Dev Tracker - Discussion

Doubt that one considering most people get their mythics by doing this for assault log books.

I still remember when Billnes found it, and it was the most glorious few days on here lol

the more things change the more they stay the same. waiting for the day when fujito or someone crashes out and burns it all down. won't happen (would have already happened if it was going to), but man what a tug of war battle this game has had between devs, white knights, and filthy cheaters since year 1.

Can people stop screwing around on the most stupid *** things? Just cause you got an addon someone else made for you, doesn't mean you need to do stupid crap with it.

Also if you know how to do things that can be harmful, can you stop sharing them and causing trouble?

The people who did this literally forced them to come in on a Sunday (including server staff) and lose dev time to fix it, cause you're screwing around on things that don't even really matter to you.

This 23 year old ps2 game that is running on windows 7 emulated servers is running on a wing and a prayer and people can't stop pushing the limits of the patience of the people who choose to still work on it.

The moment Fujito says he has had enough the game will close cause he can't be replaced, and he will just be moved to something else at SE. You can already see he barely wanted to do the job as it is.

What the *** is this nonsense

The exploit has been around for YEARS. It still is. They didn't even fix it.

THEY screwed it up. Made an integer change somewhere it didn't belong.

Might want to look up what time zones are.

Reminder that for the japanese teams, this is actually Monday and Friday!

While I agree with the sentiment, this wasnt trouble until SE changed something they didnt need to change and caused the bug. These all worked fine in the March patch when Trust primers were added.

Didn't SE add new RoEs causing ID#s to shift?

They did, but there's no reason it should've been trying to award 400 stacks of primers. There's really no excuse for that.

the ID's didnt change

I agree with this. The initial autobanner hit a wave of innocent players in the 2009 era when gardening for elemental ores was at its peak. Here's a few links to some documentation on the incident. It happened in July of 2009

The first is from Blue Gartr forms

And another account on an unrelated form

As well as a generic yahoo news article

It made a lot of public splash. Turns out the RMT's NPCd a large amount of their stuff to a specific NPC in bastok markets, and that was the action the autobanner keyed in on. A lot of innocent players got swept up for selling stuff to the same npc. At least that's what my memory tells me was the cause... it's been almost two decades but I swear I remember that being discussed on the forms at the time. Point is it was automated, it was new at the time, and it was unrefined. It hit too many false positives.

I've run sortie for 3 years now, and in that time I've known at least half a dozen names who got swept up in perma bans for movement hacks. Even though most statics don't mingle with each other and fill ins with other groups are quite rare, the end game scene is small and there's always communication. So when X player vanishes for Y activity people eventually find out. Is it possible that all of them were just unlucky and s-e personnel just happened to manually check all the logs? Sure, but I doubt that to be the case. Most of the bans were people who didn't run sortie outside their static, and I highly doubt their group members were self-reporting each other. I'm pretty sure bans go out from reports as well as automated log sweeps. I'm convinced there's at least some level of auto monitoring going on here.

It's feasible this happened without them even changing code related to it. The following is a hypothetical scenario not proven.

The structure holding reward quantities is uninitialized memory. They comment out or otherwise disable something related to the unactivated ROE which would have set the quantities to 1. In the past, there was no reward item so the quantity didn't get used. Last month the stack was set up in a way the uninitialized memory remains 0 (most uninitialized memory is 0, so this isn't uncommon). A change to related or nearby code altered the stack layout, and now the memory is being initialized to something else.

There, now you get this bug with no change at all to the code dealing with these ROE. (That's why critical systems are pushing for memory-safe languages. There's certainly a conversation that could be had about validating user input, too.)

They seem a little more cautious about bans now than they did before. Back in the era linked above, they'd just ban large groups and move on. You couldn't do anything about it, appealing got you nowhere, it was just over. They'd ban entire Linkshells regardless of participation, like when that whole Bubbling Bernie thing happened. It was inconsistent too, if you got busted fish botting, sometimes you'd get yelled at, sometimes you'd get a temp, sometimes you'd get permabanned. If your account got stolen and someone did something dumb, oh well, too bad for you. IIRC at one point they banned based on CC # and one person got caught, but others they paid for were banned also regardless of doing anything wrong.

They are still very inconsistent, but everyone I know recently who has gotten banned admitted to violating the ToS and cheating in one form or another. Maybe the results are biased because technically most of us are cheating whereas before 3rd party tools were less common, but it does seem like the days of large scale bans wrapping up innocent players is over. There is blatant hax going on and people get away with it, that wouldn't have happened in broad daylight before.

I'd generally just assume anything that results in a server side behavior could be detected. Using something that forces rendering of otherwise invisible things probably can't be detected by itself (unless it sends some kind of ack when something is rendered), but interacting with them in any way likely can. It wouldn't surprise me if it's possible for them to detect the common use by keeping some state checks on the ordering of actions and reporting when something is done in an order the client doesn't allow. The fact they haven't done this means they either don't know, don't care, or there is some weird arch problem that prevents it.

They will eventually wise up and start using LLMs to handle a lot of this, if they haven't already. One of the things they are very good at is handling large quantities of data and it shouldn't be hard to feed it log data, then have one report on certain patterns. Not that they are required to do this, it's just easier and faster than making updates to a 15+ year old tool and they can iterate a lot faster.

The day they do that is the day that every single player is banned for Windower. It's against TOS and the LLM won't give a ***; you break rules, you're gone. This will end the game lol.

Unless a specific quest not chosen for monthly was intentionally given that reward to flag cheaters trying to game a new system, but there are better ways to handle that.

They did fix it, somewhat. You can still set all ten, but no longer get deeds from the six that are not the actual monthly's for the month.

AKA, RoE addon is now dead for obtaining extra deeds.

Max deeds anyone should have right now is 4200, that's if they got everyone of them completed since it was released back in April 2021 and obtained the Vana-bout 100pt reward every time.

Guessing SE could easily look at characters deed amount and do bans from there.

You dorks not even talking about the AMAN

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxi/comments/1so5w4d/418_aman_live_translation_thread/

No need. You are. You don't care about this game but you'll be sure to give us updates along the way. And we appreciate you for that sir :)

waswas there even a single noteworthy thing mentioned that warrants discussion?

Dunno didn't watch

from the reddit thread you linked:

Summary/Key Points:

• May update: Combat skills and magic skills added to Trust Points. (more trust points available soon from seasonal events, vana'bouts, ambuscade, etc)

• New RoE tutorials for limit breaks and AF/relic/empyrean acquisition/upgrades.

• 5/15 is the 24th anniversary's Freshly Picked (the 16th is the anniversary) where they're going to announce a lot of other info.

People on reddit are as usual over reacting and expecting more bonanza vouchers on the 15th.

People on Reddit being absolute *** morons?!?!?

Wow unheard of, they are usually a rational level-headed bunch of perfectly normal people.

ok, I was wondering why after months ago referring to what was going to be the January besieged update as the final one, they no longer did so once they finally got around to adding it.

Isn't it crazy they can't add server specific rules btw, is this really something so difficult?

If server name = then, or whatever. That way they can allow all kinds of server specific rules. Xp bonuses to low pop servers, higher tier group content on bigger servers etc

They can create the *** stupidest party scaling mechanic for mobs (ie: Base_HP * (1.2 * (PT_Size - 3)) or whatever it is), but cant adjust content for server size.

They can. The servers have settings for all kinds of paramaters. Bonus experience campaign is simply tweaking the value for exp gain to be double the normal value, so instead of 1x it's 2x. They could make it 3 or 4 or 5x if they wanted. Every bonus campaign is just them adjusting a single value on the server end to multiply the base value until the campaign is over, at which point they reset it back to the default 1.0.

There's been plenty of instances where people who host private servers have modified those settings so that you natively run at double normal speed, get insane skillup rates, and get far more exp or w/e than normal. If private servers can do it, so can public. They just don't because reasons. Maybe fairness, or equality, or balance or w/e. Or maybe they just don't want to. But if they chose to they absolutely could give smaller servers those kinds of bonuses fulltime.


Edit: I found a youtube video of some guy showing the configurations available when setting up a private server. Everything from default tp gain you get from hitting mobs to default run speed, skill gains to the amount of gil dropped when mobs die, exp loss when players die....etc etc etc. It's all in there. If you pause and zoom in as he scrolls down through the file you can see there's LOADS of options, and its all server specific, so they could easily modify the values for any given server to be different. They just choose not to.

Of course they can. It's simple enough, but are there any instances that they've ever done something for one prod server that they haven't done for another? I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

So that means extra overhead to create a few lines of new code, remember it's there, monitor servers and their Besieged progress, and continually adjust it for who knows how long.

Sounds like way too much for the sole person who runs XI these days, so they just won't do it instead.

I think it's probably important to note that a private server is a complete clean-room rewrite of a server.

That means that very little, other than the packets getting sent to the client is the same.

But they absolutely CAN do it. I just wouldn't look at the config files of a private server to determine the feasibility of it. I'm willing to bet a lot of stuff in ffxi is hard coded.