Guild Wars 2

It’s currently Wintersday, and for some reason ANet has decided to make double-clicking a MAJOR feature of the event, a trend that has been continuing for a long time in Guildwars 1 and 2. The current event sees you doubl-clicking large numbers of presents to open them only to find lots of other things that need to be double-clicked to open, some of which need to be salvaged by double-clicking and lots of other clicking.

I’m not the youngest of players and I now have significant pain in my arm so I have had to stop playing the game, but this is crazy! Why does it have to be this way? So first off I’ll ask ANet again for that much requested feature, the right-click / use all option to consume a whole stack at once.

As for some reason they would prefer to have their player base crippled rather than do this I started wondering if there is a another way.

My first thought is to use a simple macro (there are many programs and features built in to moder gaming mice etc) that will take the pain out of this. I tried this, pretty soon I was able to bind a single key press to open up a whole stack. Great I thought, problem solved. Hoever, I know ANet is touchy about third party programs and botting etc so I looked at various posts concerning such things. It’s never quite black and white with ANet and nobody wants to fall under the ban hammer, especially when you are just trying to avoid crippling pain during normal game-play.

Gaile Gray has stated that:

“Anything that automates the game or gives another player an advantage is disallowed.”

But also at http://www.guildwars2guru.com/arenanet-tracker/topic/255457-policy-3rd-party-programs-multi-boxing-macros/

“This means that if you program a macro, it must require one keystroke per action. You may not program a single key to perform multiple functions.”

So macros are not banned and single key – single action is okay; the macro I had, although performing a single-action (double-click), it does so multiple times so looks like it won’t be acceptable. And to be honest, when I tried it, it did feel a bit too good, I pressed the button and a few seconds later it was all done, maybe I was just enjoying not feeling pain but it felt like an advantage.

So a macro mapping a single key-press to a single double-click would be okay. A slight improvement but not much, we are still firmly in RSI territory. BTW, Anyone can use Microsoft Mouse Centre, (or presumably many other mouse drivers) to map middle mouse button to double click for the same effect, no 3rd party program (other than the mouse driver) needed.

So next I tried mapping a key press + mousewheel combination. Each wheel click being an action but now you have the advantage of performing several while scrolling the wheel. I would argue that this still honours the single-press to single action principle as you have to be there playing the game and you have to keep scrolling the wheel, but this is significantly better on the RSI stakes.

The only problem is that this is just my opinion doesn’t matter, what matters is if ANet would agree or ban me for it.

So I thought I would share this and maybe get some better guidance from ANet, I know they don’t like to comment on specific macros but RSI is a serious problem for many and the current content style aggravates this. The intention here is not to cheat and gain an advantage, it’s to play the game as ANet have given it to us but without suffering from repetitive strain.

Of course what would solve 95% of the problem is a right-click use all option (there would still be the salvaging issue). In the mean-time I can’t engage much in the double-click content as my arm hurts too much (and I wonder how much life is left in my mouse!). Presumably there are people with accessibility issues over this type of content.

And Merry Christmas

The scroll to click thing follows the single action to single reaction policy. I don’t know if that’s ever been officially accepted by Anet, however it is the most popular suggestion for this problem.
Personally I used Windows Mouse Keys for wintersday. It is a single button for double click, takes about 40s a stack (of boxes) 20s (of salvaging).

Two suggestions I’ve seen which most people seem to think are allowed are:

1) Binding left click to the scroll wheel. It is still 1 keypress = 1 action, if you move the mouse wheel one ‘click’ forward or back the mouse button will only be pressed once. It’s just easier and more comfortable to do it multiple times.

2) Binding left click to a keyboard key which is set to register being held down as multiple key presses (which might be a setting for that key specifically or the whole keyboard depending on the keyboard). Again you have to actually keep it pressed so it fits the 1 key = 1 action rule, but it’s less painful.

Their reasoning for allowing macros for musical instruments was that it provides no gameplay advantage to the player. Sounds like you can use that exact same reasoning to macro mouse clicks — of course you’d have to make sure your macro doesn’t click faster than a human can click (so that you can argue all you’re doing is saving your mouse — and not time).

I’ve been using a macro on my mouse to open things ever since they introduced essence of luck.

Macros aside, it’s pretty absurd that this feature has not been in the game since the beginning. I’m sure there is a half good reason why they’ve not yet added it, but as far as code goes, if they had any sense when they wrote it, I can’t imagine it would be difficult to simply add another option to the context menu that activates the item stack until it is empty, or the action cannot be completed. So my guess is that there is a particular reason why they have not implemented it, though I can’t begin to conjecture what it is, beyond “we don’t want to frustrate people by mucking up their inventories if they mis-click,” which would be a nice sentiment if that weren’t already possible. I’m looking at you, whatever kitten put “Compact” right next to “Deposit all materials.”

hey did you know when you buy transmutation stones you can consume them in 25-5-1 values, if they could add that to bag and essense of luck that would be great

I have a programmable keyboard (Razer Anansi) and have programmed one of its macro buttons to repeatedly double-click when held down. This seems to be the simplest and most elegant solution.

Thanks, on further searching and reading it seems that binding double-click to mouse wheel is quite common. Still a bit nervous about it. I would rather ANet improved the game UI to deal with the mass stacks of clicking that you have to do; this must be a major pain (literally) to many who don’t know they can configure their mouse differently.