176 replies to this topic

[PurpleNinja]

Flash Frame, on 15 October 2014 - 11:26 PM, said:

This goes to show you that no, it's essentially cheating. It's a turbo button. There is a reason Turbo controllers are not allowed at MLG gaming events. So why is there an acceptance of utilizing Macro software to do the same thing?

I just don't understand the mentality.

Then you're giving video games too much credit. Like sports.

e-sports

This I don't understand.

Maybe we should define some standard for mouse and keyboard, because I may be cheating with my 8000 DPI mouse and my gaming keyboard.

[SCHLIMMER BESTIMMER XXX]

MadPanda, on 16 October 2014 - 04:13 AM, said:

21 ammo? Doesn't seem like a problem to me.

he simply dosent removed armor to carry more shots.my Quad-Gauss-DW carrys 70 shots )

[Aidan Crenshaw]

Necro, much?

Edited by Aidan Crenshaw, 05 February 2019 - 03:03 AM.

[VeeOt Dragon]

only have one thing to say about this stuff. using any Macro or outside program of any sort that gives you an advantage over an equally skilled player without it should be grounds for an immediate and permanent ban or better yet a loss of all XP, MC, C-Bills, and mechs. (we don't have the player base to be banning people sadly) so just reset their account to 0, make them start over completely.

Cheating is Cheating no matter how you want to spin it.

Edited by VeeOt Dragon, 05 February 2019 - 04:11 AM.

[RickySpanish]

I'm gettin' out my popcorn. Two bags at a time because it's macro'd.

[Curccu]

VeeOt Dragon, on 05 February 2019 - 04:10 AM, said:

only have one thing to say about this stuff. using any Macro or outside program of any sort that gives you an advantage over an equally skilled player without it should be grounds for an immediate and permanent ban or better yet a loss of all XP, MC, C-Bills, and mechs. (we don't have the player base to be banning people sadly) so just reset their account to 0, make them start over completely.

Cheating is Cheating no matter how you want to spin it.

Uuhh cool blast from the past thread...

What kind of advantage gauss macro gives you?

[Sjorpha]

Curccu, on 05 February 2019 - 05:30 AM, said:

What kind of advantage gauss macro gives you?

It allows you to fire the gauss as fast as possible after the chargeup, after exactly 750ms, which is otherwise close to impossible.Technically this allows you to maximise the fire rate and DPS of gauss rifles.

Usually this isn't much of an advantage as gauss isn't a DPS orianted weapons and you'll rather want manual control over releasing the shot while aiming. On the other hand having the macro on a separate button has no downside, you only have to use it when you want to.

I imagine it could be a more significant advantage if for example boating 4 light gauss, to maximize fire rate of the 2 pair and do some kind of extreme range DPS thing.

[Curccu]

Sjorpha, on 05 February 2019 - 06:31 AM, said:

It allows you to fire the gauss as fast as possible after the chargeup, after exactly 750ms, which is otherwise close to impossible.Technically this allows you to maximise the fire rate and DPS of gauss rifles.

Usually this isn't much of an advantage as gauss isn't a DPS orianted weapons and you'll rather want manual control over releasing the shot while aiming. On the other hand having the macro on a separate button has no downside, you only have to use it when you want to.

I imagine it could be a more significant advantage if for example boating 4 light gauss, to maximize fire rate of the 2 pair and do some kind of extreme range DPS thing.

So might get minimal DPS increase over losing control of your weapon, wouldn't count that as real advantage.

[Grus]

I'm double offended by the Necro (stop this ****) and that this wasn't done with a kdk-3..

[Mole]

Honestly I could achieve the same effect with my fingers and the game's built in chain fire and weapon grouping functions. No macro required.

Edited by Mole, 05 February 2019 - 07:53 AM.

[Teenage Mutant Ninja Urbie]

Mole, on 05 February 2019 - 07:51 AM, said:

Honestly I could achieve the same effect with my fingers and the game's built in chain fire and weapon grouping functions. No macro required.

I agree, but the gaussmacro might make things easier for beginners, specifically. I know I hated the ChargeUp when I started out in MWO.
there's 3 ways around that: don't use it, train to use it, or continue to not get it right, which will p|ss beginners off. macro is meh and a trap, but beginners don't know better and might see it as more of a "Quality of Life"-tool.

things like the charge-up, running unskilled mechs against our 91p skilled out ones, no documentary on ANYTHING ingame (for those not familiar via battletech), unintuitive UI etc .. so many things in this game that drive beginners off. PGI should really work on that (in a time-machine, going back to 2014 or so )

[El Bandito]

SHRedo, on 05 February 2019 - 02:49 AM, said:

he simply dosent removed armor to carry more shots.my Quad-Gauss-DW carrys 70 shots )

Too much leg armor.

Sjorpha, on 05 February 2019 - 06:31 AM, said:

I imagine it could be a more significant advantage if for example boating 4 light gauss, to maximize fire rate of the 2 pair and do some kind of extreme range DPS thing.

Latency and server stability mess up with it too much to my liking. Exact 750ms macro on Gauss is too unreliable.

[Grus]

El Bandito, on 05 February 2019 - 08:19 AM, said:

Too much leg armor.

.

PSA; bandit skips leg day.

[Phyrce]

CMDR Sunset Shimmer, on 15 October 2014 - 11:26 PM, said:

you're missing the point of this.

You can fire 2 gauss together? yeah?

So macro 2-2 gauss together like this, as shown at the end of the video. That is DEVASTATING... 60 damage pinpoint, at relatively the same location due to the speed of the macro.

I used to yell, and scream at anyone who would listen about how Macros are a 3rd party cheat, because they circumvent your personal ability to time things, to do it for you. I was told, over and over again, that no, macro's are not a cheat, and that they are totally valid.

This goes to show you that no, it's essentially cheating. It's a turbo button. There is a reason Turbo controllers are not allowed at MLG gaming events. So why is there an acceptance of utilizing Macro software to do the same thing?

I just don't understand the mentality.

So, marginally worse than heavy gauss followed up with lasers? Slipnir and Fafnir do 70 points damage, albeit at a MUCH shorter range. 2nd point of contention, you cannot charge more than 2 Gauss at a time. so your idea wouldnt even work.

[El Bandito]

Grus, on 05 February 2019 - 09:37 AM, said:

PSA; bandit skips leg day.

Oh by all means shoot at my legs. That would really help me to spread the damage in SQ matches.

[thievingmagpi]

again, people upset about macros demonstrate they don't understand how macros work/what they can do.

previous issues with "macro exploits" were the fault of broken underlying mechanics. Yes, the use of a macro allowed you to access that exploit easier, but the issue was with the broken mechanic.

Unless there's an exploit being uses, macros do not confer any advantage beyond convenience.

[Khobai]

SI The Joker, on 16 October 2014 - 07:14 AM, said:

Pointless mechanic is pointless.

Chargeup is definitely pointless the way its implemented on gauss.

The purpose of the chargeup mechanic is for weapons with variable levels of charge. Think megamans arm cannon. Or in MWO the proper use of chargeup mechanic would be for PPC capacitors (if PGI ever adds them) because they have variable charge levels. Thats how you use chargeup in a beneficial intuitive way.

Gauss should not use the chargeup mechanic. Especially since Gauss is meant to be a sniping weapon and a sniping weapon that cant snapfire is self-defeating. Gauss should absolutely be able to snapfire and theres far better ways to balance Gauss than chargeup, like making it generate substantial heat. The fact it generates next to no heat is the whole reason its always been broken in battletech and MWO before it was nerfed.

PGI should not be adding frustration mechanics to their weapons anyway. Thats dumb. And it doesnt make the weapon require any extra skill anyway because people can just macro around it. And new players that dont know how to macro around it just get unnecessarily frustrated by it, and thats BAD for the game.

RACs/UACs suffer from the same problem. Spoolup time and RNG jamming also exist purely as a frustration mechanics. Theyre not used intuitively in a way that rewards players. RNG jamming is one of the worst offenders for a game mechanic that punishes players unfairly for no good reason.

The purpose of unique weapons mechanics is not to make weapons frustrating and punish the player. Its to make weapons unique and intuitive while rewarding the player for understanding the mechanics. PGI doesnt get it.

El Bandito, on 05 February 2019 - 08:19 AM, said:

Latency and server stability mess up with it too much to my liking. Exact 750ms macro on Gauss is too unreliable.

you dont have to make it exactly 750ms.

nobody can manually fire a gauss rifle every time at exactly 750ms anyway. so adding small delay depending on your latency isnt going to make you worse off than someone firing it manually.

Edited by Khobai, 05 February 2019 - 11:24 AM.

[Sjorpha]

El Bandito, on 05 February 2019 - 08:19 AM, said:

Latency and server stability mess up with it too much to my liking. Exact 750ms macro on Gauss is too unreliable.

I've made tons of macros including for gauss, there is no latency issues and the gauss will fire with 100% reliability. I think that the client simply communicates to the server when the gauss rifle is firing, there doesn't seem to be a server side handling of the charge up or at least not the kind that interferes with the charge time.

I have the same experience with macros for other weapons like chain fired ballistics. You can cut the chain fire calculation down to the last millisecond without causing skipped shots or any other timing issues.

Edited by Sjorpha, 05 February 2019 - 11:22 AM.

[LordNothing]

i did come up with a precharge macro. it would cycle charging on all your guns incrementally. about 1/2 off all your gauss would be kept in a charged state at all times such that they can be instantly fired when the user hits the fire button. any gausses that fire are put in stand by for one cd cycle, after which they are added to the cycling pool. which cycles at 1/n the cd rate (n=number of actively cycling guns). thus this is the minimum interval for refiring single guns, you can fire continuously at this rate. four guns is the best bet because you can max out the 2x limit. you can also alternate between singles and doubles with 3 guns. with 2 guns its just trading refire rate with face time. you can also do weird things on the is side with weird mixes of all 3 gauss sizes.

also the "macro" is actually done hardware side as i got an arduino pretending to be a usb mouse/keyboard/joystick. the macros are written in c++ and compiled directly into firmware. thinking about using a macro language that is easy to parse and serialize. you could use those to build control profiles which could be stored on a flash chip or sd card. but i lost interest in that project.

Edited by LordNothing, 05 February 2019 - 02:36 PM.

[El Bandito]

Sjorpha, on 05 February 2019 - 11:21 AM, said:

I've made tons of macros including for gauss, there is no latency issues and the gauss will fire with 100% reliability. I think that the client simply communicates to the server when the gauss rifle is firing, there doesn't seem to be a server side handling of the charge up or at least not the kind that interferes with the charge time.

I have the same experience with macros for other weapons like chain fired ballistics. You can cut the chain fire calculation down to the last millisecond without causing skipped shots or any other timing issues.

Not my experience. When I first made the Gauss macro I used exactly 750ms, and it fizzled about 20% of the time without firing, in live matches. The chance of misfire was heavily reduced after I made the charge timer more lenient by making it 900ms. For info, my average ping is 220ms and I regularly dip below 60 fps in live matches.

Also when I tested the RACro, in Testing Grounds it did a lot more damage than in Private Lobby. So latency or server stability does affect the timing.

Edited by El Bandito, 05 February 2019 - 06:01 PM.