3rd Party Tools

[_____________Dankman]

"You will not attempt to interfere with, hack into, or decipher any transmissions to or from the servers running Anarchy. You are however allowed to use status pages provided by Funcom."

"9. You may not use any third party software to modify this Software to change Game play. You may not use our intellectual property rights contained in the Game or the Software to create or provide any other means through which the Game may be played by others, as through server emulators. You may not take any action which imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure. You may not sell, buy or auction any Funcom characters, items, coin or copyrighted material."


Your game sucks, piss off. :/

[_____________Solrael]

Hmm, how the hell will they know if someone is using AOMD anyway?

[Gnubi]

the new clicksaver 2.0 can easily be detected by monitoring if the hook code is injected into the ao process. If fc really wanted they could make the live for ppl using 3rd party tools really trouble, ending up in a situation like the cheat battle going on in cs =)

[_____________Nalissa]

Pshaw.

There are many products on the market that are dependant on third party programs to be successful. Windows is a sterling example of this. Another good example (or used to be before it was sold to the third-party company) is the Goldmine sales database program. It was more or less eventually dependant on the third-party Front Office solutions to be attractive and successful.

AO is like that.

The mission interface is ill conceived and badly implemented. It should be a finite number of missions (no insults to intelligence like go kill 100 vet soldiers for a map reward pls) with an infinite capacity to search. Currently its an infinite number of random missions with no capacity to sort. It's a futuristic world. I expect a limited number of missions but when i walk to a data terminal i expect to be able to say "give me all contracts with targets in the Broken shores zone. Now narrow those to include rewards of armor". Maybe there are armor missions in BS at the moment, maybe not. That's 20th century technology, so it should be a cakewalk for a nanotech world.

Aditionally, if i saw a mission that required me to kill 100 veteran troopers and some geek was offering me a pair of sunglasses as a reward, you know what i'd do? I'd probably search for the contracter and gank his snivelling ass for insulting my intelligence.

Bottom line is their mission system is a joke. Take away the third party program that makes it barely bareable and you've just axed a significant portion of the game's pleasure. Redisign the mission system first and you're ok. I'm pretty sure their going to leave clicksaver alone if they can, because i can think of a million things i'd rather do than poke around with a laggy mouse trying to roll a single item and spending countless hours doing so. I'd fall asleep guaranteed.

Ladies and Gentlemen, a game that puts you to sleep is not going to keep it's client base very long. I think they know that, and i do believe we are safe.

It's possible they would rather have random loot - 'buy what you need from other people', and i would stand behind that concept except... Guess what? Their interface for sales interactions is non-existant as well. Again a third party tool is better than their 'shopping channel' and even then shopbot isn't that successful. A better avenue would be to create shop terms where people could add items for consignment, and have these shop terms sort database-driven and searchable as well. Maybe Traders could manage these terms? Maybe fixers? Again to reiterate - their commerce model is clumsy as well - so we need to find the items not buy them. Atm you can only buy certain peices in static shop terms for pete's sake. Biomech helm and gloves anyone? Good luck finding the pants. lol Honestly what kind of crappy store carries limited selection like that? Wanna carry biomech in Ql110? Better carry a full set because thats 'what the customers want'. Out of stock? Put them on backorder and contact me. Get real - they're commerce model is so simple it might as well not exist. They know it, i know it, everyone else knows it.

The alternative would be that there is nothing to get that's not random. This would fail because people play the game to aquire. Aquire experience, aquire items, aquire other stuff. Making all loot random so there is no 'feasible' way to select it would not make you want to play. *yawn*. I think ill go mission for a while and see if i can get a random drop of flower-tech. Oops nothing after 1 hour. Time to sleep.


Naw.. i could be wrong, but i actually have respect for FC's decisions for the most part (contrary to whiner opinion). I dont believe they would shoot themselves in the foot like that. They won't mess with these client programs until they have a replacment model that works imo. They may not support them, nor should they, but they won't actively work against them. The statement they made is just a way of saying 'its not our client - so dont blame us. We dont control it so we aren't going to support it'.

That's a long way from saying "We want you all to be wearing patchwork armor and dont want you to strive to improve it. Hey, our Real means sometimes wear social armor and manage to get 20000 AC's, why cant you?"

[ethernal3]

Well, look on the bright side. If they banned people for using Clicksaver, that's about 80% of the playerbase. Do you *really* think they are gonna ban for it?
~Chris

[_____________Wenzell]

Hehe same with Ebay. Is FC going to ban everyone using ebay too ? Oh look theres a lvl 150 XXX char for sale on EBay ! FC is not going to do anything

[______________Jeamus]

You know it wasn't to long ago when either Cosmic or CZ said that Funcom had no problems with programs like AOMD and Clicksaver. I even remember reading a thread on the Test Server forum from the one of Funcom's Testers encouraging people to try out these programs on the test server patches to make sure that they still worked.

I just wish that, just once, the folks at Funcom could sit down, decide on a course of action, and stick to thier decisions regarding an issue.

As an aside to this, wouldn't the various skin's that have been created by different people be in violation of this third party ban? Especially the nice once that have redone the in-game maps?