Defender Expo 2017

[Shizensky]

You're all my friends, there you've been invited so stop your usual moaning.

I'll happily take any questions, but I can't guarantee nice replies

Alright, thanks for letting me field one then. Of course, anyone is welcome to answer this!

Now, this is going to be a bit lengthy, so please bear with me. I would probably have suggested it as more of a panel topic, but as far as I can tell from the OP there aren't really going to be panels, so this'll have to do.

A topic that has come up many a time, both in targeted events such as RaiderCon, and in discussions among the raiding community in general, is the place of scripts, tools, and other forms of automation in modern gameplay. Generally, the raiding community has turned it's back on all forms of scripts and automation beyond basic sheets that process the data dumps to ease the time spent placing manual triggers (and similar off-update busywork reduction tools, such a a bit of code that processes region links into bbcode). This is driven, as simply as I can sum up, by two main factors: 1) Notably since predator, site staff has shown a specific desire to reduce the involvement of scripts in R/D (see also, the project to provide update times and render update timing scripts fundamentally useless), and with the warnings given after Predator still fresh in our minds, we're generally doing our best to comply with what staff has expressed as a desire, not just within the limits of what is legal. 2) A lot of raiders strongly believe that adding any form of simplification to update both removes ever-more skill from the equation and, perhaps because of that, that it makes updating ever-more boring. In other words, they'd like to avoid making it even more of a game of "who can button mash keyboard keys the fastest" by sticking strictly to the fundamentals. As a result of this prevailing view, I can honestly say that, from my view, raiding is at the least tool-heavy state that I personally have ever seen, with the fanciest extra thing most recruits will ever interact with being the NS++ puppet creator, and not one tool that is actually used during update being commonplace.

Despite this, it has recently been claimed that "this is no longer a game of skill, it is a script war. To pretend otherwise is to deny the reality of the battlefield." While this claim was soon after rescinded when raiders made clear that that statement did certainly not apply to *our* side, but I still think it serves to illuminate something important - the fact that the statement was made in the first place demonstrates that it's author believed it to be true for their own side. If Drake is to be believed (and I'm inclined to believe him), defenders are participating in a bit of a script arms race. The same defender that once said "There are plenty of elements to the game that can't be replaced by scripts and bots, and actually, some things are faster or easier using the manual method. Try move+endo using a script vs manual, you'll lose to the manual method if the player knows what they are doing." ...is now managing a tool that, among other things, adds hotkeys for crossing, chasing, and endorsing, whose changelog points to other move+endorse tools, and may also soon include hotkeys to aid even the speed of switching. Defenders, who once championed what was done without tools and stated that "R/D should be a game of skill nothing more, not who has the best coders in their camp, but who can jump faster/ manually trigger better," now seem to be entering an age of tools nearly as dense as raiders once had, at least as it would appear from the outside. Further, from a group that once spoke of open scripts and public source code, the back end of many of these scripts is nowhere to be found. Unlike the tool, most recently upgraded three days ago to "Version 2.0," the NSBreeze thread has not been updated in over two years, and contains the source code from "Version 0.5.1.2" - lacking almost every single feature the modern version contains. The other tool mentioned offhand in the changelog has no apparent posting on site, period. It seems, for all intents and purposes, that the defender view has changed, and that automation and tool use is growing, mostly behind the scenes, on the defender side of things.

In short, while most all raiders have forgone the use of tools during update, defenders appear to be increasing their use of tools during update.

Given the above, what are your views on the place of scripts/tools/automation in the future of defending, as well as in Gameplay as a whole? What internal divisions exist among defenders in regards to the use of such tools? How do you feel that use of these tools affects accessibility to new players, as well as enjoyment for those in the game for the long run? Do you have any other comments on the state of tools in modern R/D?

Thank you for your time, and for letting me field a question.

(and sorry for the wall, but I wanted to be reasonably confident I was not spewing total shit here, so I spent several hours digging and sourcing everything I could)

This is actually a really important topic to me, and one in which I'm heavily involved. I don't have time for a reply right now but I've got a lot to say about it when I'm out of work this evening.

[Land filled with People]

snip

Maybe certain defenders got tired of raiders playing by themselves against the clock, and doing everything possible to keep defenders out of N/R/D? Maybe these same defenders decided to try inject themselves in the fraction of time still available; using the only long-term consistent means available to them?

Defenders were told to "adapt". They have. Deal with it.

[Glen-Rhodes]

FYI, Chrome extensions are just JavaScript, and you can easily view the source code: https://gist.github.com/paulirish/78d6c1406c901be02c2d

Anyways, the simple answer to your question, EWS, is that raiders have opposed pretty much every single substantive proposal to make defending easier without the use of scripts. Most changes in that direction have been limited to political tools, like SC resolutions. Meanwhile, any non-political change that *has* benefited defenders has also greatly benefitted raiders, even though the opposite isn't true.

[Jakker]

snip

Maybe certain defenders got tired of raiders playing by themselves against the clock, and doing everything possible to keep defenders out of N/R/D? Maybe these same defenders decided to try inject themselves in the fraction of time still available; using the only long-term consistent means available to them?

Defenders were told to "adapt". They have. Deal with it.

You're right that the focus on speed began with raiders and defenders did have to adapt. I don't think there is any fault in defenders for taking advantage of scripts and other tools to ensure more success. But I think it raises concern over what R/D has become and will continue to become: Automated. This shift has coincided with NS becoming more automated in general. Scripts for recruitment, log-ins, etc. I personally have never been an advocate of this shift, but I recognize the appeal. Perhaps this is what NS is now: doing most things with scripts. Personally, I see that greatly hurting the game and R/D in particular, but I don't know if there's any way to change that.

[Nakari]

Maybe certain defenders got tired of raiders playing by themselves against the clock, and doing everything possible to keep defenders out of N/R/D? Maybe these same defenders decided to try inject themselves in the fraction of time still available; using the only long-term consistent means available to them?

Defenders were told to "adapt". They have. Deal with it.

You're right that the focus on speed began with raiders and defenders did have to adapt. I don't think there is any fault in defenders for taking advantage of scripts and other tools to ensure more success. But I think it raises concern over what R/D has become and will continue to become: Automated. This shift has coincided with NS becoming more automated in general. Scripts for recruitment, log-ins, etc. I personally have never been an advocate of this shift, but I recognize the appeal. Perhaps this is what NS is now: doing most things with scripts. Personally, I see that greatly hurting the game and R/D in particular, but I don't know if there's any way to change that.

The tools to increase speed are not exactly automated. Still need to do the exact same actions, and be quick at reacting to do the same action. All that the tools do is reduce the time spent moving the mouse. I can't speak about any recruitment scripts since I don't use them
However things such as log-in scripts - that are readily available on the forum - I don't see this hurting the game exactly. It makes things like sleepers and switchers more accessible to new organisations and new blood by removing the tediousness of needing to log into a hundred puppets a week. I personally don't see any sense in making people do things the long way.

[Roavin]

I should note that the site rules are very clear that so-called "restricted actions" (such as moving to another region, or endorsing a nation) may not be done automated but must be done via direct and immediate user input, so there is a very direct upper limit to the R/D "automation" that can happen.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

-snip-
Unlike the tool, most recently upgraded three days ago to "Version 2.0," the NSBreeze thread has not been updated in over two years, and contains the source code from "Version 0.5.1.2" - lacking almost every single feature the modern version contains.
-snip-

Just gonna be clear, I'm only answering something I have been closely involved in, as I (as far as I'm aware) was the person who reintroduced NSBreeze to defenders after I was shown it sometime last year by Shizensky around the time he started being active again.

So, er... apparently through all that digging, you failed to catch the most basic of info with it, Souls. In fact, you linked something containing it.
Let me put it here to make it clear what I'm referring to: "Breeze++ is a derivative extension of NSBreeze, adding and modifying functionality for modern military gameplay in Nationstates."
NSBreeze, made years ago, was developed by Shizensky.
Breeze++, the new script, was made after permission was obtained from Shizensky to use the base code and improve on it. Thus, the NSBreeze thread does not concern it, at all. It is not Shizensky's tool, but a different one entirely using the code as a base yet improving on it.

The rest of your post I'm not replying to today, since it's... just shy of 3am. Yikes.

Sure, I'll give you that, though that doesn't affect my point so much as my terminology. If you want to think of them as entirely separate entities, then there is no thread created for it, rather than a lack of updates in the thread for it.

FYI, Chrome extensions are just JavaScript, and you can easily view the source code: https://gist.github.com/paulirish/78d6c1406c901be02c2d

Anyways, the simple answer to your question, EWS, is that raiders have opposed pretty much every single substantive proposal to make defending easier without the use of scripts. Most changes in that direction have been limited to political tools, like SC resolutions. Meanwhile, any non-political change that *has* benefited defenders has also greatly benefitted raiders, even though the opposite isn't true.

As I learned yesterday when researching this, you are 100% correct - that's actually where the 2 of the 3 pastebins I created were sourced from. However, for the sake of question re:the past view from several defenders that tools should be open-source, that's not very accessible. It's definitely arguable though!

So you see it as a necessity to remain competitive? And LFWP, does that sum up your view as well?

---

Evil Lord Sauron, Shiz (as the original creator of this tool especially), I look forward to seeing your feedback.

---

Roavin, also very correct, though I believe automation here is meant more colloquially as "taking an unnecessary level of work out of updating." As I discussed in my initial question, raiders have by and large recently decided to use mostly just items that would remove out-of-update busywork (re: nakari, agree to some degree, I mentioned NS++'s puppet creator being very helpful...telling people "congrats on finishing training! Now you need 40 nations!" is daunting, and makes things a lot easier for them). On the other hand, defenders very much are using update-enhancing tools, that are reducing mouse movements and scrolls into a series of keypresses. While this is technically legal - Admin has ruled that keypresses are a "similar action" to mouse clicks, and changing/moving page elements that only affect your screen is perfectly legal - it'd seem to me to be changing how you run to a serious degree, even perhaps a different skillset (there is also an argument there for increasing reliance on the tool/decreasing speed with the vanila site). The best argument I can see for that has, if I read people right, already been made - the fun in defending is beating raiders, so you don't care if that's reduced to running your fingers along a line of keys to do all the associated actions, because that wasn't the fun part. That said, that feels like, from similar conversations in raiding, a view that many don't agree with. At least on my side, a lot of people would quit if that's what it took to win, because that doesn't even feel like raiding any more. Hell, imagine both sides used hotkeys to their fullest extent - it'd come down to how fast pages load, how many actions each side has to take, and the only real personal skill left would be in the trigger! ...at least until "site provided update times" kills that too. Then, assuming one side's hotkeys weren't consistently faster, it's little more than a numbers game of who has more people.

---

I do think, thanks to so many folks joining the discussion already, that my question about differing opinions within defending is answering itself
I've also thought of an interesting analogy - Gameplay is in sort of a state of a technological turning point, and we're on the edge of figuring out what sort of state we end up in. Will it be full steampunk, with some tech ticking away in the background while we stick mainly to the old? Will it be space empires, battling it out via robot proxy with the most future of techs? Or will it remain something in between, ninjas versus guns, those who refuse to take up the simple solution against those who will win by any means necessary?

...yes that's a little overblown, but it might help any passing RP'ers understand the situation a bit better, and Koth tells me they're surprisingly interested in GP whenever a little bit of RP is sprinkled in ;P

[Parazzia]

Roavin, also very correct, though I believe automation here is meant more colloquially as "taking an unnecessary level of work out of updating." As I discussed in my initial question, raiders have by and large recently decided to use mostly just items that would remove out-of-update busywork (re: nakari, agree to some degree, I mentioned NS++'s puppet creator being very helpful...telling people "congrats on finishing training! Now you need 40 nations!" is daunting, and makes things a lot easier for them). On the other hand, defenders very much are using update-enhancing tools, that are reducing mouse movements and scrolls into a series of keypresses. While this is technically legal - Admin has ruled that keypresses are a "similar action" to mouse clicks, and changing/moving page elements that only affect your screen is perfectly legal - it'd seem to me to be changing how you run to a serious degree, even perhaps a different skillset (there is also an argument there for increasing reliance on the tool/decreasing speed with the vanila site). The best argument I can see for that has, if I read people right, already been made - the fun in defending is beating raiders, so you don't care if that's reduced to running your fingers along a line of keys to do all the associated actions, because that wasn't the fun part.

Well, the fun in defending is in defending - in the joy of trying to be fast, in working with others, and yes, in the satisfaction of the occasional win. I've never seen people say the fun of defending is in the scrolling and clicking. And there is still scrolling and clicking - there's no way to automate switching and spotting raiders and finding defenders to cross with. Using the hotkeys is a new skill only in certain situations that requires just as fast reactions as someone doing it without tools would need - just that the reaction can be enacted slightly faster.

That said, that feels like, from similar conversations in raiding, a view that many don't agree with. At least on my side, a lot of people would quit if that's what it took to win, because that doesn't even feel like raiding any more.

I suppose that depends on what you feel raiding is. Bear in mind that raiding does require far less scrolling than defending does, and many actions Breeze++ is used for just aren't used by raiders - so much of the experience is still the same. Just with keys replacing the move and the endorse.

Something that comes to mind here is the simplicity of returning to a jump point with hotkeys. For a defender it takes up a few seconds after a jump. I've seen plenty of raiders spend ages returning their puppets to their jump points. Raiding would likely feel quite similar without that half-hour of busywork

Hell, imagine both sides used hotkeys to their fullest extent - it'd come down to how fast pages load, how many actions each side has to take, and the only real personal skill left would be in the trigger! ...at least until "site provided update times" kills that too. Then, assuming one side's hotkeys weren't consistently faster, it's little more than a numbers game of who has more people.

It would also come down to reaction times, remember. And memory of what keys to press in each situation. And spotting and giving orders and etc. It would also not be too different from recently, I believe. I started defending before Breeze was in regular use and I can tell you that reaction times and numbers are still the most influential factors in whether we win or not.

In fact, back when I was a raider, things also depended on reaction times and numbers. There was just a bit more unnecessary busywork. If raiders are prepared to go through that tedium because that's what raiding is to them, fair enough, but we don't need to.

Or will it remain something in between, ninjas versus guns, those who refuse to take up the simple solution against those who will win by any means necessary?

...oh, come now, we aren't trying to win by any means necessary, we're trying to have fun and win occasionally. It's all well and good to refuse to use a space shuttle if all you're doing is going to the next town over but if you need to cross the galaxy in a couple seconds then you're not taking a horse.

For the sports roleplayers: it's a 100m race where raiders get a 50m head start and the defenders don't get to hear the starting gun. You could totally argue that defending successfully should be limited to people who are fast enough to win anyway. Yet raiding would be unaffected by that because it's faster to run 50 metres than 100, so that wouldn't exactly be a balanced race.

[Glen-Rhodes]

As I learned yesterday when researching this, you are 100% correct - that's actually where the 2 of the 3 pastebins I created were sourced from. However, for the sake of question re:the past view from several defenders that tools should be open-source, that's not very accessible. It's definitely arguable though!

I suggested a couple years ago, I think, to [violet] that all tools should be open-source as a requirement, even ones not using the API. I've certainly followed that guideline myself, except in rare instances when an admin has requested I don't disseminate a tool I've made. Breeze++'s source code should be added to GitHub or posted in the Tech forum, for sure.

So you see it as a necessity to remain competitive? And LFWP, does that sum up your view as well?

I do, 100%. Raiding and defending are incredibly lop-sided when it comes to ease and accessibility. First of all, that it can really only be done in the middle of the night is a problem for both sides (most people raid or defend during major, not minor). (To those who call me an armchair defender-- I don't defend, because I'm adult with an early morning job. I can't defend, during either update.) But for defending in particular, it can only happen during a small window in the major or minor updates, whereas raiders can get it during those windows and continue to pile as necessary throughout the day. Nothing has ever been done to address this.

When you look back at the R/D Summit, which was supposed to restructure the whole game and make it more balanced, the only structural change that was made for defenders specifically was the update display time. And that's obviously not even a full handicap, because it's purposefully inaccurate. GCR Delegate influence was changed to make coups and invasions easier. The Delegate-Elect proposal will make things more difficult for both sides, but it tilts harder on defenders because, again, the all-day piling ability means there are many more raiders in a region that a defender Delegate-Elect can't immediately remove. Regional Officers helps raiders way more than defenders, though I have no clue if it's even in widespread use by either side. And, of course, the new SC proposals are what I mentioned above, when I said that pro-defender changes usually come in the form of political tools, rather than true structural changes to the game.

If there aren't changes made that clearly benefit defenders, without also benefiting raiders, then the game will remain woefully unbalanced. In that environment, defenders are right to craft tools that help balance things out a little bit. No legal tool will introduce the kind of balance that the game really needs, though.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

And yet the newer breeze does seem to simplify spotting by making visual changes to the page (in addition to dossier tools), and I included a quote from its maintainer/creator about an intent to expand it's ability to help with switching

,It shouldn't take anyone a minute per puppet to simply return to VI, by the way - what a lot of people do though, is alternate between chatting post-update and going through their puppets to tag, re-apply for WA, *and* move back - or also doing 2 or 3 of those things while chatting not directly post update. Additionally, if you mean mid-update, we'll often jump directly from the miss if we didn't update, or even from both the miss and our JP in certain situations. There are other possiblities too.

Reaction times matter a lot more when you have things like mouse movement involved - with enough tooling, you're just hitting a key that your finger is ready on as soon as you see a page load.

---

So we agree on one thing at least glen

Most of that seems, for better or worse, irrelevant, seeing as admin has stated summit plans are dead. It does seem, however, that you agree with me that estimated update times is not necessarily a great thing? It does "kill" the possibility to use triggering tools for raiding, but I am personally really not happy with the idea of removing an element of skill and replacing it with a predetermined window of chance. I could see it not being great for y'all either, depending on how much the chance favors one side or another, if only becuase there's less room for raiders to mess up of our own regard/poor skill, and because every newb with two friends will have the same accuracy as TBH. As for balance....well, things certainly seem pretty balanced right now. At present, my triggers understand that 50% is a perfectly acceptable hit rate on a night when defenders are out in numbers and/or variance is really ducking with us (we can't really measure, but ever since [v] started messing with the update to make it shorter a bit back, variance has seemed to be significantly worse...and it already seemed to have gotten worse prior, notably at one point when with no changes to the code, 20xx went from being on par with manual triggering for accuracy to far worse). The question, then, behind that is how many of those defenders are using tools? How much of this current decent balance is only possible because of unmatched tool use on the defender side? I don't think that can be credited for other elements of balance. Numbers, well, rose come and go - the present balance in numbers was evident in Ankh Mauta, when foenseveral days they were damn near equal. That will swing over time. Ankh also showcases, for me at least, the very first time I have seen RO's be useful for more than removing the need to switch dels to use influence/take turns covering update - when, instead of a pile off, a raider RO was able to help us retake the region when the native del failed to log on. If anything, I'd say RO's have been underutilized by defenders... we have at times been far too happy to hand them out to anyone who asks, and sometimes even given BC powers to near strangers from allied orgs - I am frankly surprised that we have yet to have an RO flip on us and start ejecting raider endorsements immediately prior to a lib attempt.

Ultimately, I think it's hard to add much that a) can't possibly be used by raiders, and b) isn't so powerful that it unbalances things the other way/kills an aspect of raiding. Honestly, I think the mentioned apparent increase in variance has done as much for leveling the tag field as any more prominent change could, as even our manual trigger who are stunningly good at adapting to the pace of update are only about as accurate as more mediocre ones were a year ago. When watching Money, a very active and very good trigger in TBH, his evenly set triggers can sometimes shift in how wide they are by two or even three seconds at various points in update, and he is constantly watching them in order to increase or decrease his spacing to adapt.

[Parazzia]

And yet the newer breeze does seem to simplify spotting by making visual changes to the page (in addition to dossier tools), and I included a quote from its maintainer/creator about an intent to expand it's ability to help with switching

Perhaps I've been using Breeze wrong but I've never seen any visual changes that replace going to the activity page and dossiering raiders off it. Dossiering replaces only the click of the 'add to dossier button' and a scroll. Scrolling for me is not an essential part of defending. Raiders don't have to scroll, they're already on the page by the time that timing matters. Therefore losing that extra scroll evens the battlefield a little.

I was unaware of the proposed switching help >_>

It shouldn't take anyone a minute per puppet to simply return to VI, by the way - what a lot of people do though, is alternate between chatting post-update and going through their puppets to tag, re-apply for WA, *and* move back - or also doing 2 or 3 of those things while chatting not directly post update. Additionally, if you mean mid-update, we'll often jump directly from the miss if we didn't update, or even from both the miss and our JP in certain situations. There are other possiblities too.

If that's an essential part of the raiding experience then I stand corrected. Back when I raided I found the repetitive action incredibly boring and something I'd rather avoid. So I suppose that varies by person.

Reaction times matter a lot more when you have things like mouse movement involved - with enough tooling, you're just hitting a key that your finger is ready on as soon as you see a page load.

Which is still heavily dependent on reaction times. I personally think reaction times are a more valuable skill than mouse movement (think of the poor trackpad users!).

It's quite equivalent to tag raiding. "You're just hitting a button that your finger is ready on as soon as you see a "GO!" load."

[Roavin]

Souls, you are setting up a false equivalency between what raiders do and what defenders do.

Here's what a tagger does:
Open the point's nation page
Click 'endorse'
open the target region page
Hover mouse over 'Move', and click on GO.

Here's what a defender does:
Open the cross point nation
Click endorse
Open all endorsees in separate tabs
Go through each tab, endorse that nation and close it as well
In a separate happenings page, pick out the raider puppet and open it in a new tab
Add that raider to the dossier
Open the reports page
Continually refresh the reports page (like, twice a second):
-> If endorsed, open the endorsing nation in a new tab and endorse them back
-> If the raider puppet gets endorsed or endorses, open _that_ in a new tab and endorse them back
-> If the raider puppet moves, open the region page, scroll down, click 'move'

Hell, imagine both sides used hotkeys to their fullest extent - it'd come down to how fast pages load, how many actions each side has to take, and the only real personal skill left would be in the trigger!

The only advantage you could get from hotkeys on your side is ... actually, none, except _maybe_ how quickly the point nation can be endorsed (not a bottle neck, since it's one nation). If it's 5 taggers vs. 5 defenders out on the field, and I'm ignoring the overhead of switching, then the tagger does 3 clicks per hit, while the unaided defender does 23 clicks without counting the continuous refreshes.

[Vincent Drake]

As the author of Breeze++, I am happy to field any questions or concerns anyone has about the script.

As several people have noted already, Breeze++ is a derivative of NSBreeze, made with permission from Shizensky. Since Breeze++ is not NSBreeze, the NSBreeze thread has obviously not been updated. That's not my thread or script. Breeze++ is intended to be public and open source, but it's pretty incomplete, so I've been reluctant to do all of that yet. I've also been extremely sick for the past couple weeks, so just getting it on the Chrome store has been an achievement in and of itself.

There are some misconceptions about what the script is actually capable of. It can't "automate" anything and you have to wait for each key action to fully load or it won't do anything. All it does is map clicks and URLs to keys. In terms of loading speeds, there is no physical difference between hitting Breeze++ keys vs clicking your mouse or copy pasting links.

So why does it make defenders so fast? I brought a video editor's workflow to a browser game. In an industry where you can spend 10-14 hours a day, 6 days a week, actively using a computer, you get really, really good at flying around with single key hotkeys. The mouse will do to your wrist what loud music does to your ears, your wrist will end up tingling and pulsing with pain for the rest of your life unless you cut mouse usage down while you're still a young editor. When you are sitting for 10-14 hours a day in front of 65 terebytes of files that have to pass through an ancient, woefully underpowered workstation, you also get really good at identifying the most inefficient kinks in your workflow and dreaming up ways of improving them. You start seeing things that nobody else sees, and you can produce impossible results by just tweaking little details. I once made a pair of projects that each took 40 min to load, into 5 projects that each took 2-10 seconds to load, without changing the volume of content. I looked at chasing from this viewpoint, addressed the things that are the biggest time sinks, and packaged the savings together. It's not *really* the keys that make it fast, it's the approach.

Breeze++ isn't designed to provide defenders an advantage. It is designed to give defenders a *chance* to defend against clock tags that are otherwise literally undefendable (inside 3s). While big raids and liberations are fairly balanced right now, both benefit from being able to pre-setup the target. You can set an undefendable liberation just as well as you can set an undefendable raid. But, on a chase, you need a certain minimum amount of time to react to a move, as you obviously don't know the when or where.

In order for a raider to understand why manual chasing physically cannot compete with tagging, let's breakdown the workflow of one. For a manual chase, the wedge of time can be expressed as Time to see raider move + Personal reaction time + Correct region link click + Scrolldown time to move button + NS load.

Assuming you have already crossed and dossed, which takes a lot of time itself when doing full manual, and are on reports (or are on raider JP page), the first bloc of time is the difference between when you see the raider move vs when they actually moved. What a lot of people don't realize is that the raiders could have left 8s ago, and it can look to you like they just moved. If you refresh too quickly, new requests cancel the old ones, and what you are seeing is not actually up to date. You need perfect refresh cadence in order to catch the raider move right as it happens, and you need to maintain perfect cadence for the entire update.

Next, you need to react to what you see. It takes many people 1-2s just to do this step alone, even if they get to pre-set their move and are moving on a GO command. Chasing has an element of surprise combined with barely controlled panic, so reaction times are often longer than on raids or libs.

Now that you react to the move, you have to click the region link cleanly. It's pretty small text that you must hit directly and it pops up in different places depending on region and nation name lengths. If the raider is a long name with a Black Hawk flag and is jumping from a miss with a long name to a new target with a long name, the link is going to be way over to the right. If a short name jumps out of VI to a 3 letter region, it's going to appear way over to the left. If you misclick even just a little bit around the text, you have to do it again.

Now you've made it to the region page and have to scroll down to find the move button. Again, this will be in a different position for each region, depending on the volume of its content. Long WFE+closing embassies is a nightmare! This is one of the hardest steps because you can easily scroll short or long, scrambling to even find the button let alone get a click on it. Several seconds can be blown here.

Finally, you need to wait for NS to load again to register your move. If your internet connection isn't fast, this is where you go to die. This is the most frustrating step because there is nothing you can do about it, Breeze++ or manual alike. You can do everything else quickly and cleanly, but if your TTFB is slow, you won't get in.

Tally all this up, and a *perfect* move comes out to about 3s. Your average move for a skilled manual chaser with good internet is around 4-5s. Any raider jump under that wedge is literally undefendable. Newbies with 6-8s+ jumps don't stand a chance. However, with hotkeys, less time is wasted pecking for links or hunting for buttons. Breeze++ allows most tags to be defensible in theory. You still need to be ready, react, and let the page load twice. Breeze++ is just the chance to get in. Taggers still win most of the targets, sometimes all of the targets, but at least they are all defendable in theory. I don't mind losing all the targets if I had an actual chance to defend them.

Given Soul's statements, it would appear that raiders have a reduced need for scripts. Your manual triggers are steller and produce moves that are too tight for manual chasing to even physically contest. As Chingis said, they are better than his script. But, on the defending side, we have an increasing need for scripts as raiders get these undefendable jumps. The alternative is to concede that we can't defend against an increasing portion of tags and some big raids.

If the balance of tagging and chasing weren't so broken, there wouldn't be such a thing as undefendable jumps, and we wouldn't need these scripts in the first place. I'd be happy to not use Breeze++ if I didn't need to. But, I cannot manually chase under 4s. Even with my speed and internet, it's not possible. It's literally not possible. Souls, I invite you to come chase and see how well you do manually. If your taggers are hitting mostly sub 3s jumps, I guarantee you won't make it into any of the targets. I don't think you really understand how difficult manual chasing is. It's not comparable to manual tagging at all. That's an open invite to any raider who thinks they can just manually chase and still hit something.

[Parazzia]

Souls, you are setting up a false equivalency between what raiders do and what defenders do.

Here's what a tagger does:
Open the point's nation page
Click 'endorse'
open the target region page
Hover mouse over 'Move', and click on GO.

Here's what a defender does:
Open the cross point nation
Click endorse
Open all endorsees in separate tabs
Go through each tab, endorse that nation and close it as well
In a separate happenings page, pick out the raider puppet and open it in a new tab
Add that raider to the dossier
Open the reports page
Continually refresh the reports page (like, twice a second):
-> If endorsed, open the endorsing nation in a new tab and endorse them back
-> If the raider puppet gets endorsed or endorses, open _that_ in a new tab and endorse them back
-> If the raider puppet moves, open the region page, scroll down, click 'move'

[...]

If it's 5 taggers vs. 5 defenders out on the field, and I'm ignoring the overhead of switching, then the tagger does 3 clicks per hit, while the unaided defender does 23 clicks without counting the continuous refreshes.

Your proposed defender clearly uses scripts! A truly unaided defender would have extra clicks for scrolling:
- scroll to the endorse button on cross point
- scroll to the endorse button on other defenders (x4)
- scroll to the dossier button on the raiders (x5)
- scroll to the move button

Which brings a total of 34 clicks, I believe. A raider has only two extra scrolling clicks - their total is 5 clicks per hit.

[Dravkia]

- scroll to the endorse button on other defenders (x4)

It might even be more than 4 on some updates.

Also, shouldn't this debate be taken somewhere else?

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

snip

Which is still heavily dependent on reaction times. I personally think reaction times are a more valuable skill than mouse movement (think of the poor trackpad users!).

It's quite equivalent to tag raiding. "You're just hitting a button that your finger is ready on as soon as you see a "GO!" load."[/quote]


The newer breeze certainly appears to have added visual functions -



I included a link to a chat log mentioning switching help in my initial post.

The points about reducing the number of actions to a more equal level are totally fair. As I've noted, between that and variance increases we've had to train very hard to work with, the chase time is currently very competitive. My questions revolved more around how various folks within defending view a reliance on tools to be competitive in this area, as well as how they affect enjoyment and accessibility. Your view seems to be that they do not have a negative impact on enjoyment, and perhaps increase accessibility of chasing...to anyone given them. In that case, I would point to the bit questioning why this and similar tools (including, though I'm not sure what shape it is in since I only know of it from a line in the NSBreeze++ changelog, "Roavin's Move+Endorse tool") are not made more publicly available. Especially given the points below (getting the them) about how y'all believe that these types of tools would be far less useful for raiders, there seems to be no reason to *not* try and get them in the hands of as many people as possible.

snip

I don't know if I really am? That's an entirely fair point. I do think you've made some minor exaggerations or omissions (for example, many raiders have to screens after seeing go to move - not everyone has the screen space to split or dual screen things and see the chat at the same time as the region, while defenders can theoretically chase for themselves without looking for any orders. Additionally, many of those actions (clicks) are prep work before the actual jump, and not made necessarily in the same span of time, and finally, some of that is operational choice - we could cross for every hit as well if we were worried about the point being late and ruining it, and y'all could not cross and rely on either a) the point being in in time like we do, or b) that the hit could be one where you need to endo someone else and crossing doesn't even matter at all) ... but overall, it's a fair point. And to say we could get no possible advantage out of keypresses is silly as well - we'd certainly get *less* help from it, but many of those actions are things we do in certain circumstances as well. For perhaps the most prominent example, we do have move-then-endorse hits, which we currently set several seconds wider than preendorsed hits to give folks time to do things like refresh and scroll, with a lot of associated mouse movement. If we were to use hotkeys there instead, we could add far less extra time to those triggers because we'd be streamlining that process as well.

snip

That's fair, though I would question why, with nine versions significant enough to mention in the changelog, none of those were ready to take a few minutes to post. The topic of defending tools seeming, again from my outside perspective, to be moving to being less open does however apply beyond just breeze++.

I'll repeat what I said earlier that, in the context of this discussion, I believe "automation" is reffering more to "legally condensing a more complex act or series of acts into a single key press" and not the act of the tool completing that key press-bound action.

That's a very interesting perspective/commentary, re:workflow, and something that I think very much adds to the discussion. As I note a bit above, I think that that is an entirely valid point to be made, and my questions revolved more around how the use of these tools yada yada yada. Thanks for the compliment on triggers - I can say for certain that we've been putting a *lot* of time into training/retraining folks to be very adaptable - our triggers are set wide, and our triggerpeople adapt to various elements including defender presence, variance, and updater speed on the fly and throughout update by increasing or decreasing how long after the trigger goes off that they actually say go. Some of them are very much better than I ever was at it, and it's cool to see folks getting about as accurate as we were several months ago given how much extra skill that takes these days. I do find it interesting that your personal view has changed - as I quoted in my initial question, you once said that that the manual move+endo would always be faster than the script-assisted one if the manual player knew what they were doing, and now you're saying the opposite. Do you think you could discuss a bit more about what causes this change in view? Is it merely better tools, or were you previously biased against tools and are now more open to them? Are there defenders that still hold your old view, and if there are, what would you say to them to trigger a similar shift in view?

---

In general, I'd also like to point something else out/add another twist of a question - a lot of this conversation has revolved around how chasing is slower/more complex than the tagging it is chasing. There is, however, something else that is far more similar to tagging ... that is, detagging. Though there is certainly a bit more work to do "full" detagging (i.e. pulling the WFE from the associated tool), that could presumably be eased as well (i.e. it wouldn't be significantly more complex than anything in breeze to run the region name through the WFE index and make that eaiser). I'd imagine that, with the number of updates that have defender presence, as well as the skill and speed of today's defenders, that y'all could detag as fast as, if not faster than, we tag! Even if chasing is preferred/more interesting, there are updates where defenders are clearly outnumbered or when raiders are not active, that could be spent removing dozens of tags. And yet, detagging seems utterly dead (with the recent exception of whatever Lily is...they're an exception for many thing, tool use in raiding included). Why does no one detag anymore? Is it a matter of not caring about dead regions? In that case, why chase tags, when any non-dead region will effectively detag itself 12ish hours later anyways? If it's about beating raiders being more interesting, well, I mentioned there are cases where beating raiders is not going to happen in a given update, so why not spend that time "beating" us another way by knocking out a bunch of our tags? You could take out most of TBH's current tags in a week or so if you wanted to, since region deaths and native detags already kill a vast percent of tags created. What happened to detagging, and does anything lie ahead in the future of detagging?

[Dravkia]

So anyway. I'm really having fun with this Expo! It's awesome to see so many people show up!

[RiderSyl]

Also, shouldn't this debate be taken somewhere else?

So anyway. I'm really having fun with this Expo! It's awesome to see so many people show up!

Hey, you. Stop re-routing the discussion just because you don't like what Souls is posting. It's disrespectful. Ignore it if you don't like it.

[Dravkia]

Also, shouldn't this debate be taken somewhere else?

So anyway. I'm really having fun with this Expo! It's awesome to see so many people show up!

Hey, you. Stop re-routing the discussion just because you don't like what Souls is posting. It's disrespectful. Ignore it if you don't like it.

I just think there are better places to discuss this stuff.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

Hey, you. Stop re-routing the discussion just because you don't like what Souls is posting. It's disrespectful. Ignore it if you don't like it.

I just think there are better places to discuss this stuff.

I thought this was a pretty appropriate place - I also asked first, and DYP at least said fire away. If the hosts would prefer that this get it's own thread instead of continuing to bump their event thread and draw in extra readers, I'd be happy to oblige, but they have so far said no such thing.

[Glen-Rhodes]

Ultimately, I think it's hard to add much that a) can't possibly be used by raiders, and b) isn't so powerful that it unbalances things the other way/kills an aspect of raiding.

There are a lot of things that could be done to balance the playing field towards defenders. For one, admins could increase the flood limit the ban button, or increase the influence costs of banjecting new nations, etc. The problem isn't lack of imagination. It's that raiders will oppose these things, because they don't also benefit, and so they won't ever be done. The default consideration is that you should be able to succeed in a raid, barring defenders jumping in just before you do and with more endorsements. Your point "b)" is that exact sentiment. If a change decreases the base ability of raiders to succeed, its considered unbalanced. But the opposite isn't true-- the entire game design puts the base ability of defenders to exceed far, far, far below raiders in the first place.

NationStates would be very different if the default consideration was that defenders should be able to succeed.

[Ever-Wandering Souls]

Ultimately, I think it's hard to add much that a) can't possibly be used by raiders, and b) isn't so powerful that it unbalances things the other way/kills an aspect of raiding.

There are a lot of things that could be done to balance the playing field towards defenders. For one, admins could increase the flood limit the ban button, or increase the influence costs of banjecting new nations, etc. The problem isn't lack of imagination. It's that raiders will oppose these things, because they don't also benefit, and so they won't ever be done. The default consideration is that you should be able to succeed in a raid, barring defenders jumping in just before you do and with more endorsements. Your point "b)" is that exact sentiment. If a change decreases the base ability of raiders to succeed, its considered unbalanced. But the opposite isn't true-- the entire game design puts the base ability of defenders to exceed far, far, far below raiders in the first place.

NationStates would be very different if the default consideration was that defenders should be able to succeed.

I'll argue the ban button - the limit placed on that is already below the prior human/manual limit even without assistance. Additionally, in refusing to allow a "five in five" or other burst-type limit, its effectively even longer for anyone doing things by hand...often, folks either try to eject a bit too fast and hit the limit, wasting a valuable bit of time, or alternatively wait longer than necessary to avoid hitting that one per second limit. In effect, that not only killed any advantage that RO's gave in terms of increasing the number of possible ejections - it also limited the ability of a single delegate with no assistance to do so. Effectively, most operations now have been getting an average of about one every two seconds, or generally 2-4 ejections prior to update for most liberation attempts. Personally, I think that's a pretty reasonable number, and introduces an element for defenders similarly balanced to what we do when planning move+endorse operations: you can cut a bit close to limit the number of defenders who make it in (or in this case ejections), but you have to balance that with the prospect of losing slower jumpers by cutting too close. The current numbers for that seem pretty fair. Tweaking influence a bit to make attrition runs more effective is indeed also a possibility - I could behind that, in moderation, but noting that things are already *near* fair with that in my opinion. We have to do a lot of planning and mamangement to have enough influence along with enough endorsements to survive the first few days of an operation, especially becuase of the timer on BC RO additions - that is to say, proper prep means that as we gradually hold long enough to unlock those, influence gradually becomes less of an issue, but it is very much still an issue when we have no or only one BC RO. See, for example, Ankh Mauta recently, in which there was a very good defender foothold. Even though we eventually pulled ahead there (mind you, after losing it), it would have taken us at least a week or two just to clean up remaining defenders crossed up there, much less begin native ejections. In that sense, I think influence is doing *a* job in making destructive raiding time consuming and difficult, and giving defenders a way to slow it down even more, but I'd be open to tweaks within reasons there. I know it may not feel like it to you, but there have been plenty of things enforced that feel to us like they're limiting us more than they're helping us - even something as simple as adding confirmation to the WA join process slows down the speed at which we can switch and therefore tag marginally, or you could look at the changes that mean we *have* to RO ourselves to tag after update now becuase delegates get removed on WA resignation (a change that also means we never have BC powers when tagging any more, so things like ban list clearing and defender puppet banning don't happen any more). On your last bit, well, that's an interesting statement. Many situations are greater towards raiders succeeding...but that's because we act with the initiate, and responsive will always lag behind initiative. Natives have lots of tools, including founder, passwords, and the ability to limit power to delegate, that I'd argue generallly give them a massive advantage, if they use it properly. Then, once we're the ones in power...well, you've got a mix of the same powers natives have, and the idea in the game's FAQ that whoever holds the seat and has the power to keep it has the right to keep it. I'm not sure how, nor how one would reason, that the responsive body in the situation could and should have the upper hand there.

[Defender Expo 2017]

As is the usual, BT providing great insight & information. Dude could talk to a brick wall & get it to laugh. Gem of a dude & all around great gameplayer, imo

Totally agree <3

So anyway. I'm really having fun with this Expo! It's awesome to see so many people show up!

The first day was really sweet with some great conversations, some fun CAH games, an amaze interview with BT, and a speed record of 2.2 seconds set by Altmoras in the challenges.

Today that speed record has been broken by Red Dusk who brought it down to 1.7s (and an awesome interview with DYP is forthcoming so prep your questions). Right now we're CAHing it up so join us <3

[Glen-Rhodes]

Many situations are greater towards raiders succeeding...but that's because we act with the initiate, and responsive will always lag behind initiative.

Yes, that's the fundamental imbalance in the game that needs to be addressed. And the way to address that is to give defenders tools that don't also help raiders. In most games, designers try to counter-balance first turn advantage.

[Shizensky]

Alright then.

Before I start, I'm going to warn you that this is likely going to be a long read, and it's going to be all over the place. T

Generally, the raiding community has turned it's back on all forms of scripts and automation beyond basic sheets that process the data dumps to ease the time spent placing manual triggers (and similar off-update busywork reduction tools, such a a bit of code that processes region links into bbcode). This is driven, as simply as I can sum up, by two main factors: 1) Notably since predator, site staff has shown a specific desire to reduce the involvement of scripts in R/D (see also, the project to provide update times and render update timing scripts fundamentally useless), and with the warnings given after Predator still fresh in our minds, we're generally doing our best to comply with what staff has expressed as a desire, not just within the limits of what is legal.

I've noticed that it's more and more common to refer to Predator as the thing that happened. Predator was never actually the problem, though. It's sort of a "guns don't kill people, people kill people" situation. There were people using Predator who were aware that the tool violated game rules. Those people also knowingly distributed the tool for wider user. "Scripts are bad" shouldn't be the lesson learned from Predator, the lesson was learning who to trust. If the community continues to blame Predator, we're only setting ourselves up for a repeat.

With the amount of reluctance there is to remove Gest from the Raider Hall of Fame, and that a number of raiders still praise the other DOS and even keep them in Discord servers, it still feels like the wrong associations are being made.

2) A lot of raiders strongly believe that adding any form of simplification to update both removes ever-more skill from the equation and, perhaps because of that, that it makes updating ever-more boring. In other words, they'd like to avoid making it even more of a game of "who can button mash keyboard keys the fastest" by sticking strictly to the fundamentals.

And in most cases I'm inclined to agree with you, but we're on very different ends of the spectrum in terms of what physically occurs for our sides.

Defending is harder than raiding. I'd go so far as to say that a decent defender needs to be at least as good as a decent raid leader.

Your leaders are the only people who really need to understand how the game works. They need to know how to tell when a nation updates, they need to be able to determine a target, and they need to be able to make a decision to move. The rest of the squad is given about a minute to load a page, scroll to the move button, and then click said button. Now, that's fantastic if you guys are teaching your regulars how to jump on a trigger, but all indications seem to suggest that's not the case.

All of our updaters need to know how to identify when the raiders are up and ready to go. They have to watch for a move, and they have to find a move button that could be anywhere depending on the length of a WFE and the amount of embassy action. After they move they may need to endorse a delegate, which is either clicking another link or going back, clicking another nation link, scrolling down and finding another button. Let's also consider the case of a thorn, meaning they get to jump back to a reports page and hope they did everything else in time to have stayed caught up. We do all of this from a reactionary position, with little to no knowledge beforehand of where we're going or where any of those damned buttons are going to be this time.

If your triggers are on point, we're lucky to have 5 to 7 seconds. That leaves little room for giving any commands. Everyone on our force needs to be self-reliant and confident enough to just act.

So to your point - defenders aren't even close to a game of "who can button mash keyboard keys the fastest." I don't think there's any skill in moving a mouse to the right point in a screen at the right time. If anything that's a physical barrier that shouldn't exist in a web-based game, but I'll touch more on that later.

Despite this, it has recently been claimed that "this is no longer a game of skill, it is a script war. To pretend otherwise is to deny the reality of the battlefield." While this claim was soon after rescinded when raiders made clear that that statement did certainly not apply to *our* side, I still think it serves to illuminate something important - the fact that the statement was made in the first place demonstrates that it's author believed it to be true for their own side.

I would suggest that this quote is being taken out of context. The discussion up to this point was almost exclusively about the skill involved with triggers - at least that was the context raiders had been using in regards to skill.

I agree with Vinny in this context. Triggers aren't difficult. It might be tedious work, but understanding the sequence of "when my nation updates we move to the target" isn't exceptional. And yes, most of our own side also believes this to be true.

If Drake is to be believed (and I'm inclined to believe him), defenders are participating in a bit of a script arms race. The same defender that once said "There are plenty of elements to the game that can't be replaced by scripts and bots, and actually, some things are faster or easier using the manual method. Try move+endo using a script vs manual, you'll lose to the manual method if the player knows what they are doing." ...is now managing a tool that, among other things, adds hotkeys for crossing, chasing, and endorsing, whose changelog points to other move+endorse tools, and may also soon include hotkeys to aid even the speed of switching.

Vinny is a special case. He can move that quick without the tools. You can actually tell during update - if it sounds like he's trying to suplex his keyboard through the table then he's using Breeze.

Vinny doesn't make Breeze++ for himself, just as I didn't make vanilla Breeze to my own specifications. Red Dusk touched on this, but the effort that went into the extension is largely from the result of listening to what others are saying and observing their struggles. Quite a few of Vinny's modifications are even designed to address my own specific struggles, but that too is better saved for a later point.

Most developers I know aren't necessarily doing things for ourselves. It might be a fun hobby project, and we definitely get some pleasure out of that, but building something that others use is much more satisfying. Most of us won't admit it, but we secretly really do love the user. <3

Defenders, who once championed what was done without tools and stated that "R/D should be a game of skill nothing more, not who has the best coders in their camp, but who can jump faster/ manually trigger better," now seem to be entering an age of tools nearly as dense as raiders once had, at least as it would appear from the outside.

I can't speak for the first quote, I didn't know him, but your second quote comes from Tanga. I know him quite well, actually. He was me during my slight departure last year. I will disagree with him about part of his definition of skill - the ability to move a mouse is a poor indicator - but to his credit, he was only a Breeze tester. He was kind of a weirdo who preferred a trackpad. We were detagging together years ago, and two of our targets were 5 seconds apart. He got them both with that trackpad and I stumbled in a few seconds after he updated.

Further, from a group that once spoke of open scripts and public source code, the back end of many of these scripts is nowhere to be found.

So that's still me. I've been pushing for transparency for years. I believe that there shouldn't be secrets with this kind of stuff. I've always believed that if we're going to write and publish something to be used, that we have a responsibility to the people who use our code. They don't realize how much trust they're putting in us sometimes. How do you know that extension isn't a keylogger? Maybe the guy who leaked you that tool didn't tell you it's sending IP addresses back to someone's database? Users just use things, and those of us giving you our tools need to be particularly mindful of that fact.

I was even at Vinny's ear telling him he needed to get Breeze++ to the Chrome store quickly so the code could be publicly available to scrutinize. As for vanilla Breeze, I unfortunately lost access to the managing account a couple of years ago. As there were no code updates, I didn't see a reason to bump the thread to push an unsupported extension.

In short, while most all raiders have forgone the use of tools during update, defenders appear to be increasing their use of tools during update.

I don't understand why this is supposed to be a bad thing. These resources are being made available to us for the explicit purpose of using them. If you make the decision not to use these tools, that's not on anybody else if you start to lose some of your advantage.

Given the above, what are your views on the place of scripts/tools/automation in the future of defending, as well as in Gameplay as a whole?

It's certainly not close to being done yet. The lesson from Predator shouldn't be not to use technology, but to trust the creators. I think a great step towards creating that trust is encouraging people to make their code available to the public. Do I think admin should require it? I don't think I want that, to be honest. I'd rather that we make this decisions as a community and then hold one another to it. I'm not so naive as to think it will ever happen, though. The factions can tend to get possessive over anything that gives them an edge. That's a shame, really.

What internal divisions exist among defenders in regards to the use of such tools?

TITO will always be the luddites. Overall though, everybody is pretty accepting to the use of tools.

I'm worried about people starting their training on the tools. I had a discussion with someone the other day who feels like we're just hurting trainees by not giving them the best we've got from the start. Fundamentals are important. You should know where the reports page is without the shortcut. You should know why the page is arranged the way it is, what you're looking for on the pre-filtered activity feed. This wouldn't take that long, it's all pretty simple stuff, but you should know a little bit about how the game you're playing works.

How do you feel that use of these tools affects accessibility to new players, as well as enjoyment for those in the game for the long run?

Aside from the previous answer, I'm inclined to believe it will help keep people interested. We're lowering the physical barrier and letting people focus more on the way the game works. We'll have our people who are all about being fastbois, but that extra time is also showing us who the next leaders might be.

Do you have any other comments on the state of tools in modern R/D?

Going all the way back to when I was in TITO, I've always hoped the script scene would open up. Most of our tools are designed to help our side, but "we" all still tend to keep it all close to the chest. Defenders don't need to have tag targets set up and triggers prepared for us. Even if we're doing multiple libs in an update it's not that much work to set up some triggers and get the work done. Likewise, the nature of raiding really doesn't create the demand for that many hotkeys.

I would like to take a little bit of time to go into the original philosophy behind Breeze's design, if only to paint the picture of "how we got here." The original problem was simple - not only do we never know where raiders are going, we never know where we need to click. The button locations are variable, and because we don't know the target we can't predict the button's location. That's why vanilla Breeze was so simple, I just wanted to eliminate the random factor of variable length page content moving the buttons around. The motivation this time is a little different.

I've also got some physical limitations. My vision is failing pretty rapidly. Most of you are lucky enough to have a really smooth retina at the back of your eyes - mine looks a bit like Deadpool's face. Even zoomed in, the reports page has too much going on, it's hard to pick up on changes quickly and when I do, it's not easy to click where I need to. Now if I need to jump into a region and try to find a jumping button... it's kind of miserable. The god awful reports page in NSB++ ended up that way after an update of complaining about not being able to see shit.

My right hand shakes pretty bad sometimes. I don't know what this one is, but the retinal specialist already costs enough, so it's going to have to wait a bit. It's not so bad on a keyboard, you can keep your fingers kinda planted on the keys and nothing's going to move on you. A mouse reacts, though. Trying to keep steady and click a button you probably won't even see right away is a pain in the ass, and it starts to make you feel like shit when you can't do something as simple as moving into a region in a web game.

Breeze++ helps me overcome that. I know it's just a dumb game, but when I'm losing my driver's license and I can't read the menu at Jimmy John's anymore, I'll take what I can get. I know for certain I'm not the only person on NS or even R/D who can benefit from the added accessibility and I hope this can help them as well.

I believe that skill in R/D is about more than being able to move a mouse. Souls, people don't follow you because you're fast. SPSF and TGW aren't leading the charge because of their speed. Altmoras was an average of 3 seconds faster than TGW's First Warden, and as far as I know they haven't started discussing changes to command. The physical part of R/D is the tiniest, most minuscule part of the entire process. We can be proud of our speeds, I'm not saying we shouldn't, but we're lying to ourselves to suggest that scripts are changing what it means to be good at what we do.