289 replies to this topic

[Aetes Nakatomi]

I use a program called voice attack. Which I have taken the time to set up so that it remembers what I have turned on, so for instance if I try to turn on night vision when I already have it on it give an error sound rather than toggle it again, if I switch to thermal it does it instantly on screen but in voice attack it turns the night vision entry back to 0 and switches thermal to 1.

[Mcgral18]

Helene de Montfort, on 08 June 2016 - 02:11 AM, said:

It's really funny to see how many people think macros don't give any advantage, but still don't want them to be banned. If they don't give you any advantage, why use them? Or if you don't use them, why do you care about them being banned?

It has been stated multiple times:
Complete and utter waste of PGIs very limited programming time

[Hydrocarbon]

Macros give us an advantage, few of us are deluding ourselves that they aren't. However they'd be pointless if PGI gave us the ability to deal with ghost heat properly. Otherwise ghost heat mechanics penalize those w/o great timing and give those with a good rhythm a clear advantage.

Most probably feel the same way I do: that pgi should offer "channel mixing", to coin a term from the R/C radio world. Instead of chain-firing a single weapon group, it could burst-fire one group then fire the 2nd group "mixed" with it. It also vexes everyone I've discussed with why PGI doesn't let us adjust the timing between firing each weap in a chained group.

In any case it comes down to this: PGI rarely changes their mind outside an act of god, so why beat a dead horse? It's easier to set up a macro than it is a fresh mech in mechlab, so stop complaining. Focus on something that would impact the entire population for the better, such as HIT DETECTION or fixing phase 2...

[Moldur]

Hydrocarbon, on 08 June 2016 - 08:47 AM, said:

Macros give us an advantage, few of us are deluding ourselves that they aren't. However they'd be pointless if PGI gave us the ability to deal with ghost heat properly. Otherwise ghost heat mechanics penalize those w/o great timing and give those with a good rhythm a clear advantage.

Most probably feel the same way I do: that pgi should offer "channel mixing", to coin a term from the R/C radio world. Instead of chain-firing a single weapon group, it could burst-fire one group then fire the 2nd group "mixed" with it. It also vexes everyone I've discussed with why PGI doesn't let us adjust the timing between firing each weap in a chained group.

In any case it comes down to this: PGI rarely changes their mind outside an act of god, so why beat a dead horse? It's easier to set up a macro than it is a fresh mech in mechlab, so stop complaining. Focus on something that would impact the entire population for the better, such as HIT DETECTION or fixing phase 2...

Glad you're being honest.

It's not just that PGI can't change their mind. For in-person finals, all macros are banned. Perhaps it is a bit too forward to infer from that, but it sounds like if PGI could, they would do something about macros, but they can't unless it is in person. Maybe they just don't care that much unless it is something under scrutiny. Maybe they could ban macros, but they just don't care that much.

Mcgral18, on 08 June 2016 - 08:11 AM, said:

It has been stated multiple times:
Complete and utter waste of PGIs very limited programming time

The sometimes ******, continuously updated anticheat for tons of other free online game can manage it.

Edited by Moldur, 08 June 2016 - 09:55 AM.

[Mole]

I have never used a macro and I have never felt disadvantaged by it. Hell, only macro I've ever even noticed is someone macroing a rapid fire of their 6 AC/2s. Macros make things more convenient, I'm sure, but I've never been at a noticeable disadvantage against someone else's macro. Maybe you just need to... "Git Gud™".

[Narcissistic Martyr]

Mystere, on 08 June 2016 - 07:17 AM, said:

Which reminds me, are ASUS' "Sonic Radar 2" (sound direction/source visualization) and "Gameplus Technology" (in-monitor crosshair) even allowed? Are they even detectable?

Not sure if they're allowed (ask support) but every mech type has its own distinct foot falls and combined with surround sound and listening you can tell which direction the enemy is coming from, how fast they're moving, and what sort of weight class mech they're driving. Granted seismic does the same thing more or less and the tiny handful of people who have the audio setup and ability to use the audio cues to that effect are mostly from before modules existed and musician types.

[Mole]

Narcissistic Martyr, on 08 June 2016 - 12:00 PM, said:

Not sure if they're allowed (ask support) but every mech type has its own distinct foot falls and combined with surround sound and listening you can tell which direction the enemy is coming from, how fast they're moving, and what sort of weight class mech they're driving. Granted seismic does the same thing more or less and the tiny handful of people who have the audio setup and ability to use the audio cues to that effect are mostly from before modules existed and musician types.

I can do this to an extent. I'm not anywhere close to being able to identify a 'mechs footfalls by chassis but I can get a rough guesstimation of what kind of weight class I am dealing with. There's been multiple times where little graphical and audio details that are often overlooked have given me an advantage. One such example is shadows. There's been numerous times I have known a 'mech was waiting around the corner for me because I noticed it casting a shadow. Just as there have also been numerous times that I have known something was coming around a corner that I was hiding behind because I heard its footsteps coming and judging by the speed of the footfalls and by the sound I can judge whether I'm about to be dealing with a light/medium or a heavy/assault. A lot of people like to listen to music and stuff while playing MWO but I can never bring myself to do so because I find the information I get by being able to hear what's going on around me in the game far too valuable to drown out with music. Listening for footsteps has saved me in my assault 'mechs numerous times, where I have heard a light 'mech stomp up right behind me, thinking I would be unaware as he lined up my rear CT only to have me swing around on him.

Edited by Mole, 08 June 2016 - 12:09 PM.

[Yellonet]

No matter, no honourable player uses macros anyway.

[Tarogato]

Hydrocarbon, on 08 June 2016 - 08:47 AM, said:

Macros give us an advantage, few of us are deluding ourselves that they aren't. However they'd be pointless if PGI gave us the ability to deal with ghost heat properly.

WHAT MACROS?

Crikey, people keep saying this but then they don't really give good examples. Since you mentioned ghost heat, here's an example... is this what you mean?

Ghost heat triggers within 0.50 seconds. So if you can fire the maximum allowable alpha first, and fire the rest of your guns exactly 0.50 seconds after, you will have output the maximum possible damage in the least amount of time. But if you're slow and your second trigger pulls takes 0.70 seconds instead, you could be losing out on damage or taking extra return fire. Macro wins!

But really, does it matter? Case study:

There's probably a better way to do this, but I used this tool because it is familiar to me: http://www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm

I tried tapping the 0.50 second interval to see how close I came to the mark. The goal would be to hit 120bpm and not exceed it. Here are the results of ten tries:



So instead of the perfect 0.50 second interval, my faulty human perception of time gave me an average of about ... 0.54 seconds. Which is an 8.5% error (0.0426 seconds), which sounds bad. But more importantly, how much damage did I miss out on? Let's look at several mech builds:

BNC-3M with 5x LPL: each laser deals 11 damage in 0.603 seconds. If I fire three and then two to avoid ghost heat, the time it should take to get all of my guns on target is 0.603 seconds plus the 0.50 second interval that I waited for a total of 1.103 seconds to fire everything. If I have exactly a 1.103 seconds interval to get my shot off, but instead wait 0.54 seconds to avoid ghost heat, then I miss out on that 0.0426 seconds worth of damage that I could have done if I were using a perfect macro. Which with this build equates to a whopping 1.5 damage. Nothing to write home about.

QKD-5K with 4x LL: each laser deals 9 damage across 0.95 seconds. The extra 0.0426 seconds that I waited for ghost heat would equate to missing 0.404 damage.

<insertClanmechHere> with 3x cLPL: each laser deals 13 damage across 1.12 seconds. The extra 0.0426 seconds equates to me missing out on 0.494 damage.

---

Okay, so that's how much damage you would have missed out on under the scenario where you only had the exact minimum possible time to get all of your damage off. But in practice, in the actual game, how often do you only have 1.103 seconds and no more to fire off everything in your Banshee? Or even 1.62 seconds in the case of the triple cLPL build? In the actual game, a difference of 0.0426 seconds is not going to matter. These are not CSGO player models that zip around on 128-tick servers, these are slow, lumbering mechs in comparatively large open maps.

That is why I don't use macros - because they don't provide any appreciable benefit, they simply aren't worth the fuss. People who think the comp-tryhards are leveraging macros against them to gleen that extra less than of a 10th of a second advantage in laser burn times or gauss charge... are imagining things. They are getting pwnd by half-decent players and rather than accept that maybe they themselves aren't infallible gods at the game, they assume their opponents had an unfair advantage. It's a really similar behaviour to cheaters, now that I think about it. Cheaters are particularly prone to calling hackusations on other players because well, "I'm cheating, he shouldn't be able to beat me because I'm cheating. Therefore he MUST be cheating also! HA! CHEATER!" ... which I find funny.

[627]

Bobzilla, on 08 June 2016 - 02:28 AM, said:

It will be great to revisit this topic when alphas cause a penalty. I'm sure it will be disregarded, just like now with avoiding GH perfectly with a single click is now, right 627?

The point is, if anyone can do it, it's not an unfair advantage.

Stop arguing if its an advantage, the argument is its not unfair cause everyone has access.

If you want to avoid Ghost heat *perfectly* you'd use chainfire. For example the 6 LL somethingmech would have 3 weapon groups wit 2 LL each on chainfire. you fire all 3 groups at once and you get your 6 LL without ghost heat. No macro needed *and* you can be certain as this trigger is server side.

What many people forget is that your macro, calibrated to the last millisecond is only client side and has no feedback from the game whatsoever. so it can't compensate lags or ping spikes it is less consistent than the given ingame tools.

[Tarogato]

627, on 08 June 2016 - 01:40 PM, said:

If you want to avoid Ghost heat *perfectly* you'd use chainfire. For example the 6 LL somethingmech would have 3 weapon groups wit 2 LL each on chainfire. you fire all 3 groups at once and you get your 6 LL without ghost heat. No macro needed *and* you can be certain as this trigger is server side.

Except then you'd need a macro to fire all three groups together with one (or two) buttons. Operating three buttons at once just to fire an alpha strike is cumbersome and ill-advised, it can affect your aim, and you pretty much need a gaming mouse with extra buttons in order to do it at all (which puts us back at square one again). Not to mention, if you are using and pressing three buttons just to alpha strike, and they are chainfire groups, that doesn't leave you many options to bind left-peek, right-peek, high-peek, and arm-mounted weapons groups. Nobody goes through the trouble of doing this, they just put three weapons in one group, the other three weapons in another group, and fire them manually, as everybody does. And then you'd have auxiliary groups for whatever you need them for (arms only, high mounts only, etc)

Omaha, on 08 June 2016 - 01:43 PM, said:

Why does it have to be OP to be considered? Seriously there are things called humans. Humans are supposed to be piloting mechs, not machines. Human error, human reactions, and human consistency should all be a necessity of play. Not a programmed interface! That allows you to always time shots out perfectly, or shorten your reaction time, taking a shortcut around practice. I believe macros take the game beyond just tactical play, and practice. Taking it to a level, of programming knowledge, that has no play, business being in the competitive, or gaming mechwarrior world PERIOD.

There are no macros that take the skill out of playing this game. Please provide an example. I'll list several. Have I missed any?



- dakka macros: allows you to fire your guns in a perfectly staggered manner, which can be approximately accomplished without a macro and makes no real difference. Also, like any method of chainfiring, this spreads your damage and makes you less effective - good players won't be affected by the cockpit shake, so it's only good for suppressing noobs.

- ghost-heat macros: allows you to program the 0.50 second delay so that you don't have to do it yourself. But you *can* do it yourself. It is easy, it takes no skill, and we're used to it to the point that it is of no inconvenience at all. See my previous post in this thread.

- gauss macros: auto-fires your gauss immediately when it charges (and can fire other weapons simultaneously, such as PPCs), which is actually a disadvantage because with this macro you cannot time your shot, it fires after the timer is up, regardless of whether you're ready and have it lined up or not. You would need to reprogram the macro so that the gauss only fires when you tell it to, so that you can be sure you're shooting exactly when you've aligned the crosshair on the target. But wait... that's how gauss works without a macro anyways, so we don't use a macro for it.

- uac-jam macros: these haven't been a thing ever since PGI removed the unjamming mechanic from the game and changed UACs so that you can hold the button down to fire them at the maximum recycle rate without double-taps. In other words, these are pointless and accomplish nothing.

- jumpjet macros: if you can't mash your spacebar and you need a macro to do it for you, then you are a sad individual. This isn't CSGO where there is a value to bunny-hopping scripts because consistent bunny-hopping is a skill, this is MWO, where jumpjet spam consists of you mindlessly mashing your spacebar. Not only that, but jumpjet-mashing has little value anyways - it made a bit of a difference before PGI revised a lot of the jumpjet animations so that they weren't completely broken (I'm looking at you, Timberwolf) but you'll notice that nobody is doing this anymore. All you need to do is tap your jets once or twice when you think the enemy is about to shoot you, there is no need to do anything more than that, so that's what we all do (if we remember to do it at all... )

Omaha, on 08 June 2016 - 01:43 PM, said:

I believe even chat macro break this, and give you an edge over everyone else, because your dont need to stop and type in your message. While others do. Because due to how the gam3 is programed while chatting you cant operate other functions of your mech (movement and weapons and the like)

There's this thing called VOIP. Also, I have no problem typing out message in chat when I feel like putting in a little more effort for my team and don't want to use VOIP. ... ALSO, how many macros would you need to have to convey anything that you might type in chat to help your team? You'd need a macro for each grid location, for each letter designation, macros for things like "push now", or "turn around and face" and "quit blocking me you pathetic noob" ... for all the hotkeys you'd have, it'd probably be easier to just type it in chat yourself.

Edited by Tarogato, 08 June 2016 - 02:39 PM.

[Mystere]

627, on 08 June 2016 - 01:40 PM, said:

If you want to avoid Ghost heat *perfectly* you'd use chainfire. For example the 6 LL somethingmech would have 3 weapon groups wit 2 LL each on chainfire. you fire all 3 groups at once and you get your 6 LL without ghost heat. No macro needed *and* you can be certain as this trigger is server side.

What many people forget is that your macro, calibrated to the last millisecond is only client side and has no feedback from the game whatsoever. so it can't compensate lags or ping spikes it is less consistent than the given ingame tools.

Many macro users know that and which is why many do it for the really non-consequential client-side sound effects.

But, and it's a biggie, the anti-macro whiners do not. <maniacal >

[Mystere]

Tarogato, on 08 June 2016 - 02:08 PM, said:

Operating three buttons at once just to fire an alpha strike is cumbersome and ill-advised, it can affect your aim, and you pretty much need a gaming mouse with extra buttons in order to do it at all (which puts us back at square one again). ...

And that is why I use a Logitech G13 on my left hand, freeing my right hand to do nothing but aiming.

[Prof RJ Gumby]

I would turn the table around and say: PGI, finally implement server-side macros to be set up in weapon groups tab. Win-win.

[Mystere]

Omaha, on 08 June 2016 - 02:10 PM, said:

LOL, anyone can rob a bank, does that make it right? Anyone can run an aim bot does that make it right? Anyone can do anything, but that does not mean it's morally right.

You're obviously forgetting one very important thing. PGI explicitly allows the use of macros. <sigh>

Prof RJ Gumby, on 08 June 2016 - 02:14 PM, said:

I would turn the table around and say: PGI, finally implement server-side macros to be set up in weapon groups tab. Win-win.

I would agree if it supports at the very least the same functionality as Thrustmaster's TARGET scripting system. But this is PGI we are talking about.

[Narcissistic Martyr]

Mole, on 08 June 2016 - 12:07 PM, said:

I can do this to an extent. I'm not anywhere close to being able to identify a 'mechs footfalls by chassis but I can get a rough guesstimation of what kind of weight class I am dealing with. There's been multiple times where little graphical and audio details that are often overlooked have given me an advantage. One such example is shadows. There's been numerous times I have known a 'mech was waiting around the corner for me because I noticed it casting a shadow. Just as there have also been numerous times that I have known something was coming around a corner that I was hiding behind because I heard its footsteps coming and judging by the speed of the footfalls and by the sound I can judge whether I'm about to be dealing with a light/medium or a heavy/assault. A lot of people like to listen to music and stuff while playing MWO but I can never bring myself to do so because I find the information I get by being able to hear what's going on around me in the game far too valuable to drown out with music. Listening for footsteps has saved me in my assault 'mechs numerous times, where I have heard a light 'mech stomp up right behind me, thinking I would be unaware as he lined up my rear CT only to have me swing around on him.

Yup. Btw you can't ID individual chassis because the foot fall sounds are matched to stride type and weight class (I'd have to waste a lot of time to be 100% sure of that though) so there are several different mechs with the same sound

[Tarogato]

Mystere, on 08 June 2016 - 02:13 PM, said:

And that is why I use a Logitech G13 on my left hand, freeing my right hand to do nothing but aiming.

PGI pls ban

[ThermidorFallen]

Mystere, on 08 June 2016 - 02:13 PM, said:

And that is why I use a Logitech G13 on my left hand, freeing my right hand to do nothing but aiming.

Same way I use my Nostromo, directional pad plus button for 5 fire groups, much better than trying to use the side buttons on my mouse and knocking off my aim (cause I'm a prat who can't use side buttons).

[Moldur]

Tarogato, on 08 June 2016 - 12:29 PM, said:

WHAT MACROS?

Crikey, people keep saying this but then they don't really give good examples. Since you mentioned ghost heat, here's an example... is this what you mean?

Ghost heat triggers within 0.50 seconds. So if you can fire the maximum allowable alpha first, and fire the rest of your guns exactly 0.50 seconds after, you will have output the maximum possible damage in the least amount of time. But if you're slow and your second trigger pulls takes 0.70 seconds instead, you could be losing out on damage or taking extra return fire. Macro wins!

But really, does it matter? Case study:

There's probably a better way to do this, but I used this tool because it is familiar to me: http://www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm

I tried tapping the 0.50 second interval to see how close I came to the mark. The goal would be to hit 120bpm and not exceed it. Here are the results of ten tries:



So instead of the perfect 0.50 second interval, my faulty human perception of time gave me an average of about ... 0.54 seconds. Which is an 8.5% error (0.0426 seconds), which sounds bad. But more importantly, how much damage did I miss out on? Let's look at several mech builds:

BNC-3M with 5x LPL: each laser deals 11 damage in 0.603 seconds. If I fire three and then two to avoid ghost heat, the time it should take to get all of my guns on target is 0.603 seconds plus the 0.50 second interval that I waited for a total of 1.103 seconds to fire everything. If I have exactly a 1.103 seconds interval to get my shot off, but instead wait 0.54 seconds to avoid ghost heat, then I miss out on that 0.0426 seconds worth of damage that I could have done if I were using a perfect macro. Which with this build equates to a whopping 1.5 damage. Nothing to write home about.

QKD-5K with 4x LL: each laser deals 9 damage across 0.95 seconds. The extra 0.0426 seconds that I waited for ghost heat would equate to missing 0.404 damage.

<insertClanmechHere> with 3x cLPL: each laser deals 13 damage across 1.12 seconds. The extra 0.0426 seconds equates to me missing out on 0.494 damage.

---

Okay, so that's how much damage you would have missed out on under the scenario where you only had the exact minimum possible time to get all of your damage off. But in practice, in the actual game, how often do you only have 1.103 seconds and no more to fire off everything in your Banshee? Or even 1.62 seconds in the case of the triple cLPL build? In the actual game, a difference of 0.0426 seconds is not going to matter. These are not CSGO player models that zip around on 128-tick servers, these are slow, lumbering mechs in comparatively large open maps.

That is why I don't use macros - because they don't provide any appreciable benefit, they simply aren't worth the fuss. People who think the comp-tryhards are leveraging macros against them to gleen that extra less than of a 10th of a second advantage in laser burn times or gauss charge... are imagining things. They are getting pwnd by half-decent players and rather than accept that maybe they themselves aren't infallible gods at the game, they assume their opponents had an unfair advantage. It's a really similar behaviour to cheaters, now that I think about it. Cheaters are particularly prone to calling hackusations on other players because well, "I'm cheating, he shouldn't be able to beat me because I'm cheating. Therefore he MUST be cheating also! HA! CHEATER!" ... which I find funny.

I agree completely

El Bandito, on 03 March 2016 - 08:47 PM, said:

Second is the group chain fire macro. Useful when chain firing those 6 LLasers three by three, for example. Made huge difference in my CW performance. Basically first group on left mouse button and second group for right mouse button. Put the macro as "play while assigned key is pressed".

[Mystere]

Omaha, on 08 June 2016 - 02:24 PM, said:

I'll say this, using extra buttons in my eyes is fine, even if those buttons are voice activated. But then you use buttons to activate other buttons at a faster reaction time then human reactions, and at a perfect consistency. Or to circumvent other mechanics, it's just wrong.

There is a difference in using thridparty stuff to create more buttons to bind things to, to be on level with today's gaming equipment. But using those buttons to activate automated, and non human reaction timed events, or to overcome game mechanic limitations is a totally different animal.

Because lets all just face it. This isnt just being smart and using terrain, or being tactical, in your playing. This is about either exploiting a mechanic. Or exploiting your own human intricacies.

Sigh! Once again, the basic premise is that PGI allows macros. As such, get over it already.

Also, why should I, for example, configure an Emotiv Epoc+ or Insight to perform single button presses? That would be dumb considering the device's potential capabilities.

Omaha, on 08 June 2016 - 01:43 PM, said:

I believe even chat macro break this, and give you an edge over everyone else, because your dont need to stop and type in your message. While others do. Because due to how the gam3 is programed while chatting you cant operate other functions of your mech (movement and weapons and the like)

And this just takes the cake. <smh>

Edited by Mystere, 08 June 2016 - 03:47 PM.