Drakier posted:

---

I also believe that Combat Macroing hurt the game in a way that can never be fixed. Such is life.

---

Chazcon posted:

---

Reset all characters to level 1

---

Chazcon posted:

---

You can separate AC players into several groups and sub-groups in regards to UCM:


1)The UCM crowd - people who macro to gain advantage over others in wealth and / or level (skills), manipulate the game just to give themselves a feeling of power or superiority (control or grandiosity syndrome), or do it because they think it's cool (taking the game to a new level, or extending the life of the game for themselves). Many UCM people justify their actions in their own mind by referring to revolutionary slogans such as "Live Free or Die!". Their take is that they are free to play the game any way they wish. This is the outspoken sub-group of the UCM crowd. I'm sure many old-school macroers read their posts with chagrin - macroing was originally a covert operation.


UCM'rs can be broken into these sub groups I think:

a) There are the folks who are skilled and/or talented enough to write their own combat macros. You rarely hear a peep from these people. They do their thing, stay out of sight, and off the boards (Gol's recent 'come clean' a notable exception).

b) There is a large group of people who will use a 3rd party macro program written by someone else, but who are 'stuck', so to speak, if no such program exists. The power trip of macroing IS the game to these folks, most think they would not play if they couldn't macro.

c) A group that doesn't get talked about much in this polarized debate are the casual macroers. The tee-totalers. They will macro up a noob toon to 50, or try out macroing here and there to see what it’s all about, but really aren't into it that much, or feel like they are breaking the rules and stop.


2) The Anti-UCM crowd - people who love the game in it's original form and would take it back to 1999 if they could (the purists), and the folks who never break any rules in-game or in real life and want only to push their agenda on the rest of the world (the fanatical zealots). The zealots are the most outspoken group of the Anti crowd. Their mind set, dialog, and actions are very much like religious zealots in real life. They cannot comprehend that there is another point of view, and thus label anything different than their way of thinking as 'bad' or even 'evil'. It's nearly impossible to reason or debate with this crowd, so unbending are they in their adherence to their convictions. The purists are a more reasonable crowd and one can understand their feelings about the matter.


There are sub groups in the Anti crowd as well:

a) People who do not have the technical ability to install and run 3rd party applications. To any of us who consider ourselves 'gamers' or 'powerusers' this seems ridiculous. But many fit into this category. They needed help just installing and running AC itself in the beginning. Many in this group run a hardware configuration that is at or below the minimum requirements as well. And so human nature being what it is, people who CAN'T UCM will gravitate towards one of the categories of Anti-UCM’rs in order to cover their technical or computer knowledge shortcomings.

b) Folks who do have the tech expertise to UCM but choose not to for reasons mentioned above.


3) And lastly let's not forget the group that flies below the radar of the whole UCM/Anti debate and really doesn't even understand it, and is still just trying to learn the game (the noobs).

---

Paraduck posted:

---

Pissing off most of your customers isn't typically a good solution.

---