Mods and cheat engine

[JanVanding]

I wasn’t aware people who do call outs are able to read hidden triggers in the client’s files to call out RNG mechanics before the animation even happens. It’s cheating….how is this not obvious? Why do people defend this?

Going back and reading people’s comments on these things, calling them “calculators” or “crutches”. It’s like people are intentionally ignoring the fact that these plugins tell you mechanics before the game gives visual indicators for mechanics. It’s cheating, it literally hacks the game’s files and reads hidden triggers that the fight designers don’t want the player to know. Instead of looking where the bad thing is coming from, it tells you where it’s coming from before you’re even humanly able to know where it’s coming from.

It’s so incredibly simple what these things are yet people just seem to love defending them and disagreeing with people who call it out.

Except it doesn't and I don't know where this idea that Cactbot does that came from.

It flashes up a bit of text like a WoW raid caller and doesn't literally go "YOU MUST MOVE TO THIS SPOT, YOU MUST MOVE TO THAT SPOT" it simply flashes the text up of what you would read anyway on boss cast bars or icon debuffs. It doesn't tell you anything else and some mechanics it tells you nothing at all.

[jamjeeshoul77]

Except it doesn't and I don't know where this idea that Cactbot does that came from.

It flashes up a bit of text like a WoW raid caller and doesn't literally go "YOU MUST MOVE TO THIS SPOT, YOU MUST MOVE TO THAT SPOT" it simply flashes the text up of what you would read anyway on boss cast bars or icon debuffs. It doesn't tell you anything else and some mechanics it tells you nothing at all.

Except it does? For a current example, in P3S it calls out spread or stack before the animation plays. It calls out shiva before the animation plays. I don’t get why this is so hard to understand. What aren’t people understanding about this plug-in reading hidden triggers that allows it to give call outs before the visual triggers play? Why are people denying this, when it is 100% true?

[Packetdancer]

Except it doesn't and I don't know where this idea that Cactbot does that came from.

Well, if you mean "that" to be "Cactbot can read mechanics before a raid-caller can", that's absolutely true, since it's reading the network traffic. Now, like... 90% of the time, the mechanic information isn't sent to the client until just before the mechanic itself happens, so presumably while Cactbot might be half a second faster than a human raid-caller, it's not going to be massively/game-breakingly so.

But there are mechanics that have long animations where it isn't clear which animation it's playing until fairly far into the animation; in those cases, Cactbot can absolutely call way faster than a human raid-caller. An example is P3N; I'm given to understand that the server has said "this will be in" or "this will be out" when the bird sort of starts to gather itself up to begin the lengthy Experimental Fireplume castbar. So if I were to be raid-calling a normal raid for whatever reason, I'd probably say "okay, be halfway out..." as a warning as the cast started, and then wait to see see which fireball appeared and go "Okay, go OUT!" or "Get into the middle!" once it did. Whereas Cactbot could say "Get out, big AoE soon" as soon as the cast-bar started, and give maybe a... what, 2-3 second lead in that specific case? Since the animation and cast is a long one.

But on the other hand, as I mentioned in my earlier post, from what I've seen of people blindly following Cactbot—and been told by said people—there are mechanics that Cactbot cannot call in advance... or even cannot call well at all compared to a human raid-caller.