Opinions On FFXI's Life.

I've never done it, it's just easy to see how it can be done.

The only skill I've ever botted is enhancing. I'm not even ashamed of that. Honest playing for years and I couldn't cap the damn skill. I earned it to 75, but past 300~ skill (besieged friendly npcs), there was nothing you could do but eat food and hope. I spent about 2 hours with a controller in my lap, spamming a macro while watching a movie and got one whole skill level. I said screw it, wrote the script, and went to bed.

Even that took a few nights to get 50 skill levels (what I needed for my paladin).

Yeah, I averaged something like 0.6 skill/hr on SMN spamming spirits. I got slightly better than that spamming BPs in Abyssea (~1/hr?), but it wasn't worth the extra effort. Even without scripts, I would have been hard pressed to justify skilling up using BPs.

I seem to remember reading years ago that skills level more quickly on jobs that have higher ratings. For example: skilling up healing magic on RDM would allegedly be slower than on WHM. It was probably tomfoolery to begin with, however.

I guess I'm just a traditionalist that doesn't approve of using 3rd party programs in lieu of actually playing the game. If some of these convenient features were intergrated in to the game, I'm sure I'd use them to an extent, but I wouldn't let the game skillup 300 levels of magic for me.
"Stand aside FFXI and Windower, It's my turn to play!"
Y'all can do whatever you want, but I just find it really hypocritical when Windower provides so many facets for abusing game mechanics, but it's FFXIAH.com-approved while the rest are not. I sure would like to see some genuine effort on the game developers' part to...oh...I don't know.... DEVELOP the game? I'm sure that would protract FFXI's lifespan.

You're allowed to have a differing opinion. But it doesn't really change the difference between a program's primary use and facets that can be exploited.

The humorous part about Windower, etc vs other MMO's addons is that while those company's vocally embrace addons, none (that I'm aware of) allow the stuff that Spellcast, etc is capable of, but none of those games have UIs that feel so lacking.

A few addons exist for WoW that flash/scream at you when the boss is about to do something. Tojil's readying Lahar? The middle of your screen would say it. You're the boss's new enmity-target? Your screen glows red, but when someone made an addon that allowed the user to draw on the game world, and allowed other users of that addon to see your drawing (useful for "stand HERE with bad debuff), Blizzard stepped up and took simple action to disable it. They then commented that while it was feasible to make the addon work again, further attempts to do so would be met with harsher limitations that would inhibit the ability of other addons to function.

Well to SE's credit, they have adopted some of Windower's functions. Well, 1 fuction. Windowed mode.

I believe we can all agree that Windower has moved far beyond being a simple windowed mode. It's a platform from which players load various plugins to "enhance" their gameplay experience. It feels like you're trying to say that some of the plugin options for Windower aren't as bad as say... a claim-BOT or a fish-BOT, and some aren't; you're right. Quite a few still are, in my opinion.

This is the reason I support things like packet readers. I don't mind the format of the standard chat log, but the delay is prohibitive when so many mobs have run ending TP moves with short charging times. It's one of the things that SE did well with the FFXIV UI, being able to break up the log to avoid spam, being able to see the enemy's target, status timers (seriously SE, fix FFXI).

I'm honestly surprised that Japanese cars even have reverse.

I hope with the UI rehaul they'll add even more, especially since they've added many of the things in XIV.

Most of windower's plugins and add-ons are self enhancements. They help players organize information,keep track of things or make up for limitations of the game but the majority of them don't affect other's playing experience.

A claim bot most certainly does affect other's play experience and fishbots artificially inflate the economy with massive influxes of gear. So that's why there is such a disparity between some being accepted and others not.

I understand where the administrative staff is coming from, don't get me wrong. I just don't agree that plugins that enable you to not play the game and still gain something should be allowed, within the context.
It's why I dislike the free pass Windower gets despite its shady parts. It's not all bad, but some of it certainly is.

v4.1 onry:

What parts of it do you feel are "bad"? I'm curious.

How could you bot your enhancing when you just have to make a loop in your scripts?
Bot is not part of windower.

You can also make a loop with the normal macros. It just takes a lot of work.

Not really, no. You can cast up to 6 spells per normal macro press (iirc) and you can't loop them.

True sorry. I was thinking about the macro books and sets for gears. Guess it can't work with casting spells.
But still there is not bot on windower.

If you were to use a controller with autofire, hold down the R2 trigger and turn on autofire with the X button and put /book or /set redirects on the end of each macro, it might work. But it'd be pretty iffy. I'm fairly sure that breaks the TOS anyway.

A loop to repeatedly cast your enhancing magic is a bot.

It's very rudimentary, but it still is a bot.

I haven't tried it, but a functional stun bot is possible within LUA. Windower team does its best to make sophisticated bots not ideal, without infringing on the capability of addons which might borrow from similar functions.

For so many purposes, players use spellcast to cast alternative spells, or alias entire actions to other spells. At one time, I had things setup so that if my paladin "tried to cast Fire IV", he went into a fire resist mode of tanking.

Combine that with addons/plugins like OhShi~ which tells you when something is casting something big or dangerous and it's easy where the overlap exists and a stunbot could be born.

Although windower bars the sharing of bots and such, I'm sure that people have written stunning addons/plugins for the use of themselves and friends.

Stunbots are a great example of what's wrong with SE's stance on plugins and their refusal to make a serious effort to cripple them.

Players have to react fast enough to stun the nasty stuff, but are supposedly supposed to take the time to not stun the relatively harmless stuff, like Silencega on your DDs.

It's very likely that the entire reason tp moves/spells happen so fast is that SE thinks they're providing a challenge for the "cheaters", however there's only two levels of attack: casts slow enough that a stunbot can get it, or casts too fast for a stunbot to reliably get it. You can't *challenge* a bot, no matter their ignorant reasons for trying.

Omnys, did you sneak in to my house and read my notebook? It's like we're on the same page!
Get it? It's a PUN! BU-DUM-TCH

Sneak? No, there's a windower addon to let me read your files.

kidding

I think that's against the TOS.