I believe so yeah, this is one of the activities I was talking about that is taking time away from hunting and gathering which means those items became more rare.
I have a gleamball and go there occasionally and next to me there’s this gigantic structure around another and they are usually there the entire day with the 2 of them, actual 2 players since they talk to each other at times. No idea if they are botting, doing it manually or just watching the bots but have seen them say to each other that it was lunch time…
Still no matter what, manually, botting, something in between (with a hairbrush, tape, etc.) they are gathering gleam all day long!
There will always be a meta, and that is where you will find the crowds. When it changes, they will move. Meta players will find the meta and sit on it everyday, any game.
Whatever is most profitable for lvls, coins, or mats, meta players will find and do to the max. When it changes, they will change. So yes, the current market is worth the costs.
It would have to go very far enough to also make mining very unpleasant.
There are ‘whispers’ of a minter adjustment coming that should change this. To what extent is unknown.
Very much as @Jaidic says, this is only the current meta.
Gleam farming is hardly the only use of a bot, though. You can use a simple script to farm any regen-able resource in game, change block types, and perform other tasks that are supposedly balanced to maintain certain levels of challenge and/or exclusivity within the game and the economy.
Not condoning botting whatsoever, but at least these forms of regen farming put something back into the economy, instead of just using up items and making money.
I really do hope so. I fully believe a self price-adjusting minter system would be one of the best ways to combat scripting/botting. I realise it won’t stop it altogether, but at least it would make it far less attractive/profitable.
Honestly I feel the botters are doing less damage to the game than this mindless/unproductive style of gameplay is doing to it. And that isn’t the fault of the players if they feel it’s the only way to keep up in terms of coin and levels.
Would it be fair to limit how many of a certain item one could sell to a chrysominter every 24 hours? Especially gleam doors or refined gleam and whatever else the dev team have suspicions of bot usage? I am sure that would stop a lot in their tracks.
I’ve been waiting for this to happen. Most of my ingredients have doubled (some even almost tripled) in price in the last few months. All due to availability and subsequent rise in prises of the core ingredients.
I’m honestly surprised i’m still buying tools for relatively the same price as i was 6 months ago.
Although maybe this also shows that forgers were making a boatload of profit before and can take the current pricehike
As long as there is profit in it, running a bot to do it makes financially sense. Real players will always give up faster as they have to invest time and coins, bots invest only coins.
With minting doors you make about 2.7c profit per gleam block. A 3x3 hammer harvests 9 blocks with every hit on Serp, that’s 24.3 c per hit.
A 4000 durability hammer can hit 5200 times with the epic (I think?). To make this no longer profitable for a bot, such a hammer would have to sell for more then 5200 * 24,3 coins.
If you sell the hammer for less than 126360 coins, bots will continue to do it just with less profit. And if you’re able to increase the price above that I’m not sure who would still use such hammers, or even play the game.
You can’t fight bots by reducing profits. You must ban them by detecting them or make the activity “to hard to bot”.
And yes, using an autoclicker to start 30 crafts is, in my opinion, a bannable offense too. And I hope james acts on that too by either adding it to the interface, therefore making it available to everyone, or sanctioning on the “cheaters”.
Rule in other games is often, one click, one action. No amplification. And these games often don’t allow you to do multiple hits by keeping the button pushed, therefor requiring more attention than just keeping the controller pushed down while watching Netflix (in my opinion that’s botting too, if you don’t actively play the game, don’t expect rewards…).
There’s a lot of focus on the doors, which is not where the bulk of this is happening.
Fully coiled, it’s 2.43c per gleam block. And that’s not all profit. There is a (default) spark cost of 139 spark per block so that takes a notable chunk. While you can get it down to 27 spark per block with additional equipment and buff costs. The coin cost is clearly not primary but the effort (time cost) of acquiring the quantities needed gets ridiculous because there’s not enough spark for sale to buy endlessly without cutting hard into margins, or tons of acquisition time.
So mostly they’re being refined and minted, at a rate of just under 1c per block. This puts the theoretical perfectly forged hammer at a nominal return of just under 47k, which is still far too expensive for most miners in the current market. And prohibitive for any new or casual player.
Anyways the gleam situation has helped bring this to the forefront, and that’s maybe good, but it’s somewhat off topic IMO. Well, it’s tangential.
THIS. specifically focusing on the part about adding some of these things to the interface and making them available.
Wherever possible these things, when they come to light, should be addressed by making them pointless. The QoL arguments that have driven so much of this conversation over time are a key indication of where you can eliminate much of the desire to bot from the game.
And when people aren’t desperately trying to find ways around RSI inducing interface issues they’re less likely to say “well I already have this macro software installed so let’s make some coin”.
We need “craft all” or “full queue” buttons in the interface. I’d like it if block changing stayed as a sign of effort invested but we need a block changing machine. A usable model for this already partly coded in game with the spray tinter, a machine that takes a “tool”, and a stack of blocks as input, and generates a stack of “changed” blocks as output.
It would be good also to have some things like “empty machine/shop stand/request basket into inventory” and “empty inventory into storage”. I’m sure there are other cases where people are using this sort of tool to get around interface issues, and when there’s a culture where having a macro tool on hand is normal behavior, people just go ahead and use it.
This quells feedback. And feeds further into a scenario where people mention this on a forum, or in discord, and someone PMs them to say “oh here’s how you get around that” and now there’s another person with AHK already loaded, half a step from using it to directly generate coin.
I know the devs here would rather ‘save things up’ for a big update than have incremental improvements but I hope that we do see some of these changes soon. In any case, having an “on the record” statement that there are some limits, or a ‘rule’ exists, is a good step forward for the culture of the game and I’m appreciative for this today.
Id like to include myself in the choir of voices calling for punishment of botters. I genuinely hope Wonderstruck wont hesitate to ban. We are a small community, but this affects the true players of the game negatively, so i consider it very important to ban. With a small community and a very active player economy, this is the sort of setup, where botting is tremendously destructive.
On the other hand, it is equally important to cater to disabled players, where scripting may be the difference between playing the game or not. I take it wonderstruck has datasets to show the difference between disabled players helping themselves and then the destructive afk botting.
I suggest we all report any botting out there, every single day. A good place to start is on the 1001 gleamfarms.
At this point until they add a craft all button im going to continue using an auto clicker to avoid repetitive strain injury.
On topic; While I do condone botting as a means to automate the game for profit, is the game actually set up to stop such a thing, especially if the botter is in a realtively hidden space away from other players?
This was an issue back in the old days when u could grab yourself a iron hammer and some of titanium deco blocks and put some rubber bands on your controller L2 R2 or macro for pc and hit and destroy and repeat the progress while being hidden away down at mantle and just let it go for a few hrs for the huge exp
This has been patched luckily , because I was feeling left out as a cubit buyer…and it nearly made me quit
Agree, nerfing just to inhibit is what caused many to leave over time. We need improvements, not nerfs. But once newbies learn how to make coin in shops they will stop using minter primarily. As they can make more, interacting with players.
Problem with forging is that there’s so many ways to get to the same result. I’m sure @MrNiX would laugh at my forge set up he’s probably got a much more efficient method.
he’s probably got a much more efficient method.