Originally Posted by Skyhoof
1) Will they ban the AHK? Or will they simply monitor for AHK-like activity to also catch G15 keyboard users? Or is this just too low of a priority for Blizzard? I would hope they would be more concerned about violations that actually impact the game, rather than some guy spamming his shot rotation. But perhaps someone with a technical background could give us more insight into what would be easy to catch and what would be difficult to detect. For example, the macro mentioned earlier in the thread to hide your UI and then take a screen shot. That would seem impossible to detect. However, my spam of Healing Wave to test the proc rate on a meta gem for hours would seem easy to detect. And spamming a shot rotation during a raid would seem to fall in the middle of the two extremes.
|
So I'm the original poster of the lovely thread asking for clarification because I wanted to understand what was considered bannable or not. I mean, I hate spamming my mouse wheel, but I'd rather play by the rules. Sadly, the clarification pretty much makes it clear; spamming is bad. But can you get caught, as you ask?
Yes, I think you can, pretty easily. First, they can tell if the software is running. Maybe that's not bannable, but they can look for patterns of gameplay. People fixate on the idea blizzard could never tell you were spamming an ability because network latency would make the data hit their servers at inconsistent times, which is true, but completely ignores the fact they control the game client; in other words, they could watch for the repeating keys in the client code to measure average time between presses, etc. Likewise, for AHK, ControllerMate, G15 keyboards, etc, they also could look into the software's configuration to see if it has WoW-specific settings. How accurately they could nail, say, a key repeat spammer vs a mousewheel spammer is unclear, but I imagine it is doable (since mouse wheel spamming tends to have a large number of presses then a momentary pause as you move your finger back to repeat).
Of course, that's all pretty far fetched. I mean, they
could do those things, but would they catch real cheaters that way? The ones who actually imbalance the game with 5 minute long macros wandering around AV? I dunno. I can't speak to their internal priorities about what kind of cheaters they are looking to catch. All I know is I don't want to get banned, or have anything on my account that could be a problem down the road, so now I'm doing horrible mouse wheel spamming instead (which probably gets me more presses per second than repeating software would but is much less convenient). I imagine their stern policy is because it's hard to bless some uses and not others in a consistent way the real cheaters couldn't plausibly hide between, so they throw the baby out with the bathwater.