Re: A Mini-Guide to Ebugging in Single Player Forum
Yes, so was CRM. (Gotcha!
Sorry Catt, couldn't resist that after all your threats to taint the non-trade-tagging trade pool.
)
I realize that you are joking here, but I want to touch on it anyhow, so I can give a big old wall of text! We had a lot of "discussions" about the fact that I believed that CRM and RRM should be treated the same for simplification purposes. My main reason for hoping for CRM adoption was that it was actually much more intuitive to install than the RRM, and I was hoping to cut down on the "my RRM install didn't work right" threads, and I saw no ethical difference between the RRM and CRM. :yes: I'd always been pretty clear that I was fairly uncomfortable with the RRM. However, I started trading here before I really understood a lot of those things, so I was tainted, and couldn't go back. I used the CRM originally to test it before we allowed links to it and didn't see any reason to uninstall it. (I had sufficient Vanilla wealth at the time that it didn't negatively impact my ability to trade.)
It's also really not fair to say that they are the same thing. RRM simply makes use of an interface option that is already available in the code. It also makes no changes to the items. Someone with RRM will see the rune as red, but when they trade it, the person who gets it will see it as whatever color they had runes set to. (As a side note, several years of WoW play has made me come to appreciate the ability to modify your gaming interface, so my feelings about the RRM have mellowed. Of course, it's irrelevant these days anyhow.) My point however is that an interface change is not equivalent to editing an item.
I do have a point to this story, really! You will notice that even though I had personal ethical concerns about the RRM, I ended up "tainted" by it because I really hadn't been exposed to the ethical issues. I didn't understand D2 modding, and mod discussion at the time was very stifled due to the rules, and I felt really bad about my decision later because I did ultimately decide I wasn't comfortable with the RRM. (It's ultimately why I restarted as Vanilla and left all of my mod tainted stuff to Lan parties with friends.) That's why I think it's important that when new people come in, they know that just because something is accepted by the forum, doesn't mean that they shouldn't make their own decision about how they feel about it before they trade.
I agree that a separate section on the ethics really isn't necessary. However, there is already a section in the ATMA-ebugging section about what it's useful for, so why not also add a section about the potential negatives? Something like "It's important to note that since this involves using a third party program to change the stats of an item, some people consider this practice over the line. Also be aware that it is a part of the trade pool, and you should take that and your own personal feelings about it into account before you trade/MP. Since the practice is accepted on the forum, making use of it will not adversely affect your ability to trade and MP here."
Playing "legitimately" is sort of a weird thing. This is a game, and the point is to have fun. In Single Player, we have a lot of freedom on what we do and where we personally draw the line. That's one of the perks of SP. We can go back and forth with arguments about what is okay and what isn't all day, but the minute we fire up ATMA, GoMule or a mod, we're no longer playing "legitimate" D2. I know that a common place people like to draw the line is "well, I could do this on B.net or some other way that would just be a lot harder" but I could poke all sorts of holes into that. (A big one is that there is no way to mule items without losing your map without using a 3rd party program. That's not why ATMA and GoMule were developed, but it is a side effect.)
Why does this concept of legitimacy matter at all in SP? Well, there are 2 reasons, both of which come down to a concept of "fair play." In order to have a trade and MP pool here, we need to as a collective decide where we draw the line or trading becomes to cumbersome. Fragmenting the trade pool just kills trading. (Well, more accurately, the "special" trade statuses just never really take off and we end up with the main FAM trade pool.) The second reason is that we like to share our accomplishments, and they have more meaning when we think that we are playing "fairly."
We all have to make our own personal decisions about what makes the game fun for us. If trading and MPing is an integral part of having fun with the game, you are willing to accept the what the forum considers acceptable play. That doesn't even mean you have to personally agree with it, but you have to abide by it. If you have fun without trading and MPing, then you have a lot more freedom, but if you want to share your accomplishments, you need to be honest about the rules you personally play under. No one is impressed by a mat made using a belt with +100 skills, but a guardian that used the FE mod in 1.10 is still pretty impressive.
