Free spinning mouse scrollwheel and hardware automation bans

Support Technical Support
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I’m looking for a little clarification on some freespining scrollwheels on mice than can continue to spin for 10-20 seconds after taking your hand off the mouse. This is not through software on the mouse or pc, but due to the low friction bearing being used in the mouse.

If you say wanted to mass DE a bunch of items and bound a DE macro to DE a specific item every click and scrolled and it would DE several items from one flick of the mousewheel because it spins for so long, would that be fine or would that count as automation.

This seems a little pedantic but I saw this question come up in the woweconomy discord and I did not have a clear answer for the person as it would continue to DE items if they took their hand off the mouse for up to 20 seconds because the wheel keeps spinning.

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I suspect and please bear in mind just my own gut feeling, but this could be dangerous.

If you gave the wheen a solid scroll for example, it would be popping that macro as fast as it could. Fast enough off the gcd etc to possibly look like automation.

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Blizzard’s general rule is one keypress for one action. This would violate that.

They are getting more than one output (items de’d) for their input (turning the mousewheel).

Given that it’s entirely mechanical it may be harder to prove, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it.

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Using hardware to automate is usually not a good idea There’ are mods that used to do the same thing though. Be wary, these things can destroy items you might not have intended to, with no warning.

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I have the Logitech G502 mouse and it has a button that does that, not sure the purpose of doing that in WoW but I would recommend against it as it does indeed toe that line, when in doubt, don’t do it.

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I do not know about all mice but mine has detents on the scroll wheel. I also have a really cheap mouse and it had detents too.

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Mice like the G502 have a toggle switch, right behind the wheel. You press it, it clicks and engages the detents. Press it again and it disengages the detents, allowing the wheel to freely spin.

If you have, say, F1 bound to mouse wheel scroll-up, then disengage the detents and give that thing a good spin, it’ll trigger F1 thirty or forty times before it stops spinning. It spins for a long, long, long time if you don’t touch it.

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This is not a technical support issue; not sure why the thread got moved here. The core of OP’s inquiry is whether or not a player will get actioned for automating keystrokes… certainly a CS issue?

Oh well, I suppose it’s pretty much moot. The answer’s been given already.

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