I find it funny that you guys don't accept at least partial responsibility for the moral decline of the game. Always pass the buck, just like C'relic and Elgarl do/did. Pass the buck.


Somewhere the buck has to stop and if people that are using your program are creating plugins that are harmful to the game, well then its your moral responsibility to stop the destruction of the game. Please don't talk about morals and ethics like we are 4th graders.

The way some of the posters here act, you'd think they were 4th graders. don't understand simple logic and principles.


Just because we create a framework for functionality doesn't mean we hold a gun to the developers heads and force them to either make ethical plugins or unethical ones.


We have had a Decal Code of Ethics since day 1. It has always prohibited things like Combat Macros and things that alter the game in a negative way. It is not our responsibility to enforce that. the PLUGIN developers should know better than to create unethical plugins, and the USERS should know better than to USE unethical plugins. Unfortunately, I don't expect users to be able to properly distinguish ethical plugins from unethical ones as I don't think they have the professional training to be able to make that distinction. Then again, neither do many of the plugin developers.


That is also another reason why I think more people need to learn proper programming practices before doing plugin development. These are things that are taught in schools and in professional development programs. Ethics of programming. I'm a member of the ACM and when I joined, I had to agree to a certain set of ethics and guidelines. I'm following those. I'm also a professional developer.


Many other developers are not professional developers.. never learned the ethical understanding in software development. That is why we created guidelines to follow. Many chose to still ignore that, and in Elgar's case, actually went against it to spite us. Can I blame him? Absolutely. He KNEW better.. he KNEW what he was doing and did it anyway. That is the worst kind.


Edit:

in case anyone cares - http://www.acm.org/constitution/code.html

If all the Decal plugin developers had the same sense of ethics than Drakier and Gouru, there would never have been a problem with Decal and macroing. The problem is that a few little punks like elgarl decided to abuse their work and turn it into a cheat tool.


If people deserve the title of 'Saviors of AC", is those guys, and not sad little hackers like elgarl.

 

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The truth is that their have always been exploits to this game. You just had to be part of an all exclusive club to know how and where to get them. Remember a program called "gear"? Let's not forget dupes, plat macro's, quest bugs (the rabbit foot comes to mind), and many, many more. Many people loved Elgar because he shared his inside information with everyone and even created a program where it would be easy for them to cheat too.


Many, many people took advantage of things like the plat macro. I know there are still people with mules stacked with plats. Did they get away with it? Of course they did. So the question was whether you cheat to keep up with everyone else or put yourself at a severe disadvantage when it comes to trading?


Some people felt the same exact way about levels. Do I cheat to stay at the same level as everyone else or get excluded at the next high level quest?


Some will argue that ElTank kept the game going because it helped with the boredom which resulted from lack of mid level content. However, this is a "which came first the chicken or the egg" question. Did people get bored and decide to UCM for lack of mid level content or did Turbine not add mid level content because of the lack of mid level players? I tend to think the same people would have UCM'ed regardless of more mid level content.


So does Elgar deserve some of the blame? Yeah maybe. Though, not all of the blame. Does what Elgar did make him a bad guy. Nah, probably not.


~Duri

There's a reason why people have been found guilty to be accessories to certain illegal activities. While the use of RL scenarios is lame, you can get a sense of why some people feel that Decal is partially responsible for anything you devs blame ElGarl for. You guys knew what was done, you guys had a way to stop it, but you didn't.


Web hosting companies, if they know a site they host is doing illegal activities, they have the power to either ignore it, or shut them down & turn them in. I find it hard to understand how any decal devs can come here right now and talk about how Eltank ruined AC. No offense to anybody, but I really did ROFL when I saw that.


I don't support UCM, heck I don't even have a character over lvl 150. I did however, use Eltank as well as various other decal programs. I can tell you from my personal experiences, AC would've lost a lot more customers if addons like Eltank wasn't released. So if you want to compare what attributed to the downfall of AC? Well I think it's everything, from Turbine to Decal devs allowing UCM's to continue while silently bashing Elgarl. Turbine doesn't enforce EULA often because they like the money they get from people. Decal, I don't know why they didn't ban any combat macro programs from working.


Anyways, my 2 pyreals, yes I know I jumped from one thing to another, didn't make much sense after I read it myself. But hey, just my opinion, and I really did LOL when I saw a decal dev talk about how Eltank ruined AC.

and please, pray tell, tell me how you expect decal to "stop" it?


this is an old dead horse you're beating because it ultimately comes to the same conclusion. There isn't anything Decal Devs can do short of pulling the plug on Decal to stop UCM with Decal. Even that wouldn't stop UCM.


So please.. enlighten me with your suggestions of how Decal Devs could have stopped Elgar or Spk from making UCM plugins.


We wrote Decal. We're responsible for that. We wrote a Code of Ethics to darken the lines between acceptable use and unacceptable use. We TOLD Elgar not to make a combat macro. That only caused him to want to write one all the more just to spite us. He knew exactly what he was doing when he did it, and in my opinion, that makes it worse.


We can all speculate all we want, but I can clearly trace a pattern between UCM and the decline of AC. Whether you want to believe me or not is up to you. I've done it before and I'd be happy to PM you the details if you care. I don't want to post it here because I've already done it countless times. In fact, if you wanted to take the time and research it, I'm sure you can find many posts about it here.

Eltrack was the best, I always loved watching the red text when finding a major and will miss that a lot...


Saying that Eltank allowed UCM in the last few years is stupid, it could be made UCM friendly if you used appropriate plugins, and as far i know, those had nothing to do with Elgarl.


Now talking about UCM friendly plugins, a name do strike my mind, Ltx, all u have to do is hit the start button and there it goes for hours n hours, heck untill a few month ago it still had an admin detect built in. Dont get me wrong, Ltx is a very nice plugin, with very few bugs, and I simply love it. But please, saying that its all Elgarl's fault is wrong.

Actually, it still has the admin detect built in. *cough* hidden switch *cough*


And yes, Elgar has done what was needed to make it an ACM program, as opposed to the countless UCM programs out there, but some people make comments like "Want to make AC better, don't use any plugins with Tank in their name."


Draik can make as many timelines as he wants to try to prove the downfall of AC on ElTank, but then again, using his same logic, I can prove how X was responsible for Y, just because they existed in the same time frame. Sorry Draik, there are MANY reasons as to why AC has gone down the drain, and to say that ElTank caused it is laughable at best.

Draik? where do you get that from?


As for the timelines, sure.. you could attempt to relate whatever you want. The difference is what actually happened can actually be attributed as I claim it is. You can speak to a lot of "experts" in the area as well and they can confirm. In fact, quite a few players (UCM and non UCM players) will tell you that XP Chains coupled with UCMs are what broke AC. Were there other things that caused damage? sure. Were there other exploits that had a negative affect on AC? of course. But I don't think any of those were nearly as detrimental and as much to cause the decline of AC than UCM.


Don't get me wrong.. AC needs playing aids. But using a plugin to play for you 24/7 is not a playing aid. It's a macro.


And I'm not talking about within the last year. I'm not talking about ELTank AFTER the changes elgar made after YEARS of begging and asking him to change it. I'm talking about his FIRST release up until UCMing became rampant all over the place, and especially in the Tusker Dungeons on AL. It wasn't until AFTER then that Elgar did anything in the way of attempting to curb UCMing within his plugin.


Clearly if you follow the progression of AC and the timeline of events you can see where Turbine screwed up by listening to the macroing high level whiners. There was a very smooth progression of content within AC for a long time. At least a years worth. Nice clean straight line of new content to fit a growing trend in levels. This is when level 50-80 characters were considered uber, elite, and un-obtainable. This is also coincidentally when people started to race to 126 and started attempting to find loopholes.


People started leveling faster and started to figure out the "system". Aerlinthe was put in for level 45+ characters which was considered VERY high level at the time and only a small percentage of the AC population was able to do Aerlinthe. Then BSD was added as well as Metos and a couple other high rate XP dungeons. People figured out how you could macro the tuskers. Elgar created ELTank and made it publically available. Then where did the content go? It immediately started jumping past the mid-level content and started to get into the high 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc. All the mid-level content was starting to be skipped. They added a couple of minor things in as they always have, but the FOCUS of the monthly patches started to become VERY high level for the current group of players. People started to feel left behind and feel like they HAD to "cheat" to be competitive and keep up with the content. This fueled Elgars "quest" and added more wood to the fire. Soon, if you weren't in an XP chain and/or macroing, then you weren't good enough.


XP chains started to become insanely optimized and started to turn into a serious pyramid scheme. The ones on the top were gaining INSANE levels because everyone below them had to meet the passup plus interest. This continued at the accelerated rate of content skipping most low-mid level content leaving those who DIDN'T macro behind. I never macroed, and back then, I considered myself a power gamer and so did many others. I leveled at an "Acceptable" pace for not macroing. Yet my highest level character is 114.


I backed off leveling after that and basically stopped playing altogether for the most part. I'd poke around at new content when I had content my level, but it was VERY rare, and generally not even worth the time. I know this because I was in this position. I know how hard it s to be a player that didn't UCM or exploit to get insanely leveled. I played my characters. And I got very frustrated at all the people around me UCMing and XP Chaining to get super high levels. Mind you this wasn't jealousy because I don't want to be high level. I just wanted Turbine to make content suitable for me and people like me who don't feel it acceptable to macro and exploit to "keep up".


So .. now .. you tell me how macroing didn't cause the decline of AC. Then tell me how you've never macroed or tried to "keep up" and played "normal" content. I've been playing since opening retail. I've been here all along. And I've see what's happened over time and I don't like it. I blame Turbine for not doing enough to enforce their rules, and I blame the plugin developers and macro writers (especially Elgar) for unleashing that on the public which shouldn't have ever been give that. He gave everyone macros,90% of which should have never had it. 90% of the people who currently macro only are able to do it because someone GAVE them the macro.


Do I think macroing should be reserved to the few who can do it? If it keeps it from being wide-spread, yes. I don't think it should be done at all, but people will do it. I just don't think it should have ever been made as widely available as ELTank was made. Give people playing aids, but that's a far cry from allowing your computer to level your character for you.


Done.

....

That's not funny anymore.

 

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