I want to request that the auction house for PC to be completely separated from console. Reason being that people use macros/bots to snipe cars on an non-human level, having it completely separate will make it a lot fairer for people to snipe cars on the Auction House.
I know people will complain about this but the only people to blame are the ones who use the mods. Unfortunately I cannot see this issue being fixed and/or enforcement action being taken, this is the only plausible solution to it.
There is no need for macros anymore. Since one of the recent patches, you can just pre-select the car and spam the search till you get one. Which is only pressing 2 - 3 buttons. Just gotta be quick or you’ll wait till the prices increase and it will be easier to obtain.
You can actually search faster manually than with a macro. A macro just sends a series of keypresses with defined time delays in between. It doesn’t know what has happened in the game in response to them, so it always has to go through the buyout process, even if no cars were found. This means much more time elapses between searches than when a human sees no cars were returned and immediately goes back to try again.
Also, you can use macros on a console if you want, e.g. with a CronusMax.
As I said, you can program macros on console anyway, if you really want.
But I’ve been playing with macros on a PC, and haven’t been able to come up with something that is safe to leave running in a loop. The problem is what happens when it wins, remember it’s just blindly issuing a sequence of keypresses, so as soon as you have different possible outcomes, the macro can’t cope with it unless the UI is helpfully designed to recognise different keys for each outcome. And the more you try to cater for the win scenario by adding more delays and keypresses, the longer it takes for the “no results” scenario, reducing searches per minute. Also, surely the legendary people have long since reached the credit limit and have no interest in snapping up cars any more.
I’ve been away from the game for a few months, so have been trying to pick up the cars I’ve missed from the AH, and have got most of them now, having done, I’d guess, fewer than 1000 searches in total. I did use a macro, but it does very little, I press a key and it runs a single search and buys out any car it finds. It takes about 5 seconds, so I can only do around 12 searches per minute. It’s much slower than a human can do it, but I glaze over pretty quickly doing such dull stuff, so I can bear to spend a few minutes pressing one key every 5 seconds. I’ve got about an 80% win rate for the cars I’ve seen, so I don’t think there can be any significant numbers of people running looping macros. Even if a human took a second to complete the button pushes to buyout, they’d beat me to the car most of the time as they’ll manage several searches in the 5 seconds between my searches. I haven’t seen a single car auctioned at 20m, so nobody who has listed a car I’ve seen has been snapping up cars to make a profit, most have been listed at the minimum buyout.
I’m not even sure it’s possible to create a safe looping macro with the game’s current UI. I saw some code on a forum, but it was for an old version of the game’s UI.
I’ve only bought one each of the cars I didn’t have.
My laptop came with keyboard software with macro option, desktop keyboard has that too, there are also many programs out there that can handle macros/scripts.
But in the end it also depends on your internet connection speed, as game needs to load auction details - tested with my not so fast connection.
I have a K90 (Corsair), it comes with macro keys for RTS players. However, although these keys have memory of key presses, they still need to be pressed from time to time. Software can automate keystrokes more effectively.