Unbelievable

[HotkeyNet]

I received the following personal messge today from somebody I don't know.

To those of you who are reading this: just think, you too could receive messages like this one if you publish a free program for gamers! Fun, huh?

hey i just started using this program and i have no clue what i am doing or how it works and i've read everything call me a dumbass haha. I was wondering if you could just make me a script that would work for 2 copies of wow on one pc because the sample doesn't do anything well get back to me asap thanks.

[Adoweniih]

Haha, love PMs like that :p I've gotten quite a few of those in my time too - and I didnt even create HKN

[HotkeyNet]

It's the last six words that set this messge apart.

If you take those six words away, yeah, I've gotten lots of messages like that. Probably over a hundred since HotkeyNet was published.

But those six words elevate this message to a height never before reached in my experience.

[Adoweniih]

Haha indeed i'll see if I can dig out some of the best I've gotten

[HotkeyNet]

Another reason why this message is special is that it combines four different kinds of stupidity. Most of these offensive messages contain only one or two.

1. The guy can't get the sample script to work, so he assumes the script is broken. It doesn't occur to him that the script has been used by thousands of people, so obviously it does work, and obviously he must be doing something wrong.

2. The guy has such a hypertrophied sense of entitlement that he expects a stranger to sit down and spend time writing a script for him for free.

3. The guy believes I can write a working script for him even though he thinks the sample script (which of course I wrote) doesn't work. If my first script doesn't work, why does he expect my second script to work?

4. The guy is asking a favor, but his last six words are extraordinarily rude. Either he thinks rudeness will encourage somebody to do him a favor or he doesn't see how rude his words are.

[Adoweniih]

5. it's going to be pretty hard writing a script, when the only information provided is "two copies of wow on one pc". Nothing about what it should do or anything like it.

1, 2 and 5 are the most common ones, and are present in pretty much all of the messages I've got.

[HotkeyNet]

This may surprise you but I'll defend the guy on point 5. I don't think point 5 is so bad. He's a WoW player, and WoW players usually assume that the purpose of a multiboxing program is to multiplex keystrokes. In other words, they usually expect that HotkeyNet's purpose is to broadcast every event that happens in one WoW window to all the other WoW windows simultaneously.

WoW players tend to think this way because they play cloned characters. Imagine Team Wizzy with a wizard in the active window.

In fact this is not HotkeyNet's purpose -- it's a hotkey program, not a multiplexing program -- but based on the little he knows about HotkeyNet, it's not completely stupid for him to expect it to work that way.

Old Mojo works exactly like I just described. It has a mode where you turn on "window broadcast mode" and every key event that happens when one WoW is active happens in all WoWs. Old Mojo doesn't use scripts for this. You just turn it on. New Mojo will have the same mode if I ever finish it.

HotkeyNet should have had that mode too -- it's probably the main thing that most multiboxers want -- but I didn't know that when I wrote HotkeyNet.

To make this practical, the user needs some method of exempting keys from being multiplexed (for example, movement keys have to be exempted). But except for this detail, which the average person probably can't foresee, you don't need any special info to write the script. In fact, as demonstrated by Old Mojo, you don't need a script.