The script has reached 700 daily users, which compared with the total number of PackRat players is far from negligible. It’s no surprise that we attracted the attention of the Dev’s, who contacted me in the hope to make the game a better place (for the script users, the others and the servers).
Some of the features of the script (if misused) place a great strain to the game servers and cause a denial of service for everyone. On the other side despite my best intentions there are other features that hurt the non-script users of the game: stalking for newly released cards e.g. makes impossible for a normal user to buy these items.
Thus I am discussing with the Dev’s the limits to put on the script to make it more fair for everyone. As far I am thinking about:
- Putting a limit on how long the script can run unattended (e.g. 2 hours). Afterwards it will just stop and ask for human input.
- The credit module will become inert after a certain amount of money. E.g. if you have more than 20k credits, you surely don’t need more.
- The script will stalk normally for old cards, but when you are looking for newly released items you will have to manually confirm your intention of buying that item (and give a chance to others to buy the card).
I gave the link to this post to PackRat’s Dev’s so that we can discuss the problems together.
I hate those ideas. you might as well just not even use the script otherwise. your just taking away its best features. devs cant stop ppl using scripts. im sure if your one is changed like this someone else will just create a new one. and the problem will start over again.
Well, if the devs have two grand issues thus far (1. taxing the servers and 2. overstalking the markets) why not just raise the wait time in the markets to say, 10 seconds or so? a normal person can refresh and re-examine a page in the markets about as quickly as the script can (at least, I can) – the only complaint is that a normal person doesn’t want to sit in the shops for x-amount of hours refreshing for the item… so just up the wait time to 10 or 15 seconds per stalk.
OR
set a limit to the number of times a particular item can be bought in the shop by the script – I.E. perhaps only 1 of each item per hour. The user has to click him/herself if he/she wants to try to buy within that hour window.
as for the server taxing… same mantra. up the wait time to say 5 seconds per page or something. I know plenty of users that scroll as fast as I do if they’re looking for only pop-ups.
For my input, I use the script mostly because of the pop ups. I actually find stalking the markets fun, but not surfing for pop ups. But… that’s my opinion.
When I requested this script, I never saw it being the beast it is with all these great features. But, on the flip side, some days I regret it because of all the problems it’s caused. Finding a happy medium would be fantastic if it’s possible!
I have my refresh limits set to a reasonable rate of every 30s when looking for PUs,(I use Reloadevery on FF instead of the built in stalking, it loads faster on rats due to no smack talk and history), same time when switching between each market, but I agree there should be a set minimum so that we aren’t blowing the server to dust. I could manually scroll even faster than that if I wanted to. But not everyones going to think that way.
The only real change to my play habits has been that I’ve been able to do a few other things while having it run in the background, and getting more done, like sleep haha. So I would be disappointed if I could no longer wake up to find a few elusive PU’s or cards I’d been looking for. Plus I’ve been able to help multiple friends out with credits when they’re really low or cards.
In the grand scheme of the game, it’s not a huge setback if the new card limits were set up like that imho. Newer cards fly off the shelves anyway at first though. I remember trying to do Boy Genius when it came out pre-script, and sometimes you’d barely get or miss a card even if you were refreshing the market every 15 seconds. Plus, the limit on credits will help impede the artificial inflation in the trading market. It’d just trim back my generosity with the credits I give out at a time.
But I also agree with GOD (don’t tell anyone!)
I’m also shocked the devs are working with you, even though they know uses of a script are against FB policy, even if they are for silly stuff like this and not farming contact info to spam people
I think with the recent turn of the game being perceived as more difficult (I’m not sure if they really have made it so, or all the script users have…) more people started using it, and it snowballs.
Well I personally think it’s a terrible idea to cut it back like that and I hate it.
This script evens the playing field for newbies. The devs want fair, make them switch up and mix up the rats every month so we get a chance at all of them. So that the earliest players don’t always get the very best cards that have been stolen from inactive packs from way back when and then rob us on the trade board by hoarding, selling and trading rares they already have multiples of.
Getting the new cards immediately and making them to trade is the only shot some of us have to get some of the midrange older cards we’re looking for. Cutting the script like this to “even the playing field” just gives the advantage to the older players all over again.
Ahem. Sorry for the rant. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go manually stalk the markets to try and make an 18 card recipe for the Planet so I can trade it to one of the hoarders to get 1 damn bee.
Like others I like the script for pop ups… but to be good to there servers and my haunted computer i have the pause time set to 5 seconds.
i don’t think it is a big deal to have to manually click the buy button … as that is what i have been doing since the update hasn’t been update. What i would recommend though is that the stalking script pauses when it finds something on the shopping list so you have time to buy it before it goes to the next store.
I hope you and the devs can come to a happy medium and can work together cause i love both the game and the script!
The devs are only working with him because they know they can’t stop the script form being used. But let’s face it, the script is cheating. It does not “even the playing field” it give the script user an advantage. Old-time players have NO advantage toward getting new cards. The only ones with an advantage are the script users and those who have multiple accounts and hoard cards until they expire and sell them for huge sums of credits. Time does not give anybody ANY advantage, only persistence gives an advantage.
The devs could keep making the script useless by changing their pages ever so slightly so the script can’t parse it properly. When the script updates, they tweak it again. I think this is what they have been doing for the past couple of weeks. But they don’t want to do that forever.
They just want everybody to play the game as it’s meant to be.
Old time players have no advantage to get the new cards, but that wasn’t my point. Old time players have every advantage with the expired cards! They have the oldest rats, and those rats steal from inactive packs and packs that have been around longest with the oldest cards in them. They already completed most sets in their vault, therefore they can hold on to multiple expired cards.
The script, being used by newbies, does even the playing field in having an advantage in getting the newer cards and recipes FIRST and being able to use them to trade for the older, expired cards. Have you ever seen the wish lists and attempts to buy and trade for expired cards from newer players without any ultra rare expireds? They go ignored day after day. Until brand new cards recipes and things requiring market stalking come up. That is when the offers come in.
Hopefully if they come up with options to dumb down the script to this extent, someone else will make one. That’s the name of the game.
The game is flawed and based on doing stupid repetitive tasks: #1 refreshing markets every few seconds for new cards, or #2 surfing packs for popups. These tasks should be either removed or given to a machine. The script works, but the functionality should be in the game not outside of it. Some possible solutions to the two problems:
#1 If a new card is introduced, it should always be in the market (a guaranteed spot, not random) for at least 1-2 days, to give everyone actively playing the same opportunity to get it without brainless refreshing and taxing the servers.
#2 If surfing through 100 packs the wanted pop-up is not appearing, give the user a choice of pop-up (pop-up store?) to spend the credits they collected.
It’s a balance of making the game challenging enough, but not stupidly hard/repetitive. When it’s nothing but brainless clicking, people will use a script. It would be stupid NOT to use a script – I pity those people spending hours after hours looking for a card. Is this what the Dev’s want people to do? Shameful.
As for old cards, get rid of them, delete every old card in packs and get rid of the hoarding problem. D’oh, they are supposed to be discontinued anyway. That would be the ultimate way of leveling the playing field.
All these are just some suggestions. And I totally agree that the problem is not the script, the problem is the way the game is “played” right now.
In reality, the devs have kind of put it on themselves to tax their own servers by a) limiting the amount of a card that appears in the shops and b) limiting the amount of pop-ups that appear. Frankly, if people have to wait 20 minutes for a card to leave the shops because nobody wants to buy it then they will refresh (either automatically or manually) for 20 minutes to get that card. Sometimes the wait is a lot longer than 20 minutes – it doesn’t matter if 1 person or 1000 people are using a script at that point: people are going to wait in the markets and tax the servers by refreshing.
The Devs (though they rock for developing this game) can’t really blame this script for “taxing the servers”. How they built the game in the first place does that more than enough as is.
… now as for the credits issue – I can see how using the script non-stop can cause a credit imbalance in the packrat community… HOWEVER, people have already posted that several hours of non-stop packratting gives them the opportunity to amass plenty of credits (and many people play co-operative, allowing people to use each others’ credits)… so once again I don’t see how the script does little else but what anyone else can do without it.
In finishing, I don’t see the malicious nature of this scripting program. Simply enough, it allows those of us that don’t get to play packrat as much as others a fighting chance to actually be able to finish sets because we can’t spent 10 hours a day clicking nonstop to collect credits and pop-ups.
(I actually do have a suggestion, however. If nothing else, I would say that if you would like to ‘help out’ the devs by lowering the amount of server taxing… set the script to only work on 1 firefox tab/window… that way people can’t scroll with 5 or 6 windows at once)
First of i think it would be a good idea to make set refresh time for the markets and scrolling as to not put too much pressure on the servewrs, that way the scrip would be doing no more than a human could!
I do no like the idea of it stopping at 20k though, just because the only reason i use the script is to be in with a slight chance of maybe just maybe being able to buy the cards i need and outbud the people with a gazzilion credits
This is quite an interesting development, and I’m all for making the game more fair for all players. Personally I use the script only for popups.. there’s so many needed for the recipes, and I didn’t have the hours to scroll waiting for them that some people have. I also don’t play co-op, which puts me at a disadvantage.. as far as i can see, using the script actually evens the field for me. I was really far behind on the popups before I installed it, and if there aren’t 9 or 10 of a rare popup required to finish a set i’ll turn off the script.
If the strain on the server is really a problem then slow the script down, that doesn’t bother me at all. Change the refresh rate to 10 seconds for browsing the rats, it’s still better than nothing. Take away the market stalking, that’s okay as well. Or else if the Devs want to change the game mechanics so stalking for popups isn’t required, i’ll stop using the script. I know they’ve said that stalking for popups isn’t an effective way to play the game.. but they haven’t left us any other option. I’m still not seeing great walls in the rats, for example.
I do feel sorry for the people who have to pay massive amounts for the rarer cards, I’m lucky in that i’ve been playing since the beginning.. but I also think that if they weren’t all willing to pay that amount, and weren’t charging that amount for other cards they have the market inflation wouldn’t be so stupid. They’re caught in the trap of greed unfortunately, and it’s only going to get more ridiculous.
The problem about putting artificial limitations or slow-down limits in the script is that anyone can just edit that part in the script. Or someone will make and publish a new script. The only way to correctly fix this is to fix the way the game works? Or maybe they can add a turing test to make using a script not worth it, like asking a captah thing every 5 minutes. lol.
“Anonymous” captcha’s can be bypassed
What are the Devs possessing? Devs, not Dev’s. Augh that irritates me!
And trust me, if you ever want to “buy” a good retired card it costs far more than 20k…
I like the unattended time limit. I mean let’s face it, the game is meant for human interaction after all, not for our PC’s to play for us.
As for the token limit…. what is the point? If we are on a page, we would be grabbing them anyway… why are we limiting them to 20k?
For the new cards, there is a limit to the cards. We are just as unlikely to get one of the cards as someone else. Instead of making it so we have to manually confirm purchase of new cards – why not make the market stalking time limit minimum longer then now? Now we can set it all the way down to zero, which really gets us nowhere… but set the minimum so it cannot go below a certain number…..
Anything the script does to be “nicer” to the devs can and will be bypassed and so it will be useless.
Personally, my browsing time is 5 to 10 seconds. Anything less and Firefox v3.0 will freeze within a couple of minutes.
If the devs want to limit the credits, limit it at the pack level, not the script level. This would also help bring down the price of cards in the trading boards since people will be less willing to pay 10-20k for a card if 20k is the limit of their credits.
Also, if I’m personally stalking a market I will refresh it every couple of seconds some times, so I’m actually faster than the script. I’ll even sometimes load up multiple tabs and switch between them quickly (hit refresh and go to next tab while that one loads, hit refresh on that tab and go to next tab…). So, if I’m stalking a market, I’ll burden the server more than the script will.
Most of the problems though, come from the players egos. They NEED to be first to finish a set or get a card (how many posts do we see in the boards of “#xx of card-something-or-other”?). Wait a few weeks and the pop ups will be in the rats and the cards won’t disappear quickly in the markets. Have some patience people.
I think the devs need to reconsider some aspects of the game to reduce the allure of trading cards for huge sums of credits.
Has there been any decisions if the market stalking aspect will be fixed anytime soon? And if not on this end, then is someone else writing one that WILL work? I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
About the stalking limit: Putting some limit on the frequency of market refreshing should be a good idea. I think about 30 seconds would be ok and allow to buy only one new card of each card every 24 hours automatically (the others will need confirmation).
About the browsing limits: Delays below 1 second should not be allowed and if you are inactive for more than 2 hours the script will switch to an idle speed of at least 10 seconds between refreshes.
About the deal with the Devs: Off course everyone can modify the script to lift the limits. But not everyone knows how (e.g. to make stalking work again it is enough to replace 5 occurrences of the word ‘buy’ with ‘purchase’, though no one said it yet). I don’t want to change things for most of the scripts users, only for those who are too greedy.
The Devs can easily add captchas to their application and modify the game every day to break the script, but they prefer not to bother the users and find an agreement first. They also can mess with your account, e.g. disconnect you from the Rats. The reason they didn’t do it to you is that they can not at the moment identify the script users.
They disconnected my account (since they know my name
) from the Rats about two weeks ago, but since I am not a PackRat addict, I don’t care and it only pushed me to update the script more often. Now they decided to find an agreement and I want to see where will it go.
I HATE the changes. First, new cards (or cards used in a recently announced recipe) only stay in the market for 10 seconds. That fact is what makes people, using the script or often otherwise, tax the servers. The stalking feature hasn’t been working for me for a week. So, I manually refresh the market every 10 seconds. You have to in order to get a chance for the card. That is what taxes the servers, not the script. Without the script you still have to refresh every 10 seconds.
If you have to confirm your purchase, you’ve lost the item as that 10 seconds is probably gone.
You are fixing a symptom, not the actual problem.
And yes,unfortunately, you do need more than 20k credits in this game if you have any hope in getting any of the rarer retired cards. They sell for way more than 20k if you can find someone to sell them to you.
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