[mungoman2]

To prevent macroing in your house they split the world into a grid of tiles sized 8x8 steps and linked your gain to the grid. This worked by hashing the tile coordinates and your skill level to find out the probability of gaining a skill point at that location.

The hash function was poorly chosen which had the effect that if you found a tile where you gained a skill point, there was a good chance the tile 8 steps to your North would let you gain another skill point.

So the algorithm became: 1. Run boat continuously trying the skill over and over 2. Stop when there is a skill gain 3. Move boat 8 steps north 4. Do skill again 5. Gain? Go to 3 6. Otherwise, go to 1

[nrb]

It was simpler than that, it just limited the number of gains you could make per 8x8 cell, but moving out of that cell and into another (in any direction) reset your ability to gain skills. Due to how players moved around in the world, that was sufficient to prevent macroing in-place, but since nobody knew how many cells it remembered you being in, AFK levelers just traveled around the entire world continuously in a boat.

[philliphaydon]

Oh very interesting. I guess this was on the main servers. I didn’t play the main servers so the reasons we did it in play run shards was different.