OSI DECIDES MACROING IS BAD FOR YOU [Author: lum]

Well, if you use UOAssist (and of course, no one does) you’ve probably followed Tug’s sad and fruitless attempts to get UOAssist ruled street legal. The programming gonzo boys at OSI have told Tug that his program was badly written and would reflect poorly on the Ultima Online franchise, and pointed to things such as readme files in the wrong folder as proof of this. Tug ploddingly fixes everything he was told to fix, only to be told at regular intervals by an OSI representative that “yoooou must….. feeeex that too! Diiiisqualified!” in a really bad French accent. Well, Tug must have caught the GMs laughing uproariously in the background during his last phone call to check if UOA was approved, because they finally fessed up that UOA would be disqualified because it allowed people to run macros unattended, and this was a bad thing.

Well gee. Ultima Online has been running for a good solid two years now, and they just now decided that macroing was bad. OK. If macroing is verboten, first off they had probably talk to all those folks who write Windows automation software (I think Microsoft is one of those companies). And while they’re at it, they should take everyone’s pennies away, so they don’t *accidentally* jam into the keyboard and cause a macro to run. And they had damned well do a shard wipe so that newbies don’t wonder why they can never get past 45 strength while GM Buttwipes give them the beatdown the second they leave town.

If you don’t want people to macro, don’t make the skills so freaking tedious to raise that people HAVE to macro. Hell, I don’t know, flash porn on screen every 10 minutes. Then the typical UO player would never leave his keyboard. Ever. He’d probably ask the porn for a date. He’d have a meaningful relationship with the porn. Eventually the porn would leave him though, and he’d go back to macroing. Probably using UOE.