INCOMING WALL OF TEXT! RUN FER YER LIFEZ!1!

Quote Originally Posted by Fat Tire View Post
My in-game morality aside, well because I have none. Botting is not against the law.

One could argue, however, that in high-end raiding perfect dps rotations are a must and if you are not performing top 100 then you will sit out for someone else. Some of the mechanics of some of the fights have become more difficult for the avg player. May not be a problem for the teen on adderall or the cs;go pro, but in general the playerbase has gotten older and less twitchy. By having a program perform a top 100 dps for you it relieves the stress of performance and being a drag on the raid team. One could see the appeal of a program that does this aspect for you. The program that was targeted was pretty unknown up until a year ago and then exploded in users, I wonder why.

Why would I care how blizzards balances encounters based on dps if I am always doing top 50-100 dps. Its the mechanics of the fight that I believe blizzard balances around anymore.

Listen I understand that its against the eula. All the people bitching about losing their accounts are the ones who valued their accounts. However, once they disassociate themselves from their characters of having any value other than entertainment value, because the value of time has been removed they will be free.

Well, the only way I can explain it is when you first learn how to mutibox. Most mutiboxers cant or wont play any other way. Same with botting.
First, I don't recall anyone arguing that botting is against the law. EULA/TOS are a completely different concept. I also won't argue about twitchiness, stress, or how terribly depressing or not some of the grinds are; having budding carpal tunnel issues, I'm intimately familiar with how certain things are literally painful. Also, I understand the concepts of why people bot. If I could do it for certain tedious things without risking my accounts, I absolutely would.

My particular point is much more narrow in scope and is two-fold:


  • Blizzard has repeatedly alluded to the use of Big Data in balancing things -- their internal WorldOfRaids/WorldOfLogs/etc. charts, if you will. That data is a big factor in tuning encounters and making raids/instances harder or easier or nerfing/buffing boss mechanics. Now, take a raid of people actually, you know, playing their characters; we'll call them Raid A. They've spent some time crafting up macros but they still have to remember which buttons to push, when to push them, and be careful about not pressing the wrong button at a critical point in a fight. We also have Raid B, in which two of the healers, one of the MTs and a third of the DPS are running CR/heal-priority/interrupt bots. The only way they make mistakes is if they get LoS'd or out-ranged and the spell just flat fails. So, when Blizzard does the math on how these encounters run and considers tuning things, how much of an impact do you suspect automated/perfect play has on their equations? Do you think it is significant enough to skew Blizzard's perception of the difficulty of encounters in areas where bots are prevalent?
  • Another big feedback mechanism is raid members complaining (sometimes vociferously) about certain mechanics being stupidly difficult or /yawn-inducing. If some percentage of the raids completes the encounters because of perfect timing of heals/interrupts due to bot scripts and they basically pooh-pooh everyone else with "lol u guyz suck, lern-2-raid-derp," how would you expect Blizzard to treat those feedback threads?


With the above two in mind and with bots being as prevalent as they apparently are in top-end raiding (had lunch with a friend that raids and the results of his last few days (even in LFR) have been pretty freaking hilarious) then I suggest they are significant enough to warp perceptions and impact the balancing/tuning process to the detriment of non-botting players. At some point, sure, it all sorta gets lost in the overgearing but for at least some amount of time I think it has a deleterious effect on the game.

As someone that doesn't raid, I don't have a dog in this hunt. To say that botting is absolutely expected because of deficiencies and it has no effect and it's all Blizzard's fault anyway, etc. is I think being a tad disingenuous. If the game sucks so hard that you're willing to bot what is supposed to be the best parts of it, I wonder why people even still play it; and yes, I realize it's not an all-or-nothing proposition.