Originally Posted by Tenhou

The automated thingie does not necessarily mean macros or clickbots. It means a program that understands the game and sends the game commands for you. A clickbot only repeats a click you already did, that is why Tomaa suggests it is not against the ToS. It's not automating the GAME it's automating the COMPUTER and thus does not cause any changes in the game. An opposite form of this would be to make a program that understands the games commands and gives the games commands on its own. A clickbot does not understand anything, it just repeats something you already did to infinity.

At least that's what i've understood. Don't sue if i'm wrong :P

Originally Posted by Tomaa

What you have in mind is called a bot. That is not covered by their ToS as well, but I never even heard about such bot.
Macro itself is an automated action, but its not accessing the website itself.
What that line refers to is web server access using automated tasks like crawling, bruteforcing, etc. It is standard line in ToS and its purpose is mainly to prevent unintentional DDoS and to stop people poking around out of curiosity.

That being said, I dont endorse using macros. ToS can change any time, and in theory, they can ban anyone for any reason.

Originally Posted by Massume

I must admit that I actually thought that they were referring to macros when someone qouted that line on this forum, but your explanations makes a lot of sense.
Besides, it seems very unlikely that Nutaku would bother to hire a person just to track down a few macro users, while only a few hunderd players are actually spending money on this game.

Well I am not a computer genius at all, so you guys wont have to worry that I will start using a program like that in the future

I highlighted that part of the ToS because is generic, when they said "or other automated means to access the Website for any purpose" it means any automated action over the site, even if you don't alter some code.

A DDoS attack by example, can be provoked using one feature of the victim site at great scale; you don't even need a "l33t h4xx0r" to provoke it, just a huge amount of coordinated people abusing of the same task, no coding involved. i.e the 4chan vs Tumblr pic war, specially how Tumblr users reacted against /b/ wankers.

A mouse macro works with the same idea at very little scale. Yes, the mimic is realized at local level, but not the data sent everytime that you use any Nutaku app.

And how staff can see (using logs) if a user is automating some actions? Easy, if logs has timestamps these can bring a clue, even with Wireshark or MS Network monitor i can test it (limited to my own side). I can see the Nutaku ID inside the URL executing some of them, so is possible to identify some behavior.

As i said before, a delay between boxes (picking it manually) already exists, that's why those moves looks suspicious.