I was wonder how you handle it if someone randomly asks to join your XPing group.
I six box and move around to out of the way places but I will still get a random person(s) from time to time asking if they can join my group for a while. Now I really don''t mind but I am not sure if I need to slow down my pulling and DPS, to pretend that I am not auto-boxing or not. Normally I will just give up the camp and gate out, telling them I will be back later but was fixing to head out. I know that before I was a boxer, I did get into a few groups that were being boxed and all went well, I wasn't going to say anything. My concern is not everyone out there is just looking to XP, some want to expose and be all loud about it.
What and how would you handle this?
-Taz
Personally, if I'm autoing, I try to stay in camps that are super out of the way or hidden in some way. Things like little side rooms deep in parts of a zone no one goes to or behind geometry in areas that folks wouldn't normally explore without going out of their way to do so. Generally, I just ignore tells that are sent my way if not manually playing at least one of my toons and then respond later pretending I didn't see they had sent me a tell, apologizing (usually accompanied by some excuse about how my filters were screwed up because of Raid and I forgot to change them back or something, only seeing their tell after looking through my logs and what not).
If I am actually playing though, I will just drop one of my DPS to let them in. I don't mind losing a little bit of exp on a box if it means keeping up appearances and helping out someone who might otherwise be upset with me later down the line if they find me doing something less than desirable. I try to keep my reputation as positive as possible, that way if I get called out for doing something sus it's not only a lot less impactful but less people actually care. On top of this, the more folks you help the less likely they are to call you out as, in my experiences anyways, someone is always less likely to have gripes with someone who has impacted them positively in the past and will more than likely prefer to handle the situation privately rather than slandering you all over general or something.
In the past, I had scripted an event in to KA to try and dynamically recognize if someone was sending me a tell regarding exp or not and then it would pick a random response from an array that I had filled out but you'll start to run in to problems if by chance you send the exact same tell to the same person twice over time even if you fill out the array with say, 100 entries, there's always that chance and shit like that keeps me up at night.
General tips for autoing safely would be:
1. Be respectful and polite in your responses regardless of if you plan to let them in or not.
2. Try to take camps that aren't heavily populated. Make your own camp spots in areas that folks would otherwise not normally approach without going out of their way. While you may or may not take exp hits for this, it has helped me avoid altercations countless times and is probably the biggest tip I could give.
3. If you're playing at least one toon manually, let folks in. It isn't against the rules to automate your toons while you are present at your PC only unattended gameplay breaks the EULA. In my 10 years of experience multiboxing using combat macros/plugins I haven't ever ran in to anyone who has slandered me for automating my toons in the background while I manual one, I'm sure there have been folks with experiences like this and maybe in the past this has happened but using combat macros in 2010 is a lot different from 2020, most folks on boxing/live servers use these tools already and are a little more accepting of them than they were back in the day.
4. Don't camp anything high priority, for example don't auto 24+ hours at frenzy in LGuk during Classic on server launch sort of thing. Try to find camps folks won't be looking for, unless I am looking for a very specific item I usually try to find a camp that has absolutely no nameds at all that way there is very little likelihood that anyone will be coming by looking for something. (This sort of stems off of #2)
5. Be as active as possible, I know for botting being unattended is sort of the point but look back at your screen every couple of hours or so, check for those tells and respond to them. You're less likely to get in to any sticky situations this way.
6. Zone knowledge is huge, study a zone before you go to it, what nameds spawn there? Where do they spawn? What quests use mobs in the zone? What quests start in the zone? Is this zone used for anything specific such as tradeskill mat farming, epic drops, clickies, BiS items, etc. that way you can find ways to avoid running in to issues with overlapping on camps folks want. This is especially important as you get in to later expansions like Underfoot where some zones are just filled to the absolute brim with mobs used for questing and you can really get in the way of some folks flagging/progression if you're not careful. As a personal example of this, in EoK, I auto'd at the Overthere ramp for about 24-32ish hours and had a group of folks absolutely livid with me because I didn't research ahead of time about the chokidai that spawn in the pond for the progression task and my group had continuously pulled and killed them, a little research ahead of time and a change to my INI could have stopped this issue from happening. Do a little research, you'll be able to auto safer for it!
It's also important to note that, for prog servers, as they get older there's less and less active GM support (if there was any at all) and less and less population. It only gets easier to auto as servers move forward. The worst eras are Classic-PoP, folks start to drop off a little during GoD and by SoF onwards you're pretty much all set to do whatever you want whenever you want. Hope this helps!
