Gil stolen through market board

[TurtlesAWD]

But if the cheaty methods lead to having your gil drained, I'm also not going to have a lot of sympathy; saying "it should be okay for me to break the rules when it benefits me, but this person whose rule-breaking harmed me should be punished and the damage undone" feels a little hypocritical. (Especially since dropping a retainer at the front of your house with expensive junk listed for sale is, so far as I know, not against any particular clause of the ToS, even if it is demonstrably exploiting the way the system works for personal gain.)

Yeah I'm inclined to say both feel like more or less different manifestations of the same thing to me - "gamifying/manipulating the UI in ways for personal benefit to the potential detriment of other players" or something along those lines. I compared the retainer trick to housing pvp earlier in the thread and I basically stand by that - of the kinds of game systems housing is supposed to open for players it doesn't feel like teleporting owned plots around to catch people in a misclick was on the list, y'know. I don't think a healthy housing system would have people doing either.

[Packetdancer]

Yeah I'm inclined to say both feel like more or less different manifestations of the same thing to me - "gamifying/manipulating the UI in ways for personal benefit to the potential detriment of other players" or something along those lines.

My gatherer jobs are at a point gear-and-stats-wise where I can consistently do exactly the same actions and get 1000 quality on collectibles. If I made a macro on my gaming keyboard that did those actions in the appropriate order, then just hit the key when I went to a node, I don't see that as being wrong, nor do I imagine anyone else would. I'm still there, I'm still walking up to the node, I'm still doing the things; I'm just dragging those actions onto a hotbar and making a macro to do them so I only need to press one key at each node.

If, however, I wrote a program that would go to the node, do those actions in the appropriate order, stop, walk to the next node, do those actions in the appropriate order, stop, go to the next node after that one, do those actions in the appropriate order... that would be considerably less okay, since I could then just walk away and binge a show on Netflix or whatever while WALL-E merrily wandered around on my account grabbing botanist materials. ("Plant!")

And with the houses, if someone were sitting there hitting a macro that did the four steps for the placard over and over, I don't think anyone would take it amiss; as noted, that's little different than an accessibility tool. If someone made a wireless remote that let them click to perform that macro from in another room while watching Netflix (as you hypothesize), and had the PC's screen streaming to their phone so they could glance over and keep an eye on it, I don't think anyone would object to that, either.

But if they write a program so they can just walk away and ignore the computer for 14 hours, that's different. When you write a program that sits there and plays the game for you, wholly unattended, while you go off and do other things, that is not accessibility.

That is botting.

And if you say they're fundamentally the same thing... I'm sorry, but I have to disagree.

And yeah, the housing system is in a state where people are going to be tempted to resort to that, because it's broken as heck. And people who want houses and don't choose to do that are also going to be understandability bitter about it, because bots do have something of an unfair advantage inasmuch as they never need to step away for a restroom break or sleep.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ItMe]

Yeah I'm inclined to say both feel like more or less different manifestations of the same thing to me - "gamifying/manipulating the UI in ways for personal benefit to the potential detriment of other players" or something along those lines.

The difference being that UI tricks are just players using the in-game tools. Anyone can do this. SQEX has no problem with it.

Using a bot is not something provided by the game. It's not even something everyone has access to (rip PlayStation players). Also it's explicitly against the ToS too, so you have to risk your account if you want to have any chance against a bot.