[Live] Update Notes: Thursday, January 28, 2010(0)
 

GENERAL

• Ability commands such as “useability” are now being throttled in an effort to cut down on server lag. This means that “mega-macros” that attempt to cast many spells will no longer work as expected.
• Housing zones and persistent instances will now automatically shutdown after one hour of inactivity. Any AFK players left in the zone will be camped back to the character select screen. You may still AFK indefinitely in overland zones, city zones and non-persistent dungeons.

More...

Sounds like a good idea'er to me.

Oh I got go see all the bitching on the forums on how this broke every ones one button to pawn them all macro! This is gonna be fun :) lol

Haha, that is going to be some whinefest I am sure :p

So many people uses a 6-7 useability macro these days, I can't believe it :D

whats worse is the gear macros that get spammed to cause lag during contested fights.

They could fix that too. Just put a limit on the # of them you can use in a certain time period. Say you can use a maximum of 1 equip-item call per slot per minute. It's kind of stupid how folks do it. Heck, they should just keep logs of it and start banning the people that abuse it.

But yeah, to the actual change: good. QQ to all the folks that whine that they actually have to push buttons to play the game now.

I can't wait to see how the persistant instance change affects the lag on AB. I'm hoping it's going to cut the lag down a bit; raiding as a healer sucks when you're getting 1-2s spell lag =/

does this mean that all the click to cure buttons will no longer work? and what about use item abilitys?

will my fishbone earring macro still work?

EDIT: is this really gonna help lag issues or is this a way to help prevent botters who lag the system with useability harvest macros?

Normal everything will still be the same.

This stops people from putting like 20 abilities in one macro.

but if useability no longer works at all then a simple

/say I'm off to see the wizzy

/useability <call to city>

will not work after this goes live is that right or am I reading this thread wrong?

edit: grammer

and besides I thought that you could not cast more than two spells in a macro anyways? I am so lost...:confused:

You cannot queue more than one action, but you can macro as many (within limitations) as you want. Think of macros like harvesting macros, trying to harvest each possible node type and failing on all but the correct node (but creating server lag for all each failed try).

Also noone said useability would not work "at all" anymore.

ok thanks for the clarification someone on the forums is saying it can still be used for up to 4 spells is this true and if so where can I read about it? oh and it is a whine fest out there too. hehe just fyi.

I suer hope they dont destroy the swap gear macro..

My bruiser have 3 swap gear macros that I like to use, 1 for pure tanking, 1 for dps and 1 for OT'ing, and ther is a lot of difference in what gear I use for each role..
I'd really hate it if I where to swap all those manually..

But spells, I agree, make it so you can only use 2-4 in each macro..

game is back up and gear macro's still work fine and in fact all my macro's still work as they did before but then again I didn't have any "easy button" macro's set up.

Rothgar already said on the forms that equipment macros would not be affected. Those are legitamately used. (I have two that are 'full set' macros -- one for my regular healing gear and one for my DPS gear).

It's just the macros that try to cast a whole bunch of abilities that were nerfed. Lets see you were a class that has 10 damage abilities (we'll call them Spell_A through Spell_J).

The lazy (and now nerfed route) would be to make a macro like this:
useability Spell_A
useability Spell_B
...
useability Spell_I
useability Spell_J

If Spell_A was available to be cast, it would cast it. If you did that enough and say Spells A through E were unavailable to cast, it woudl cast spell F. But each time you click it it would try to cast all 10 spells, even though the net result might only be you casting a single spell.

All that causes data to go back and forth between client and server and makes lag. Lag that arises from people being lazy and trying to cheat the system, rather than lag from people just playing normally. That's why it got nerfed.

well I'm glad it got nerfed then. I actually push buttons 1-= and have them set up in a mannor tha I know exactly what spell to cast next and what each one does.

As a Templar, I use a similar macro to random-dps when I have nothing better to do. If I was a DPS class, I might work out a a specific order to cast things based on more advanced rules... but I could care less about my DPS numbers. I'm a pure keyboard caster, so all of my hotbars are mapped to keys... like I'm going to waste 12 keyboard keys to nuke when I can use one.

No big deal, I already made a UI mod that does almost the same thing as the "super-macros". Two hours of my life gone. Maybe I'll release it, maybe not. It'd need way more options if I did... so I'm not right now.

Just so others know...

Rothgar Lead Programmer had this to say in the forums:

I've reverted the changes for now and those changes will go into testing tonight. QA is working overtime on expansion tasks but will make sure the change doesn't break anything else.

Since it's a client change only, we'll push it to the patchers sometime tomorrow morning without having to bring the servers down.

When time permits we will consider some of the other options and come up with a solution that meets our needs without impacting your gameplay as much as the throttling does.


Link is Here one post up from the bottem.

Yeah, I thought that was funny after I had spent the time making the mod and expanding it. Funny as in, blah.

I'm going to release it anyways because it still has an ability that macros don't. That and you can say you're doing something for the environment by not littering useability commands on the server.