Poll 1 of 2 Devs are curious.

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Speedz, May 9, 2017.

?

Type of server you want (client connectivity)

  1. Leave as is

  2. OSX only

  3. OSX but allow PC traders

  4. 2 servers, This one as is and another OSX only server.

Results are only viewable after voting.
  1. Pithy

    Pithy I Feel Loved

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    Much as I enjoyed lolling around on dev, I support the disabling of current content over there. Working strats out on the fly is part of EQ.

    I'd strongly support bundling some simple monitoring tools with the client(s). I imagine some devs might have ethical concerns about installing what pretty much amounts to benevolent spyware on people's machines, and I get that no tool is going to catch all cheezball hacks. But IMO, raising the technical bar to hacking would preempt a lot of future stress and headaches for the dev team, and keep you guys free to work on the stuff you enjoy.
     
    Speedz likes this.
  2. pharmakos

    pharmakos People Like Me

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    how widespread do you guys think these issues might be?
     
  3. Fadetree

    Fadetree People Like Me

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    Well, P99 has had a good deal of success, and has had a lot of problems with various kind of naughty behavior. Haynar would know more than I, but they've had problems with unreported duping, DDoS's, RMT, general assholery, and stuff like that. Obviously it hasn't been fatal to them, but its been a time drain I bet. We can expect that kind of thing here too. How much? I dunno, but it only takes a few.
     
  4. Fadetree

    Fadetree People Like Me

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    This is a good idea.
     
  5. Bragon

    Bragon People Like Me

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    Leave it alone.

    There is something all those people usually have in common.

    They wont stay hidden for long. They will talk or try something that will raise a red flag sooner or later.

    This community is small and you would have to be really sneaky and smart to get away with game breaking hacks or exploits.
     
  6. shortok

    shortok People Like Me

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  7. Bragon

    Bragon People Like Me

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    I reported some shady character just yesterday!

    He was all green and smug standing at db... up to something for sure.
     
  8. shortok

    shortok People Like Me

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    Green? Must have been one of them hippie classes.

    [​IMG]

    Go hornets.
     
    Last edited: May 9, 2017
  9. Elroz

    Elroz I Feel Loved Staff Member

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    is that Mugsy Bogues?
     
  10. Loraen

    Loraen Well-Known Member

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    What is the purpose of discriminating by OS? Is the assumption that all Mac users are angels while all PC users are RMTing ill-gotten pixels obtained by a 12 box army controlled by MQ2 over a VPN?

    I strongly disagree. No spyware is definitely one of the advantages of TAKP over Project 1999. I kind of put up with it when they introduced it there, but I really disliked it.

    Which really just brings me full circle to my original question: what behaviors are the staff concerned about? If someone is using a hacked DLL to enable the scroll wheel or automate tradeskills, do we really care? On the other hand, if someone is using MQ2/VPN to automate an army of toons or hold down camps for days, wouldn't it be fairly obvious? I can't easily think of any activities that would be both highly objectionable and also difficult to detect, though I may be missing something. Project 1999 is different, because autofire and showeq are difficult to detect and provide a huge advantage for the idiotic raid scene there.

    That being said, the obvious thing to do is split off a PC only single box server. People who really want to stay can just fork over the 75$ for a few 'classic' macs :D
     
    Last edited: May 9, 2017
  11. showstring

    showstring I Feel Loved

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    Few potential solutions:
    Don't see any issues with anti-hack detection .dlls
    Get some more helpers to help with admin/server policing stuff so devs can focus more on development?
     
  12. Haynar

    Haynar Administrator

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    Am I after people who have enabled scroll wheel? I don't care.

    Do I care about showeq? I don't care.

    Do I care about someone 6 boxing? Yes.

    Do I care about someone warping? Using gate hacks as a melee? Someone blocking packets from client? Someone altering doors in a zone so they are all missing? Someone going above/below geometry to go anywhere in a zone unmolested?

    Yes.

    My views do not match other staff. And any of the above will get you banned.

    If you don't want monitored for cheats? Play on a mac.
     
  13. Tuluvien

    Tuluvien I Feel Loved

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    This is the bit that some folks aren't grasping or dont know, perhaps. Virtually all hacking and issues that plagued AK toward the end were executed from the less secure "hacked PC client"
     
  14. pharmakos

    pharmakos People Like Me

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    Different orders of magnitude tho, we have like 3% the max concurrent users that P99 has. I doubt we will ever get even close to 1000+ concurrent users like them.

    FWIW -- I'm living on fixed income disability since I am going through chemotherapy, so even with the availability of sub-$100 used Macs I would probably end up quitting if I couldn't play on PC anymore.
     
    Last edited: May 9, 2017
  15. Mokli

    Mokli I Feel Loved

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    The OSX client is secure while the PC client isn't? Or perhaps, it was easy to port the hacks over that already existed for newer EQ clients. Its interesting that people here believe some hacks will never arrive on the OSX client, unless I'm missing something here? I guess OSX programmers just don't exist?
     
  16. Fadetree

    Fadetree People Like Me

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    Well, if you think OSX and it's executables are not hackable you are sorely mistaken. I can't argue with your experience on AK, but I seriously doubt that nowadays people can't just google for OSX hack kits. If I can trace into a running executable or into a disk image and replace execution vectors with my own callouts then I can hack the client.
    The only thing that let OSX be 'more secure' in the past was lack of general knowledge and dev tools. Both are more prevalent now.
     
    Last edited: May 9, 2017
    pharmakos likes this.
  17. Fadetree

    Fadetree People Like Me

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    Yeah, and actually I hope we don't. I think 500 is a fine top population limit.
     
    pharmakos likes this.
  18. shortok

    shortok People Like Me

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    Faite did all his scripty funtimes on Mac.
     
    Faults likes this.
  19. Tryfan

    Tryfan People Like Me

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    I personally am totally okay with my client being monitored while I am playing on a pc. I hate cheaters. I wouldnt buy a mac to play on takp though. I have two computers on my home desk and that is quite enough.
     
  20. Lenas

    Lenas I Feel Loved

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    Yeah and they were all a pain in the ass that involved active packet sniffing and manual manipulation. Nothing like MQ2 cheats in terms of ability or accessibility.
     
  21. Loraen

    Loraen Well-Known Member

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    Can't you write some detection code server side? I would suspect that you could catch most cheaters with only a few rules. For example, to catch warping: any time two position updates are out of line of sight, run the NPC pathing algorithm and compare that distance with the current runspeed of the character multiplied by the time between the updates. Perhaps this requires too much CPU?

    Hmm, I can't really think of a good reason why the Mac client would be intrinsically more secure. All of the same tools exist on FreeBSD (Mac OS X+). DLLs on Windows are called shared objects on Unix. GDB will let you step through a program. Perhaps the problem is that all of the interesting points are known on Windows via MQ2? The primary issue is making sense of a gigantic mass of binary instructions.
     
    Fadetree likes this.
  22. Fadetree

    Fadetree People Like Me

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    Very good point, OSX is actually a BSD/Linux variant.
     
  23. Haynar

    Haynar Administrator

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    Could write all sorts of server side hack detection stuff. And our 8 core server could support a max pop of 14 people.
     
  24. Mokli

    Mokli I Feel Loved

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    I'm all for putting down hack detection dll's in my PC EQ client folders. Just don't think those same nefarious people you're trying to prevent won't find a way to do it on OSX one day. Its just easier on PC.
     
  25. Tuluvien

    Tuluvien I Feel Loved

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    To clarify I know nothing about programming, or capabilities of OS. I was speaking from our experience in AK where almost every instance of subversive behaviour was perpetrated from the illegitimate pc client.

    That may be different with ours for a variety of reasons, I do not know.
     
  26. Fadetree

    Fadetree People Like Me

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    Safe to say, no matter what we do, people will try and hack. You can rely on obfuscation some, but that evaporates quickly. Some will succeed. The best thing to do is to, as they say, report what you see. You won't be getting the guy all in trouble necessarily, but it would be something for them to look into, which is a much less expensive detection system than anything else.
     
  27. showstring

    showstring I Feel Loved

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    I am actually surprised that :

    1) we don't have client-intrusive anti-hack .dlls like p99 here
    2) that we don't have client-side patches of eqgame.exe frequently to change the offsets, and/or encrypt the offsets or make them super hard to find (I know very little about this so my terminology may be wrong)

    this would be combined with people encouraged to report suspicious behaviour
    and since it seems quite easy to get banned here (which is good imo), and bans seem to be IP based, it should hopefully ensure any hackers are relatively short lived

    in addition since there is no RMT here, there's not much point for people actively hacking, there is no profit to be made
    all you would lose is your pixels/time, which is very silly

    at absolute worst there might be some passive hacks (showeq), which aren't the end of the world...

    I think a strict no RMT stance is crucial here. That on its own would remove most of the incentive to active-hack
     
    Last edited: May 9, 2017
  28. pharmakos

    pharmakos People Like Me

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    how widespread do we think these issues are? on a server this small, we've got to be talking less than 10 active users that are intentionally breaking the rules. it sucks that they are abusing things, but abuse is the hallmark of liberty. how much freedom are we going to take away from the masses in an effort to restrict the abuse of the few?

    and in a different light of the same idea, on a server this small, if anything that truly could break the server economy long term ever pops up (i.e. dupes), it would be very hard to get away with exploiting it enough to actually have an impact.
     
  29. Tuluvien

    Tuluvien I Feel Loved

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    Americans with their freedoms and liberties lol
     
  30. Amirite

    Amirite Well-Known Member

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    i'm all for having a .dll on client side like p99, and i was one of the ones on p99 to get banned from that first huge wave.

    i have used mq2 on p99 because i could. i didn't do anything bad with it other than use the map feature to find named up. but i was only level 40ish at the time anyway.

    i used mq2 on PEQ(which is allowed) 36 toons at once. i mainly only used it for boxing utility there but the nice /who npc feature and map feature were too nice to pass up not using.

    i would not use mq2 here as i have no reason to, i have an awesome set of toons and i'm in the best guild on the server. i miss the map and the easy utilities of mq2, but this server makes them worth not having.

    if it is easy to "hack" here, seeing how that Caiu guy obviously was doing something and admitted it. (like how the hell do you die in fear in the middle of a raid when no mobs are up if you weren't trying to ghost around or speed/slow yourself) then this server needs that extra utility client side to prevent it.
    It would be good for the server Health.

    When we have an influx of new people and we will, you GMs are all coders and not really GMs to police(not trying to sound rude here), it may be good to find a few long term members of the community to secretly give some Guide power to to help police it. but having GMs with playable characters could become power triping. you would have to look at whats the worse of the 2 and decide on.

    is there an option to see how many people use mac vs pc? i dont think splitting the server would be a good thing as i'd assume more people use pc and it would just kill the mac players