sundey wrote: ↑Sun May 30, 2021 7:29 pm
"Acceptable for the past decade" is debatable. AoR ignored blatant cheating for years until it died, so I wouldn't look to them for what's acceptable; several RoR devs/team-members voiced their opposition towards NB and a desire to get rid of it from the start but were limited by client control - nothing to do with 'acceptability'. I acknowledge the point though that its not being disabled/banned would imply that it was considered acceptable, and for a lot of players without background knowledge of the huge controversy around the addon (which goes back to AoR), this might seem like an arbitrary, out-of-the-blue change.
2nd paragraph starts with a nice strawman - I know it's hard for some people to believe, but some of us aren't against NB because we need a scapegoat to rely on when we can't confront how terrible we are at this game (that's obviously just one of my reasons).
I also think you're misrepresenting NB here, both its capabilities and the types of players (and their skill levels) who use it and get the most out of it. But we're probably not going to agree on either, and the latter point in particular can't really be resolved without stats.
I guess it ultimately comes down to each person's views on addons with conditional decision-making capabilities - whether you accept them in principle and, if not, whether you oppose them vehemently enough to consider the risk to population from disabling them worth it. Considering some of the actions (and inactions) taken on RoR, and the general ethos of "there's the door" from certain staff and for much of its time, appealing to population seems to me a little ironic. But in the end, a stance on pvp automation has to be taken and I guess the devs/team have done so.
They certainly did not ignore blatant cheating, along with a whole lot of lesser offenses. Since you mentioned a strawman, that's a pretty big one. There was absolutely an active GM team on live, and they did what they could with a limited staff covering dozens of servers. They weren't properly staffed to support a live service towards the end by any means, but that doesn't mean they simply allowed cheating to happen while turning a blind eye.
It was a bit of a strawman, but it was based largely on the reactions in this thread. There's plenty of reasons to have used NB in the past. The majority of people are casual players who would use it to perform a little better or make some simple rotations to alleviate the stress on their hands. That's not to dismiss that people would certainly use any advantage they can find at a high level. My argument was more that NB doesn't provide the sort of advantages that people commonly attribute to it when it's more likely people already know how to make those decisions themselves.
Using NB for the sort of myths it's portrayed as causes a lot more skills to be burned in situations that you don't necessarily want them to be. You have to keep your conditional reactive abilities outside of NB, it just doesn't manage them well enough. If you're playing with CC/interrupts/detaunts in your (this doesn't exist) one-key-to-rule-them-all NB script, you're not winning anything aside from maybe specific 1v1 matches that specific sequence is tailored for. There's certainly more than enough more impactful conditions outside of pure button pushing skill that impacts fighting in all different formats. Kiting, picking targets, group support, morale drops, pivoting to new targets, clearing tanks or staggering healers, slowing down to regen AP for your next burst rotation. NB doesn't teach you to do any of these things, you can't program this stuff, but you absolutely need it to be successful in organized PvP.
Reading through the past several hundred posts there has been a hostile and aggressive tone towards the players who relied on NB to provide them a pleasant game experience. Ostracizing the limited community en-masse is damaging to the health of the server. Yes, we do make some changes that we tell people to deal with, particularly when it comes to balance. That's part of the MMO experience, classes change over time. Meta shifts. Whether people like it or not is part of the agreement you have here, change keeps the game fresh. This is something a little different. Banning and openly being discriminatory/dismissive towards a large class of players who have been around as long as anyone else is not beneficial, only damaging. There is only one net change in population, and it's negative. You're not changing the duration on a cooldown, or moving CC from one spec to another. You're telling people they're cheaters, scumbags, they deserved it, good riddance, etc. It's disrespectful to players affected both in the response they received for speaking out about it, and for enforcing it in the first place when it's become, despite the flawed arguments, a controversial but otherwise popular addon.
It's a slippery slope as well. There are lots of addons that provide loads of beneficial information that strongly dictate how to play the game. Automation is absolutely present for anyone that uses miraclegrow for apothecary. Swiftassist allows you to press a single button and your entire warband can focus fire on the same target. Buffhead specifically has a list and guide of high impact abilities that it notifies you are present so you can immediately cleanse/sever/shatter/taunt (maybe that's where it's from). Enemy is a far better version of the default UI, and customizable to perfectly fit your aesthetic or information needs, not to mention the ability to track morale pips and AP of other party members. Healgrid allows click casting (I didn't know that worked, but so I've heard).
Addons are designed specifically to enhance your gameplay. They ALL provide some benefit, and the best ones provide significantly more benefit than others. Throwing NB to the curb opens the door to question what other addons should be removed. If it's automation that's a problem, that excludes MiracleGrow. If it's conditionals, Buffhead would be performing at a very high level for providing that information that's otherwise significantly obfuscated by the UI. I've long opposed opening this can of worms because it asks a whole lot of questions about what should be allowed, not to mention attempting to block something only pushes things into the shadows. The benefit that everyone could enjoy, despite being controversial, will now likely only be available to people in specific discords where they're fairly certain no one will leak information. It pushes basic ability sequencing to people that have physical macro keyboards and mice available, which isn't something we can detect anyway. It doesn't remove the problem, it just makes it less obvious and more likely that people will go looking for something shady instead of using a freely available addon that gives them the experience they're looking for.
