Auto-attack. Why?

[LigH]

Eliminating "sweet spots" (or recognition distances, because they are radial areas, not just points) would eliminate all chasing NPCs... except maybe you'd add some "motion detection".

[bilbous]

The point about sweet spots is that the npc is open to anyone until the first attack is made. It seems to me that npc's are not triggered by someone standing on their spawn point. This means if you have a macro for /target_next_npc /attack you can always claim the monster when it first appears by pressing the macro key.  If you don't it will take more time and you might miss the opportunity. Personally I like to have seperate macros for target and attack to account for lag. Repeatedly pressing the combo macro will get you attacking several different monsters. With seperate macros you can target once and attack as necessary.

[LigH]

Due to some lag, it will often happen before you can attack, that a monster is distracted and will attack a player who is in the recognition area, which is a "ring" between a minimal and maximal distance. The minimum was introduced to avoid players being killed while logging in after crashing in a fight. So if you are right at the spawn point, the NPC won't recognise you, but instead the one a few steps away - target him, and attack him. Before you are able to target and attack, the server already moved the NPC away, so chances are that your attack command may select the second near NPC, but not the nearest you expected.

(That way I often caught the strong rogue or the Brigand instead of the weaker one, which I wanted to attack instead of letting him disturb another player who was fighting the Brigand, when there was a bunch of 3.)

[Tarel]

There is a change coming up, that will spoil the fun for auto-attack botting people.
People that try to abuse the auto-attack feature, will not get far with it.

[Idoru]

Hmmm, sounds interesting

If you auto attack it will spawn an Ulber behind you?

[Tarel]

No, it's much easier.
You will not start attacking back in normal stance anymore, in the near future.
You can only defend you'reself then and not die, if you are strong enough.

[Idoru]

So rather than going onto normal stance we will go onto defensive, or full defensive?

[Nikodemus]

I only hope there won't be situations i suddently stp attacking, after it was actually me who started the combat.
I believe this is scripted well, basing on the past mistakes and experience

[Gharan]

So rather than going onto normal stance we will go onto defensive, or full defensive?

I'm guessing full-defensive, as you're hitting but not damaging or gaining XP, so you will just tire.

[Idoru]

But when you tire dont you then change to normal stance? or do you stop attacking and then get attacked by the mob again making it look like you change to normal stance?

On another note, It may help against people getting PP by standing there, but this is perfect for those who use rats to train their armor

[Gharan]

But when you tire dont you then change to normal stance?

Yeah you're right Idoru you do go to normal stance and it hits then shows that you're too tired to attack then hits again and so-on until the rogue etcetera is dead, maybe they will just change the primary stance to full-defensive so no damage could be done even after tiring.

[Peacer]

then there's the lag which could automatically put your little figure into auto attack stance and full defencive instead of bloody. Now you come to hate those botters who ruin this for everyone else :/. Now that gives you a reason to report them aye.

[neko kyouran]

http://planeshift.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/planeshift/planeshift/docs/history.txt

*** 2007-01-08 by Michael Gist
- Compile fixes from Nilaya.
- If attacked, initial stance will now be full-defensive.

So, they decided to go back to that I thought it was at originally when it the auto-stance feature was first put in place...full-defense?  So they fixed the bug that cuased them to change it from an auto full-defense to normal?

And speaking of the training of armor, the solution to that is a simple one, but most likely harder to code: once you get so high in armor, you don't get training from smaller, easier foe anymore.  Balance it so that the player needs to be there watching their character becuase the only time he'll get training is from a mob that can hit them hard, coupled with random spawn points and stronger npc AI, this should solve most likely all problems. 

[Gharan]

Are you hearing this botters 

[LigH]

As long as I am not constantly reset to full-defensive while fighting, it's okay ...

I made a special shortcut, anyway: [ /stopattack | /attack # ] - rather reliably allows to change stances.