Originally Posted by
adc
I disagree with pretty much everything you've written in this post, but I don't think it's worth arguing about whether or not gold farming scripts should be allowed (or why scripts that make gold for the user somehow make that user morally corrupt, as if personal gain is a terrible thing; we all use scripts to advance our Runescape accounts, do we not?). That said, I strongly disagree with this concept of "because you used pre-existing technology and tools, your work is essentially nothing". It makes no sense. That is how we, as a species, advance. We don't have to rediscover the concept of "zero" every generation; it's something we have already discovered and built upon for hundreds or thousands of years (depending on when you think zero came into existence).
League of Legends uses Adobe Air (as well as C++, Lua, C#, ActionScript, Java, Erlang, PHP and Sql, perhaps others). Does that mean all the credit for League should go to Adobe and the creators of the other tools, because they used a technology that was developed by someone else? Valve recently rolled out DotA 2 to the Source 2 Engine permanently; Source 2 was written in C++. Should DotA 2 be credited to Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++? An example closer to home - Clarity wrote (among other things) a Mud Rune crafter using Simba, the SRL-6 include, and SMART. It is at least 1600 lines long (my copy is closer to 1700, but I'm not sure what the original copy has) and can execute it's task for at least 10+ hours at a time with no human interaction and essentially no errors. Has he accomplished nothing meaningful simply because the script makes use of Simba, SRL-6 and SMART? Do the creators of those tools deserve all the credit? When it broke (as it's pretty old), I put effort in to fix it and get it into a working state again. Did I do nothing meaningful, because I used the base of his script and fixed it instead of starting over and writing it all myself?
I challenge you to find me one thing in modern society that was created from absolutely nothing without any outside help. I would be willing to bet this *never* happened; that absolutely nothing in this world is created without using the work of other people (even as simple - and as important - as the concept of "Zero") to create and improve. The accomplishments of one person are no less valuable or useful because they rely on the work of other people.