Project Quarm - 1 Box Planes of Power

[Seducio]

I see where you are coming from Loramin. I also see where the Quarm team is at also. Heavy handed early 'invasive enforcement' commitments may be less effective than what Secrets is planning. Secrets also has expressed a different philosophy than p99s enforcement mechanisms.

When it comes to Anti Cheats many devs across the online gaming industry we have to resort to invasiveness of the user's device info, sending data back to devs of possible current programs running and processes the machine is using, and IP connection that is connected to the server. Not to mention IP hunting across multiple services to catch the RMTers, which many here are ok with. If someone did the same maneuvers on your grandma however you'd probably consider legal action. As the maneuvers could be misconstrued as Identity Theft.

The counter argument that Anti Cheat is very important to focus on so that the players can feel they are in a world that is fair. An example would be juicing and drug testing in Professional Sports. At the Olympic level and Pro sports level athletes submit to drug testing to make sure they aren't on steroids and other performance enhancing drugs. They have their blood drawn etc. So the question philosophically is the juice with the squeeze?

To make a popular server like p99 the answer might be a resounding yes.

In addition to training proper CSR etiquette for dealing with actual humans, devs have to be concerned with CSR over eagerness and that in some situations they look like Paul Blart the mall cop who don't realize they aren't law enforcement however. Basically nerds with power they shouldn't have. Devs here on p99 as well as Secrets have seen both the failures and successes in the Emu scene in this regard.

P99 devs biggest headaches have probably come from their Anti Cheats rubbing folks the wrong way who considered them invasive, a few of their CSR folks who went rogue, and old agreements with Daybreak and others that might not make as much sense now as they did when they were signed.

Secrets is less ok with this level of invasiveness due the excess level of private info he has witnessed other organizations collect when they perform invasive Anti Cheat mechanisms on online games. He evolved to think that some devs go too far in what they are collecting about you and have running the background that you don't know about.

It's possible that the level of invasiveness that some online companies such as Riot currently employ could at a future date become illegal. Imagine a online gaming company accidently finding out super high level political info like a mini Hunter Biden type scenario or possible accidental capture of classified DoD documents. It's also possible the level of invasiveness some companies are willing to to employ will only increase if the laws remain as they are. Most users currently will give up privacy for convenience and this is taken advantage of by devs seeking to create popular free products.

Some have figured out that if a product is free. You are the product.

[Seducio]

*is the juice worth the squeeze?

[loramin]

Look, I don't have strong opinions on rules enforcement on emulated EQ servers .. I truly don't. I just see an unsolved problem.

I also agree: anti-cheats are invasive, and (all else being equal) invasive solutions are worse. I've even previously agreed that MQ-based cheating can be solved without the need for invasive anti-cheats.

But, I just don't see how a petition/GM-only system can solve ShowEQ. If the server sends info to the client (like which nameds are up), there's nothing to stop another program on that client (eg. ShowEQ) from seeing it ... and if someone abuses that info, there's no way to detect it (without anti-cheats).

So, I'm not at all saying "Quarm must use an anti-cheat". If Secrets could (say) limit the server so that it only sends data on NPCs nearby, it would solve ShowEQ without the need for anti-cheats.

But without some plan to address ShowEQ, it feels like you anyone saying "Quarm won't have cheaters" is just doing this:

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[Secrets]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

So, I'm not at all saying "Quarm must use an anti-cheat". If Secrets could (say) limit the server so that it only sends data on NPCs nearby, it would solve ShowEQ without the need for anti-cheats.

But without some plan to address ShowEQ, it feels like you anyone saying "Quarm won't have cheaters" is just doing this

The server already sends data on NPCs nearby only, at least in terms of movement data, not names.

The petition/GM-only system won't be the only component on launch. There will be one that is both client-side, and serverside too.
There will be measures to track folks that are cheating that won't be in the public release of Quarm. This measure will likely see the same scrutiny that P99 has with their anticheat, and I intend to forward those complaints to the toilet as they do.

It's also fair to assume that folks are cheating the same way on P99 as they would be on Quarm.. a few may slip past the cracks, and that few is all a guild or group needs to impact the game.

So, in actuality, I don't think it'll be any different than P99's cheating situation as of today. People are getting caught with manual GM observation on P99 still, and automatic layers of detection also exist to catch those that aren't as tech savvy, but utilize cheat programs.

That will be the case with us, though we're putting about the same level of effort into detection that P99 is, so...

[Seducio]

An undeniable metric of success for Project Quarm would be if it becomes popular enough that Daybreak/Dark Paw/'whoever owns IP' reaches out to make an agreement with PQ like they did with p99 after its success reached a level of being noticed.

If Quarm gets a request like that it would already be successful enough to have gotten on the radar. If it can weather that kind of a request and continue to grow afterward like p99 did, then the scene as a whole will evolve quite a bit.

Am I in wishful thinking territory? Perhaps. I think your concerns are legitimate Loramin. Many old school EQers and us P99ers in particular don't like cheating. I think these concerns are being considered by the Quarm team.

There will be push back from some players with regard to dev decisions along the way regardless of which direction those decisions go. A non-corrupt lead CSR manager would go a long way in freeing up Secrets time, but it comes at a cost of power diffusion. If Secrets shows fortitude and innovation in dealing with issues that will inevitably crop up along the way all old school EQ players will ultimately benefit.

[loramin]

All I'm asking is this.

I'm a ShowEQ user: I play the game and look indistinguishable from a normal user, but I cheat and see what mobs are up when I enter a zone.

How will you (or the rest of the Quarm staff) catch me? It seems like a straightforward and fair question to ask, and you don't have to provide all the secret tricks being used to catch cheaters, I'm just looking for a simple/general explanation.

[Seducio]

Are you open to the notion that the solution to your very question may evolve over time?

Early on in Blue's inception many of these very questions were still unanswered. The p99 team had to monitor what the players were up to and create boundaries as they went. They were building the plane as they flew it.

Expecting game devs to get everything right on day 1 is something that went away in the 90s.

[Secrets]

Originally Posted by loramin [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

All I'm asking is this.

I'm a ShowEQ user: I play the game and look indistinguishable from a normal user, but I cheat and see what mobs are up when I enter a zone.

How will you (or the rest of the Quarm staff) catch me? It seems like a straightforward and fair question to ask, and you don't have to provide all the secret tricks being used to catch cheaters, I'm just looking for a simple/general explanation.

The following realistic options exist outside of being invasive. Going into detail on any of these would make it fairly easy to bypass any protections:
1) Clientside detection / prevention. Invasive measures could be taken in the future if cheating becomes a problem / pervasive.
2) Serverside manipulation of the client with data provided to it.
3) Manual observation in combination with the above.

These are the measures P99 has taken and we'll be doing similar measures. Though, subjectively more or less effective in some cases.

The biggest deterrence (ie; the above covers detection/prevention, see: https://technology.riotgames.com/new...ach-anti-cheat) that EQ has is its insane time commitment.
There is only so much damage one person can do in a limited period of time, and the risks of being banned and actively caught outweigh the benefit of cheating in almost every case.

[loramin]

So, not to be flippant, but it sounds like the plan is to wait and see if it's a problem, and then either institute an anti-cheat or somehow observe/catch the cheaters? Do I have that correct?

The only issue, as I've already mentioned, is that observation will be very challenging (impossible?), because ShowEQ cheaters aren't observably different the way MQ cheaters are.

But let's run with that plan of waiting to see how bad the cheating is before you address it. Just one other simple question then: how are you going to know whether you have a cheating problem or not?

Again, the whole core problem is that these cheaters aren't detectable.

[Trexller]

that's how things went on Blue launch.

at one point, there were so many of us using MQ that they couldn't ban everyone

we got a 10% reduction in total XP and accts stripped of all coin as a thanks

nobody ever mentions it tho, i can't be that old...