i don't know who's the boss here and how they pay their coders...
but the bot would definitely be sold more often if they manage to satisfy the „mainstream“.
I remember the time when demonbuddy and honorbuddy had a laaaarge community and low ban rates:
i investeded a shorter amount of time, NO c++ skill and got my bot army running schedule-based for 1 week (with 1 single "start" click)
the community was polite, the developers were working hard, rarely joking, many many plugins in a good shape.
Of course everything went from good to bad after ban rates raised and the auction house closed…
But within exilebuddy it’s a different story:
much more secrets are kept, the „use your own brain“ story is told 1000times more often, coding skills is necessary, less plugins are provided and updated, more troubles with plugins interfering, beta status since 6? Weeks.
So many unfinished stuff and when newbie botters ask for help the small community of coders is often joking around or referring to the unfinished stuff.
There is a „community within the community“.
You, Darkbluefirefly and others suceed with the way they bot, but invested like 1000 hours (try to be honest) which will never be a reasonable amount of time for the mainstream botters.
And of course you cannot share every workaround with the newbie botters because a few days later updates crush them.
Don’t get me wrong, the core bot is „OK“. It’s good work.
But so much unused potential, so much unshared knowledge
Just to keep a stupid cloak over Darkbluefirefly's Bot army...
Especially for the topics "VM" "IP's" "Plugins" "Scheduler/Relogger" "Itemfilter" "Performance" we need mainstream-doable crap and help.
Otherwise many potential customers for exilebuddy get lost.
Lets clarify some things :
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HB/DB & EB are different bots, different devs, you can see it by the way they handle things. To deal with other plugins in DB needs you to use reflection, EB has built-in plugins communication.
The client have a huge impact on the way things have to be implemented, you can't compare Bli$$ard and GGG.
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The community is different : while other bots have DIY-oriented users, in EB since things are bit more compilcated people fear the way plugins and stuff are developped. So they ask... taking us time to answer/do things. Without this "Community in the community" as you called it, you wouldn't even have AIF, QP, Alerter, MapRunner, Custom Routines... think about it... Also, when the other bots went down or people got pissed with botting WoW/D3 or shit they're slowly coming to PoE, which makes things even worse because we have to explain, re-explain, again, and again, while fixing stuff at the same time...
Most of us (devs) have gfs, families, work... I don't count the hours spent past 8pm to fix AIF or think about ways to handle things differently to make people happy, ruining my sleep schedule and the hiccups with my gf because "YOU SPEND TOO MUCH TIME ON THE COMP' YOU TARDFUCK" (jk, she's polite.)
The 1K hours you're mentioning, nobody except pushedx is doing that. We spend the time we can spend on plugins, ideas, brainstorming, past experiences to make EB look like the other bots, and let pushedx work on the core. But in the meantime, people spit on the work we've done, altogether by saying "Hey, plugin no work plox fix" without attaching log, giving any information, asking features without infos. I can give a simple example : People ask me for new values to filter out things in AIF, yes, I can do anything you want, but if I don't have the item to extract the informations from it, I won't be able to do so. It seems to be innocent but 70% of the EB's users don't know how to use the ObjectExplorer or even ignore what this plugin can do...
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Unshared Knowledge : Some plugins are kept private, this is right. I won't tell you any names or features, but I'll give you the reason why it's private : the community. Every single time a plugin comes out, it follows by a shitfest of useless posts. You're putting yourselves at a level we can't reach at the 1st version of a plugin, so we have to work, work, work to make it almost perfect to avoid this, because people want things
FREE, and
WORKING ALMOST FLAWLESSLY I'll let you wonder how many donations I received for AIF, the plugin that made chaos orbs worthless and GCP's following. This is the mentality actually, people pay the license for the bot but forgot the plugins devs also spend time on their projects. So the decision is simple, lately alcor asked us if he should release publicly one of his projects, we answered no. Not because we are selfish as fuck, but because he's busy at work, have a family and a little time to dev in the week. The hype that this kind of project could create is just insane, and the bugs we could find in different setups makes it a nightmare to debug. This has no relation with a "cloak" or anything, it's just thatt the community isn't ready.
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Mainstream : You often mention the "mainstream" botters, I would call them casual botters. So for you, in a perfect world casuals should profit at the same level as hardcore do? This is a dream, a perfect dream. So the local garage owner should make as much as ford does? No, he cant fix electronics or unmount manufacturers specific screws. Sure sometimes he needs help, so he's referring to more skilled peeps to learn how to fix it.
We (community devs) are perfectly fine with how the bot is coded, you know why? we don't have to fix little things that could break a plugin entirely. You know why? because when we find something fishy pushedx fixes it in less than an hour...
Some things can't be explained like VMs, IPs, or such, because it's different on every setup, people use different softwares, different OSs, different RIGs... Or even because it's forbidden/not safe to reveal those informations, for you first (those botters that dare to bot on 100 tabs accounts) but also for us, devs.
To be honest, this bot is the most advanced one over all buddy products. People with perfect logic or common sense could easily get in the boat with us, but instead they take the time to beg for stuff without gratitude, wannaberich botters. That's just sad that we have to deal with people that don't even read errors in their logs, or shit on devs if something is not working. I know it's common when you're providing something important to make something functional, but this is not how we wanna spend our free time.
So well, that's what you think but that's far from the reality. The fact you're stuck with your VMs for now few months doesn't mean everyone has this situation. we can't fix your GPU issues, we can't fix your openvps latency issues, that's something you have to fix yourself. Well, anyway I don't even know why I'm typing all this
)