6 ms·

Pretty cool that they allow players to run their own scripts, and in a full Lua environment no less. I imagine that could be useful in a game with a lot of repe

Pretty cool that they allow players to run their own scripts, and in a full Lua environment no less. I imagine that could be useful in a game with a lot of repetitive tasks.

minimaxir 10y ago
The ability to run Lua scripts has been a WoW feature since its release in 2004-2005. To prevent the game from being easily being botted to death, there's not much you can script aside from automating UI interactions. This was a killer feature for the Master Plan mod last expansion, which automated clicking through poorly-designed menus for a poorly-designed mechanic, and it single-handedly broke the economy.
- rhaps0dy 10y ago
  > and it single-handedly broke the economy. Could you get money by clicking menus? I'm curious
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    If you had a number of characters optimized for it, you could get thousands of gold every day for a half an hour of menu clicking. This technique has just been removed from the game, however.
  - Rovanion 10y ago
    From what I understand they essentially made a part of the expansion which worked like farmville where you through a UI sent out your followers on missions which would finish in a certain amount of real world time later.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  > it single-handedly broke the economy Let's be fair here. It's the Garrison's design that broke the economy - Master Plan just made it worse by turning "a few click every few hours" into "one click every few hours".
  - minimaxir 10y ago
    Fair. :p although it would have made using alts much more infeasable, and cause people to quit faster.
onetwotree 10y ago
Sort of. Blizzard goes to great lengths to keep players from running "bots". For example, a bot might allow a player to run an account 24/7 that would just kill a specific monster over and over until a certain rare and valuable item dropped. This isn't possible, because certain actions (such as "Attack the monster") can only be taken in a script that is running in response to a UI event. This isn't a security fix though, just a way to prevent players from gaining an unfair advantage by running bots. On the other hand, I did write a handy few handy little addons despite this restriction. For example, when you're doing lots of wheeling and dealing at the auction house (a perfectly legitimate way to make in game money), you tend to receive a huge amount of "mail". When another player buys an item you're selling, you receive the payment via your mailbox. It can be tedious to go through all the messages and take the money or items (mostly a UX issue if you ask me). To get around this, I just added a "take all AH stuff" button to the mailbox UI. There were a few problems, in particular that you'd have to "pump" it, because moving to the "next page" of mailbox items was an asynchronous operation, and the callback wouldn't be able to do the "take item" action. Users contribute huge numbers of useful addons despite this restriction - for example, auction house addons can remember price data and show you items that are substantially above or below their general market value. The famous "Carbonite" addon made gigantic improvements to the in-game map, most of which were later incorporated into the default interface. And no serious raider would go into battle without a host of combat helpers, DPS meters, and so forth.
- chiph 10y ago
  The Zygor add-on does your in-box trick, and has a gold-farming module that helps quite a bit in identifying below-market pricing (user-seen auction data gets sent to the cloud for analysis and downloading by subscribers)
  - onetwotree 10y ago
    I haven't played since early WotLK, so I'm not too familiar with the latest in WoW tech :-)

Pretty cool that they allow players to run their own scripts, and in a full Lua environment no less. I imagine that could be useful in a game with a lot of repetitive tasks.

minimaxir 10y ago

The ability to run Lua scripts has been a WoW feature since its release in 2004-2005. To prevent the game from being easily being botted to death, there's not much you can script aside from automating UI interactions. This was a killer feature for the Master Plan mod last expansion, which automated clicking through poorly-designed menus for a poorly-designed mechanic, and it single-handedly broke the economy.

rhaps0dy 10y ago
> and it single-handedly broke the economy. Could you get money by clicking menus? I'm curious
- minimaxir 10y ago
  If you had a number of characters optimized for it, you could get thousands of gold every day for a half an hour of menu clicking. This technique has just been removed from the game, however.
- Rovanion 10y ago
  From what I understand they essentially made a part of the expansion which worked like farmville where you through a UI sent out your followers on missions which would finish in a certain amount of real world time later.
scrollaway 10y ago
> it single-handedly broke the economy Let's be fair here. It's the Garrison's design that broke the economy - Master Plan just made it worse by turning "a few click every few hours" into "one click every few hours".
- minimaxir 10y ago
  Fair. :p although it would have made using alts much more infeasable, and cause people to quit faster.

onetwotree 10y ago

Sort of. Blizzard goes to great lengths to keep players from running "bots". For example, a bot might allow a player to run an account 24/7 that would just kill a specific monster over and over until a certain rare and valuable item dropped. This isn't possible, because certain actions (such as "Attack the monster") can only be taken in a script that is running in response to a UI event. This isn't a security fix though, just a way to prevent players from gaining an unfair advantage by running bots. On the other hand, I did write a handy few handy little addons despite this restriction. For example, when you're doing lots of wheeling and dealing at the auction house (a perfectly legitimate way to make in game money), you tend to receive a huge amount of "mail". When another player buys an item you're selling, you receive the payment via your mailbox. It can be tedious to go through all the messages and take the money or items (mostly a UX issue if you ask me). To get around this, I just added a "take all AH stuff" button to the mailbox UI. There were a few problems, in particular that you'd have to "pump" it, because moving to the "next page" of mailbox items was an asynchronous operation, and the callback wouldn't be able to do the "take item" action. Users contribute huge numbers of useful addons despite this restriction - for example, auction house addons can remember price data and show you items that are substantially above or below their general market value. The famous "Carbonite" addon made gigantic improvements to the in-game map, most of which were later incorporated into the default interface. And no serious raider would go into battle without a host of combat helpers, DPS meters, and so forth.

chiph 10y ago
The Zygor add-on does your in-box trick, and has a gold-farming module that helps quite a bit in identifying below-market pricing (user-seen auction data gets sent to the cloud for analysis and downloading by subscribers)
- onetwotree 10y ago
  I haven't played since early WotLK, so I'm not too familiar with the latest in WoW tech :-)