, the more strategic a game is, the less likely a macro system will be useful.

Yeah chess is generally not seen as a strategic game at all.

As I said the only game I can think of where you'd not have any advantage on any significant level is GO. I'm sure that one will be broken as well given the amount of research going on with that game. There's probably other games as well but they're pretty damn few.

making a chess AI that is superior to good players isn't easy though, (and would require pretty decent amounts of processor power), GO is even harder (noone have succeeded yet), and it is definitly possible to design a game where the strategic or even better, social elements are so critical that it would be hard to create effective bots.

a generally more effective solution than trying to design a game to reduce the incentives for macroing would be to create systems that help the staff detect macroers and take action on a case by case basis. (creating a bot that is capable of making a GM belive its a human is extremely difficult), all thats needed is some way to automatically warn GMs of suspicious activites (detecting patterns etc)

Amazing. I didn't expect this thread to grow so much. Thanks everyone, you've given me a lot to think about!

Here's my opinion on a few of the ideas:

Making it interactive enough that you wouldn't need macros:
Wonderful idea, but there's always a use for macros. I plan on doing this anyways though, just to make the game fun. Say you like leveling yourself... but would still want to gain experience while sleeping? There's a reason to macro. Say PvP takes skills, however a certain bot could give you an unfair advantage (like aimbots in FPS')... 'nother macro right there.

Blizzard style:
I like how this sounds... I'll look into it.

Detecting repeatitive movement:
Well, this is never something that should automatically ban people as there will ALWAYS be people who get banned innocently. Like mentioned above, it'd be smarter to turn this into a system where instead of banning someone, it'd alert a gamemaster in which they could look into it themselves.

And now back to the hole from which I came!


-Aternus