BAD BOYS BAD BOYS, WHATCHA GONNA DO [Author: lum]

Read the pissy rant I posted below this first, if you haven’t already.

Got a few emails already on this bit, and it set me to thinking.

UO is a virtual world. That’s one of it’s strengths.

And OSI is the DEA.

Bear with me here. Macroing and third party program use is like smoking marijuana. No one gets up during church and announces “Yeah, I smoked a spliff the other day and I still got some left, want some?”, but if you had a Magic Truthsaying Machine I imagine if you surveyed everyone in America under 50 you’d have very few people who didn’t know how to inhale.

And like marijuana, most people understand that macroing, and by extenstion the use of third party programs, while illicit, is also quite widespread. This isn’t a genie you can stuff back in the bottle. And there are quite a few things more hazardous than marijuana, or macroing. Like, say, instant vendor kills. Were my wife’s vendors mysteriously slain? Or was it just a bug, like the time she lost a chest off a boat in thin air and the GM, responding to the call, said “Well, I guess *it just washed off the boat!*”.

But no, instead of actually performing customer service the GMs in UO are more concerned with tracking down and destroying recreational marijuana users — er, unattended macroers. And you know, most of the time it’s because someone narced on the victim in question.

So I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised… we put up with fascism in real life, why not Ultima Online. So does Lord British get a nifty silver shield from McGruff the Anti-Crime Dog now?

Personal note: Before you whinging curs jump up and proclaim how much more moral you are than I, I am not condoning drug use. I also am not a hypocrite. I’ve used drugs in the past. Lots of them. I had a problem with them, and eventually I solved that problem and moved on. But my problem didn’t involve weed, and UO’s problems don’t include macro mining.

EVILMACROEXPLOITERUPDATE: We’re still all flouting John Law by mindlessly and unattendingly staring at Tal’s butt. Come and get us, coppers!