Unethical Gameplay?

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Wall of text incoming since I haven't had a PVP drama thread to whine about in a while. Also, GET OFF MY LAWN.

I'll just chime in with a few things.

* I have sound enabled on all 5 toons. Always. Even the one that wants to be called Loretta. Because if one falls behind and I miss/ignore the follow-broken warning, when my other toons are not in combat and I hear combat sounds, it usually means one guy is stuck in a hostile area. Saved my bacon plenty. Highly recommended. Requires some tuning so you don't get overwhelmed by noise (e.g. disable environment/ambiance, set followers to half volume). Here, I'll even provide my example for this (note: my volumes are low across the board so I can hear Netflix):
Master:

/console set Sound_MasterVolume 0.1/console set Sound_SFXVolume 0.2
/console set Sound_MusicVolume 0
/console set Sound_AmbienceVolume 0.5
/console set Sound_DialogVolume 1
/console set Sound_EnableAmbience 1

Slaves:

/console set Sound_MasterVolume 0.1
/console set Sound_SFXVolume 0.1
/console set Sound_MusicVolume 0
/console set Sound_AmbienceVolume 0
/console set Sound_DialogVolume 0
/console set Sound_EnableAmbience 0

* The Jamba whisper forwarder has never failed to forward me a whisper from a GM or anyone else on any character as long as I didn't have the Jamba channel somehow misconfigured or it was a Jamba beta release that had a channel bug due to an unforeseen Blizzard change. (Yes, the GM whispers were pre-popup-change.)

* There's this nifty addon called sounds4chat. It lets you override the sound of, say, that whisper thingy that nobody seems to be able to hear. On mine, it makes this really, really audible noise that I can hear even when I'm in the kitchen getting something to drink. It's totally amazing. Y'all should look into that before something...unfortunate happens to your account. Here, I'll even link it for you: https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/sounds4chat

* When I'm doing something that I always want to see details about, I discovered two options that work pretty well. The first option is, just make the windows big enough that I can see them all, and move them around so I can see the part(s) of the screen I want to see. The second option (I use ISBoxer) is to set up a dxNothing repeater for the area I'm interested in so it's this big normal-size chunk of window so I never have to worry about things popping up there and me not seeing it and having something dramatic happen to that character/window.

* If I'm standing somewhere farming something, I figure that since Blizzard has a well-known and well-documented method for contacting people to personally check whether they are an AFK bot, and they do this personal-contact thing as a courtesy to me rather than just banning me and making me prove I'm not a bot, I own personal responsibility for being able to respond to those rare but important queries to the best of my ability. I've had I think 4 of those, two of which happened after the move to the little extra popup rather than just straight whispers.

* I agree in spirit with MiRai's comments regarding standing in one place pressing a button while basically AFK. However, if the problem is that some tasks are so mind-numbingly boring that people watch TV with no sound and no monitor while pressing 1 for hours, not only is that fostering a whole new generation of advanced carpal tunnel syndrome sufferers but creates areas where "botters" can take advantage of bugs/loopholes to fill a customer need. (Does anybody honestly think that if the game were fun for everyone 24/7 that botters would exist in their current numbers?) That said, until and unless they remove all the monotonous things in the game, or until you get hired as a game designer/product manager for WoW, you'll have to expect to play the way they want you to play or be actioned for not doing so. EULAs suck, but without a bunch of people willing to make it painful for Blizzard to enforce it, they'll keep right on doing what they're doing.

I'm usually pretty live-and-let-live about people doing whatever as long as it isn't running afoul of the "Don't Be A Dick" ethos. Hell, even botting isn't necessarily big-E Evil IMO, but you can't exactly allow some people to do it when there are so many others that would exploit it to ruin parts of the economy or camp play areas, with the knock-on effect of pissing off lots of players and overworking the support team. The MMO company that comes up with a way to automatically enforce "bad" botting regulations and allow "good" botting will have a big advantage over the games that don't have that. Maybe. Maybe AI will kill us all off by then. Right after the black helicopters show up.