Consistency in roleplay?

[Glarundis]

i had that issue with imperial ppl (since i have a char in imperial) and sometimes i'd find some of them macroing or something, or they would find me macroing or something, so i tried to warn everyone to make use of icq and uoam to alert ppl so they'd look IG and do something about it. but apparently it still doesn't work, or ppl don't care. after all, if you're macroing and someone appears and talks to you and you don't talk back, it only looks weird for the character itself, not for you, much less if you don't care about roleplay

[Charha]

I think it would send a stronger message if there was an official guideline stating that this sort of unattended macroing is not welcome unless it's kept well out of sight. Then it would be possible for counselors to address the matter directly in game - just like it's possible for a counselor to tell people to stay in character and speak english.

Of course it's a bit hard to address anyone who is not responding at all, but meh. I do think it's a tad weird that it is possible to play UO without even looking at the game screen unless some alert goes off. Your character is not really there unless you pay some attention to him or her.

[Cyrus Tegyr]

Well Charha, while I am but a lowly new counselor myself, I would see nothing wrong with hitting someone with a .ooctalk gump, while it isn't ooc talk that they would be being hit for, it is there to uphold the RP quality of the shard so therefore I think it would be warranted, perhaps we could get a gm ruling on this before this thread gets locked, which, I feel it is heading right into as it is accomplishing nothing but a whine fest between certain parties it seems.

It's hard to make that a rule if for instance a guard is needed to build a skill so you have to macro on a guard or a healer to build another skill, just examples of course. I agree however that if it can be helped, macroing in doors with a locked door between you ought to be the way to go, unfortunately for the newer players/returning older players who don't have a dime to their name, this is quite impossible. Before someone hops on here and tries to discredit me with "Well Fred a well known player I saw him macroing in the middle of Britain bank" I don't give a shit who you saw or how many people did this or didn't do that, for me it's a number you could of pulled out of your, let's say hat. I am just saying for somethings this would be hard to enforce because some skills require you to be in amongst town. "Well out of sight" to me means for instance in the boonies not within town, I might be exaggerating again, but somewhere where two characters are unlikely to meet, the Trapper huts east of Minoc for instance.

Unfortunately however, macroing within a house isn't even considered a safe zone for macroing cause someone could "see" you in there if your house has windows. I am not advocating for less RP mind you but I am trying to make the point that some people who play the game do enjoy building their characters up to their full potential and this requires a lot of macroing, to make a rule that you must be well out of sight of anyone to macro a skill is ludicrous because Pangaea in it's current state, you have to macro and in some cases that brings you in the middle of town because you need 5 things to hide around or a guard to anatomy on or a healer to eval int on or because alchemy is a pain in the ass you want to cut the time in half by being near a healer or since a scribe's meditation is utter shit you have to be in a religion so you can benefit from the altar because finding someone to camp for you is a pain and you don't necessarily have the millions to pay for someone to do it for hours and hours on end. I mean the reasons are endless as to why someone might be macroing inside a town where they might get run into by other players, though I do agree taking the occasional glance at the screen every 5 - 10 minutes should be normal practice for people.

I do not intend to show that I am coming down on the side of no RP for Pangaea, I am just trying to show the other side of the argument where people are in the middle of town macroing.

[Kat Asherstone]

I mean the reasons are endless as to why someone might be macroing inside a town where they might get run into by other players, though I do agree taking the occasional glance at the screen every 5 - 10 minutes should be normal practice for people.

Before the macro check alarm you couldn't really sit and macro without having a good view of the screen... and the players that might be trying to roleplay on said screen
Now players "glance at the screen every 5-10 minutes"

which has definitely impacted roleplay negatively as it encourages for all purposes of roleplay interaction, afk macroing.

as Charha pointed out the .oooctalk gump should alert their macro program BUT then you've got someone to run to their computer to hit a macro box and then nope... just someone wanting to roleplay, and more likely than not that's going to make them less likely to roleplay and if they do it'll be short to get you gone and them back to afk.

[Kat Asherstone]

, it only looks weird for the character itself, not for you, much less if you don't care about roleplay

^ this, this right here

YOU ARE YOUR CHARACTER IN GAME.

It seems half this server forgets this simple fact of roleplay... if it's weird for your character, it should make you feel weird irl.

[Iktomi]

I actually like the idea of there being a .command to trigger other people's macrocheck alarms, and would be easy to do.

This will discourage people who are trying to afk macro from doing so in public places and also facilitate RP interactions for people who are just macroing 'cause nothing else is going on.

I bet it would also be easy to make an EasyUO macro that triggered the alarm when another player came onscreen.

[Cyrus Tegyr]

ya it wouldn't be too difficult to make an easyuo macro that triggers when a humanoid comes onto screen, however, you couldn't distinguish between a player or say a guard. What can easily be done however, since player chat colors are between the range of 1-1000, I could write, something in a minute that will alert the user to when a message appears in their journal within the desired range of colors, which can than be taken a step further to exclude certain messages. If anyone is interested in such a system for their macro check alarm script, feel free to contact me, I don't post stuff on the boards cause the staff are busy enough with other things that sometimes it takes a long time to get things approved.

Before the macro check alarm you couldn't really sit and macro without having a good view of the screen...

Well, there was no before the macro check alarm, assuming we are referring to at the least the last two and a half years, I could ramble off 30 people who used a macro alarm script of one sort or another, including myself before anyone said it was legal or not. Which, to my mind, tells me that they were in rampant use before any of the staff came out and said they were legal, it was the worst kept secret ever on Pangaea which became apparent when the staff finally said it was legal to use them because, there is no way for them to police the usage of them or not really. I just think they need to be used responsibly, which means scanning your screen every 5-10 minutes for other people trying to interact with you, it's not that difficult, whether this is happening or not is a different matter. I am not here to speculate the who's who of or the statistics of these "abuses".

as Charha pointed out the .oooctalk gump should alert their macro program BUT then you've got someone to run to their computer to hit a macro box and then nope... just someone wanting to roleplay, and more likely than not that's going to make them less likely to roleplay and if they do it'll be short to get you gone and them back to afk.

It does alert the macro alarm as it appears as a generic_gump in easyuo, meaning it isn't a built in recognizable gump with a name. That is unless you make an exclusion list and add it to an exclusion list, personally I think I am the only one that does this anyways to exclude certain gumps such as .online, but I do not block ooctalk's gump. However, if in fact a counselor hits someone with it and the person doesn't show any signs of life, ie: talk in game after you have attempted to interact first and then hit them with .ooctalk, than perhaps it is the counselors job to bring that to the attention of the higher powers so it can be addressed.

Now onto a more serious note, can we please stop with consecutive posts when no one has replied to your last one? It's a sure fire way to get people to start ignoring posts after it has been done for the last 11 pages, there is no reason for it unless you exceed 60,000 characters, which is a lot of characters to cram into a message on multiple occasions in this thread, people have double or triple posted when they could of just as easily put them into one post. Unless this is a condoned workout for post count stacking, which is pointless anyways, you get nothing out of having eleventy-billion posts on these forums or the whole of the board readers suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder so posts must be broken up, but this is doubtful.

[Charha]

I understand that some skills have to be macroed in plain sight. Then again, some skills have to be trained with monsters and if you don't keep an eye on the screen every now and then, things might go haywire. If something happens on the screen and you're not there to interact, it shouldn't make a difference whether the triggering effect came from a monster or a player. I actually feel that the presence of other players is more important than itinerant monsters or the fact that your character runs out of bandages or something. Even OSI had an anti macro code, which doesn't have anything to do with Pangaea, but you could say that originally UO is a game where interaction with other players was intended to be more important than grinding skills.

Some person indeed might feel frustrated that their macroing was interrupted by some random person, but I don't see this as a problem if the general consensus is that for the sake of RP people ought to interact with the game world while they're playing instead of, well... doing something completely different and using their smart phones to see how the numbers are going up.

I don't want people to get the idea that I feel this is a major issue, or that I want to severely punish people for not being completely alert all the time, or that I want people to stop macroing altogether. I would be perfectly happy just poking those phased out players with .ooc gumps to get some response from them. But before I do that I just want to know if people think it's okay.

[Cyrus Tegyr]

Well, I find it perfectly alright, as I stated, the way I see it, that command is there for counselors to use and I think it is a valid point if you are trying to interact with people, perhaps it will remind people to actually check their screens.

I am in complete agreement that, if you couldn't tell, this is not a huge or major issue. I think its some isolated incidents blown way out of proportion.

[Kat Asherstone]

Well if I understand that post correctly the suggestion is that from the start everyones been using an afk macro... I just got mine like 3 months ago because my roommate was sick of watching me stare at the screen macroing. So yeah I just realized the ENTIRE time I've been here has been under a false pretense about the people I shared a server with. C'est La Vie.
definitely makes sense the way in which the server looks at RP if this is the case.

"I am in complete agreement that, if you couldn't tell, this is not a huge or major issue. I think its some isolated incidents blown way out of proportion."

I suppose that makes sense if you knew that behind the scenes everyone was just botting, pathetic.

Clearly this server gives less shits, and apparently always has, about the standard of roleplay than they do about hitting heighten class... Repsak would roll in his Pangaea grave.

Walac's finally right on something, this isn't the server for me, if i wanted to play a game with bots I'd go play TF2