Hobobob said:
Spellcast is so much beyond that, it all depends how much time you take to wrtie your own spellcast file. You can write spellcast so it automatically determines which gear set to use on which mob (ex. For BLM it will equip a full elemental set for fighting Tiamat if you chose it to, but if you use Elemental Seal it can detect that and switch to full damage set.) It allows you to get full benefit of gear, you can make it so you start casting in all your fast cast gear to get the full benefit of fast cast, but by the time the spell goes off it will have a completely different set of gear so you get the full advantages of that gear as well. Spellcast is gamebreaking to say the least.
No one has yet to argue about Windower under my interpretation. Certain plugins are certainly gamebreaking but that does not mean Windower as a whole is gamebreaking. Moreover the vast majority of plugins should be tolerated. Even if they provide "advantages" they should be tolerated because the essence of competition remains whereas botting removes competition.
I argue this is the case for the vast majority of plugins with a few exceptions (Cancel was one; I never used spellcast but I'll tack that on there too)
There is a legal doctrine that states anything you have the right to do indirectly whatever you have the right to do directly and vice-versa. This means that many windower plugins that actually do effect gameplay are legal.
For example take recast. Imagine a very talented coder made his own custom timer program to run on his dual monitor and display his FFXI timers. Every time he hits a macro he would also hit a corresponding button on his G15/G11/G19 to add that skill/spell to the timer's cooldown list. This does nothing less than recast and it is clearly legal.
If you don't think that's legal, how about if he had custom built beeping timers (like the sort you get at Radioshack) that are preset to certain cooldowns (his flash timer is set to 22 seconds, his voke is 30, etc.) Each has a different tone and he trains himself to recognize what timer means what. So when the flash timer beeps he hits flash and quickly restarts the timer. Certainly that has to be legal
The vast majority of the advantages plugins confer can be easily obtained by non windower users in a legal fashion.
The advantages of botting not only ruin *direct* competition, but they are not obtainable any other way. There is no way for you to synchronize 30+ people to take different lockout delays, up to the tenth of a second, without using a bot. And there would be no way for you to use idle AFK people as claimers without a bot.
An arms race with App? Fuzz wrote and sold both of them. It's not an arms race by any stretch.
Do you not understand the concept of an arms race? All it is is two sides escalating in response to each other in a race for supremacy.
By buying NASA/moving to a server with NASA, you prompt the natives to escalate in response or risk being overwhelmed. Thus they buy App. Fuzz is merely the weapons dealer as a whole that profits by selling to both sides.
You do realize that almost every single shell that pays in USD instead of gil for NASA simply sells the gil they make from it back, and ends up getting it for free, right?
Do I really need to get into a debate about why RMT'ing is bad?
It did not come with all the scripting tools that app did. As a former Absolution member who used it daily, I can tell you this with absolute certainty.
As I've already said, this seems highly illogical given the pricetag for NASA and the ease with which fuzz could have imported the features. I call bullshit, but again, I don't know anyone who paid $3k to verify this.
Botting is not relative to skill or dedication in any way, shape, or form. But that does not automatically mean every single person who uses one is completely devoid of skill or dedication. I've found plenty MORE members like myself in shells who bot who are willing to stay up till 4AM, or post their phone number and be called at some ungodly hour of the morning to kill an HNM. The best players I've ever met have also resided in shells that condone botting either explicitly or under the radar. The competitive endgame scene simply attracts more dedicated and skilled players then any other aspect of the game, whether or not botting is present is irrelevant. Those that get competitive use them, and that's pretty much the end of it.
You are being unresponsive at this point.
I already conceded that botting and skill are different matters. I argued that the fact you could outcamp Quetz's lazy native shells means jack shit about you as players on an absolute scale.
No they couldn't have, because App, generally speaking, doesn't compare with NASA. NASA will outclaim it consistently to the point where most other shells just give up, then the NASA shell has free reign of kings on the server.
I don't see where this argument is getting you. So basically you're arguing that NASA guarantees success because it's so overpowered it will "break the will" of any other competitive shell.
This only magnifies my argument that you succeeded because you had a crutch in a shitty server. It didn't matter whether or not you were dedicated or skilled... you just need to stick around long enough for your bot to work some magic and be able to beat six year old mobs in under an hour.
Hobobob said:
You warned us about Medicineman, he turned out to be a pretty decent member, you warned us about Hellstorm, he's now a sack holder in our shell, he turned out to be one of the most dedicated people into end-game we've come across on this server. We couldn't take the word of people who didn't want us to succeed is the bottom line. So yeah, we've had a lot of shitty players in our LS who were Quetz natives, we gave them a shot and some didn't work out, but some did.
Or perhaps your standards are just shit.
I know I certainly would never want to have to work with Hellstorm again, much less have him be in an authority position over me.
But again this should have all been evident from the start seeing as we disagree about whether it is questionable to use a bot which by your own admission almost guarantees you will batter other shells into submission.
