I'll just give a long thorough recap of everything I've said in the other thread in hopes that it will help some people understand the situation a bit better.
First and foremost I'll get my opinion out of the way, I am personally for legalizing it given the current situation. My reasons for such will be detailed below as well as reasons against it. I will also say that I really wish it hadn't come to this and would MUCH prefer a completely legit environment.
So let's examine the situation, currently auto-potting is rampant on ALL the servers, some renewal players would like to think otherwise but they are flat out wrong. At this point not much is done about people auto-potting and as such it's leaving people that don't, either due to not wanting to cheat or due to lack of knowledge about the programs, at a distinct disadvantage. This has caused a completely understandable amount of anger in the community, many people assuming the GMs just aren't doing their jobs in dealing with these cheaters, however the situation is not that simple.
Detecting/Preventing Auto Potting
The main problem the GMs have is the inability to positively identify people who are autopotting. Let's look at some methods people have suggested to catch people/ prevent APing.
GM Observation: The first and most obvious is just GMs watching WoE. The problem here is that auto-potting is visually identical to potting with a macro or using multiple hotkeys and potting manually. While you may occasionally catch someone who left theirs active while AFK, it's extremely rare and does nothing about the overall problem.
Client Side Protection: The second most obvious are programs like Game Guard which are designed specifically to stop cheating in games. Unfortunately they can be easily bypassed, the best example being a program called Harmony that was developed SPECIFICALLY for RO servers and took over a year to perfect. It was bypassed in about a day. There was also talk about data-encryption to make the HP number difficult to find for the programs. Unfortunately there are already auto-potting programs that work on the visual data of the client not the actual data values. These options just don't work.
Server Side Detection: The most promising option overall but an unrealistic one. The GM team would have to develop a logging system AND a system for parsing those logs into actionable data. They'd then also have to develop standards by which to determine if the activity they see is actually autopotting or just normal potting, something that due to various factors including latency, system lag, and a million other variables is practically impossible to do without ending up with just as many false positives as actual offending players. On top of that the time and resource investment required to develop these things is far beyond what the team has available to them.
In Game Changes: A particularly common suggestion is putting a delay on potion use but that has two problems. First it won't prevent auto-potting in any way, people will still use them so they can react as fast as possible to damage, especially now that healing earlier will mean more with less healing per second possible. Second the iRO team doesn't have the server access they would need to do that, kRO would have to do it for them and quite frankly, they won't.
Final Note: The PServer community (something the iRO team understandably doesn't like to talk about) has been trying to stop auto potting for years with far more people, time, and resources than the iRO team has. Most importantly, pserver owners can actually modify their server software unlike the iRO team. Yet despite this they have failed time and time again without even having any MINOR success.
So what now?
So now we're left in a bit of a conundrum... Most of us agree that auto-potting is bad but with everything we know about it, it's clear that it's not going away and the rule against it can't be enforced. It leaves us with only two options...
- We accept the current situation and choose to continue on as things are.
- WP legalizes autopotting and creates their own.
Both options are terrible but they are all we have at this point. As I said in the beginning, I much prefer the idea of legalizing AP simply for that fact that it's the only option that places us all on even footing. It may not be the ideal solution but it's that or stick with the current gap between certain groups of players and continue seeing the frustration that's driving many players away from the game.
Edited by Thyrial, 25 June 2015 - 05:51 PM.