Auto attack: A complete battle system

[Linnear]

Sentinel lasts for more than 10 seconds... if you are a Gladiator or have Swordsmanship. Provoke is not a trait, and does not do damage.

Automated battle systems will only serve to aid botters and put people to sleep.

This is my favorite post on this thread as it is the only one that tries to explain why SE does not have an auto attack. I have tried to think of a solid reason for not having it and the anti bot/afk progression appears to be the only reason for it. You lose a lot of interesting game mechanics for not having one and gain very little for excluding it as far as I can see, other than making it harder to bot/afk. On this thread so far, I have seen people trying to figure out neat ways to implemlent an auto attack system and them being shot down without providing a reason for not having it other than the game is not that spammy without it. Personally I don't think that is a viable arguement as all it does is say that you can work withen the current system other then explain why the system is good. When you making a decision such as auto attack / not auto attack, you need to figure out what each one provides to the game experience and I don't see many +s for the current system.

All allusions to FFXI and comments about how an auto attack should be left to FFXI is a wast of forum space and time to read becuase it does not aruge the reason for it in FFXIV on any merit or metric. So if you want to reply to this post, please try to provide some detailed reason othar that my rotation is super cool and I don't spam go back to XI.

Ok, now that is said, my personal problem with the lack of auto attack is the reduction in weapon choices and advantages you get from different weapon types. I might be missing something but I really dislike the fact that as a Glad, my dagger action takes as much stamina as my sword...... this hurts my brain when I think about it and it takes something away form the game that I love in other games. I like the concept of weapon speeds and the stats attributed to them and such. I also like running around with 5 weapons in my inventory for various mobs and situations and scenarios. I do not want my decisison between a dagger and a sword to be which ever one is higher level..... I want sword A and sword B to have more differences than stats, I want weapon speeds! it may seem like a small change but personally I see it as a big loss.

Noone has mentioned this yet but gear alotments and the way that stats are assigned to gear is also uninteresting to me. In many games you can set your gear depending on what aspect of your character you want to focus. I don't see much of that in FFXIV, I will admit that SE needs to fix a LOT in the game before getting around to it, but at the moment I find the armoury system lacking. I want a decision in gear to be lose 10% auto attack for 5% in two abilities, but that does not seem to happen right now, once again I may be missing something, but without weapon speed this nuance appears to be lost.

In short, why is having no auto attack good?
Why is having an auto attack bad? other than to stop bots and afking.

I can see a couple of advantages in having one, please provide a counter arguement for not.

[kukurumei]

I still don't see how any attempt to stop bots can stem from auto attack. Bots scripts are fully capable of pressing 1 in conjunction with 2, 3, 4, and 5.

That's like saying I'll stop people stealing money by having my room at the end of the hallway instead of the beginning of the hallway.

[Linnear]

The difference is the volume of damage that can be done without instruction, if you can take 100% of a low level mobs health without scripting anything other than a single attack command, it is harder to scan for bots by parsing the commands given, it basically makes the admins job easier if you have to hit the same button over and over.

In your own example if your listening for footsteps, it is better to put your room at the end of the hall, as it gives you more steps to listen for.

It is a good point and brings the only posative I can see about not having an auto attack in question, but it does not respond to either of my inquiries.

[kukurumei]

The difference is the volume of damage that can be done without instruction, if you can take 100% of a low level mobs health without scripting anything other than a single attack command, it is harder to scan for bots by parsing the commands given, it basically makes the admins job easier if you have to hit the same button over and over.

In your own example if your listening for footsteps, it is better to put your room at the end of the hall, as it gives you more steps to listen for.

It is a good point and brings the only posative I can see about not having an auto attack in question, but it does not respond to either of my inquiries.

That's utterly stupid. because first of all, easy enemies aka farming enemies, people would script a macro that put 1 x10 anyway. No one smart or stupid farms with both hands or eyes on the screen.

secondly, that makes it even harder to catch botters because it would increase your false positives 1000%. Thus making it harder for admins to catch more botters because for every one you get wrong, you let another one sneak away.

And by your excuse, listening to more foot steps means that every echo of people walking would lead to more powerful equipment to be run 24/7, need more maintenance, and need more guards to constantly check the trip wire. And most likely alert any real criminals of your security in the process. How many times would that security trigger a day? Dozens, hundreds. Walking around a hallway, what about sneakers, or boots, or double backing...insanely illogical.

By the same line of irrational thinking it's better to have auto attack to catch bots because if a bot decides auto attack is enough to win the fight, they will always do one action, which a normal person even afk will have deviations in pattern.

Less actions actually make it easier to catch botters because you have an easier time filtering and finding patterns.

In the end it's the most naive stupid excuse, and if it's true, then no wonder bots roam the wild so easily.

A better way to stop bots, is and always will be community initiative, follow by pattern matching or otherwise statistics, then followed by a sting operation.

Aka, real police work. You find a bot(s) based on community query, you observe it's patterns(day and time, length of hours, movement style, reaction speed), then you run it through a statistically pattern matcher, and then when you're confident you sting all the matches simultaneously before botters realize the sting and change their scripts.

Anyone, anywhere will tell you if you want to find a link between thousands of traits, you don't want to find the most generic, you find the most specific.

If even a tiny bit is ever related to the reason no Auto attack was conceived, people needs to get fired fast. Developers who can't realize their own pitfalls needs to be replaced before they caused other problems in the system.