Already talked about AutoDecodePayload in “Receiving binary data”, however you can set this value not just per-event, but per-socket too. The socket has an AutoDecodePayload property that used as the default value of event subscription. Its default value is true - all payload decoded and dispatched to the event subscriber. If you set to false no decoding will be done by the plugin, you will have to do it by yourself.
You don’t want to cast the args every time: Sure! You can set the AutoDecodePayload on the Socket object, and you can use your favorite Json parser to decode the Packet’s Payload to a strongly typed object. However keep in mind that the payload will contain the event’s name and it’s a json array. A sample payload would look like this: [‘eventName’, {‘field’: ‘stringValue’}, {‘field’: 1.0}].