Saturday, May 9, 2009

The Sky is STILL fallling...

Oh man, I am going to get several days worth of posts about that article!

“NotImportant” at http://www.eve-mag.com/wordpress/archives/the-sky-is-falling

So in-fact, the macro miners most likely stand for 50% of all ore being mined. Couple this with the fact that macro miners only “effort” is having to wait for the ore to roll in while a hard working miner has to WORK for it. The effort value for a macro miner is way less…

Ya know what, I’m going to go ahead and disagree with that. I was up until 11:30 and worked on my program for about 6 hours the night before last because the code on Agent EVE wasn’t working right. He was unlocking targets, double mining asteroids, and failing to warp back to a station. It was awful! Then last night I got it all fixed after about three more hours, only to wake up and AE is trying to mine despite his cargo hold being completely full. Ooops! There’s a bug somewhere but, of course, when I dock and restart the app everything works fine. Weird!

How much “effort” does a straight miner put in? “Well I click this button, then I click that button…and then I wait until I have to click this button over here!”

That’s not work; it’s “play”. I have to WORK to create my agent. I have put in literally hundreds of hours trying to figure out how to write this thing (almost all of it spent NOT playing EVE), and then you have the audacity to come along and ignore all that and say that the MINERS are the ones working? No…I made a program that plays the game for me; trust me, that’s a LOT more work than mining in EVE.

“Edcognito” at http://www.eve-mag.com/wordpress/archives/the-sky-is-falling

IS what he does illegal? Yes? Then its wrong. Whether or not it hurts the in-game experience is irrelevant. Clearly what the author is describing is cheating, cheating is wrong, and he clearly tries to rationalize it.

Oh, and about this “illegal” word. AFK Gaming is not against any law in the United States Code. In fact, a lawsuit that Nintendo brought against Galoob (makers of the game genie) ended thus:

"Having paid Nintendo a fair return, the consumer may experiment with the product and create new variations of play, for personal enjoyment, without creating a derivative work."

We have the right to AFK Game because of the Fair Use clause in the United States Code. Now, sure, the EULA tries to strip us of this right; but that still means we have the right, and are not breaking any laws.

Edcognito, since we're not breaking the law, and our impact is irrlevant, you must be ok with AFK Gaming :-)

2 comments:

  1. Well, even tho I can't say I am happy with a macro (I do mine ak -at keyboard- lol), it did occur to me that a "real" miner can outmine a macro in one respect. I use a roid scanner on what I am mining, and as my lasers mine (in a Hulk btw) I can rescan and see the roids diminishing size. Why is this important? Because if after a cycle the roid only has enough left to satisfy 1/2 cycle of my laser's 3 minute cycle, or 1/3 left etc., I can stop the laser after I estimate the roid will be depleted and move on to another. In this way, I can slice minutes off my hold filling time which a macro cannot do. In other words, I imagine a macro will spend the whole 3 minutes to mine a roid which may satisfy only a few hundred m3 at the end of its cycle. Don't know if u ever thought of this, but I found it interesting. Probably staring at rocks too long! Fly safe!

    ReplyDelete
  2. For the moment you're absolutely right. I don't bother to use a mineral scanner since my Agent can't read numbers. I've coded that ability into other applications, but I haven't bothered doing it here because I really don't mind the extra few minutes per hour my method wastes. I'm kind of working on the big fires first, then the littler ones.

    But, eventually, I'll close this loop and, unlike you or "ak" miners there won't be guessing or estimating. I know how much ore per second my Strip Miner pulls in, the program will be able to read how much ore there is in the rock, it can easily do the division and determine for how many seconds the miner should be used.

    Generally speaking, humans at the keyboard will beat a macro, bot, or agent for a while. Humans are really good at working faster than programs.

    But programs are better at working longer than humans. That's the tradeoff, ya know?

    ReplyDelete