[Dev] Nyzul Isle Assault Bug

You will be lucky to get 1 win... I hate SE~

This is all that I've absorbed from this whole thread. What exactly is a "drawdistance dummy"? >.>;

There a link for this taskforce? Let the banhammer fly

IF JP CANT WIN ON PS2 NO ONE CAN!

Yeah honestly, reducing how many times you gotta win 80 would work too.
Maybe not 5, but maybe like 10-15.
25 is wayyy too much <_>

I have a question to all the "banhammerzz!!10101" people...

Exactly how, in mechanical details, do you think they will be able to distinguish between "legitimate" win and people who used modified client side dats? The game currently doesn't do a scan for modified dats upon startup, thus SE has no fricking idea who does and does not have a different font nor icons. It's possible next update they could add a function that would check specific files against a hash, but that's next update and does absolutely nothing about people who've already acquired their gear.

So while some of you like to live in a suicide death fantasy, where a vengeful winged angel swoops down to smite those you feel have committed an injustice towards you, in actuality the employees over at SE need to actually have a method to detect this .dat hack before they can start swinging a banhammer. Or do you think SE is going to ask each of you individually who you think was doing it and only ban those people you so righteously hate?

They could just assume everyone with Nyzul gear used dat swaps and or other 3rd party tools, surely the guilty players would number at least 90%.

I thought FFXI antibot purists stopped playing in 2006.

So are you then asking for everyone who has any NNI 100 gear to be banned? And do you have any logs, statistics, studies or other evidence to back up your claim of 90%? Just for the record and all that. Need to be thorough here.

Maybe just have a kinda mog bonanza lottery. Everyone with NNI 100 gear is on a big list, 1 out of 10 gets to keep their account *CONGRATS*, the other 9 get hammered.

lol I never said I wanted them to get banned otherwise I'm banned as well, but you can't pretend the vast majority of those with NNI gear did it with dat swaps or at least ran with people who did.

Ohh I'm not claiming innocence nor playing semantics with what is and is not cheating. Changing my icons so that buffs are easier to read and having onscreen recasts and durations are all cheating. Changing dats to make poles easier is also cheating. No qualms about it.

Just curious to the reasoning, or lack thereof, all the "banhammers!!!!!" people are using. The old salvage duping was a manipulation of a server side event and people talked about it in party / ls chat. It was only a matter of time until a creative programmer crafted a script to go through their archived server logs looking for specific entries and sending that into a separate database. Then they got a perfect list to use to determine who to and not to hammer with lots of evidence. This is a modification of a client side resource that is not checked for. There wouldn't be any difference in the service side logs and thus no way to use a script to separate out the "cheaters!!!".

I've always thought about the comparison to the salvage bans, the players in that instance used an exploit to duplicate gear so you could complete the event sooner, it was completely uneeded for the event and was just a means to get people completed gear quicker.

The dat swaps on NNI however raise the rate of success from extremely minimal to a more reasonable amount, considering the odds of getting an order lamps floor at least once during a climb to floor 100 is very high, most runs would end in failure without dat swaps.

I'd say with the way SE designed the event they just invited people to find exploits to succeed, will they ban people over this? Like you say, they can't detect it right now but what if they do look for people with .dat swaps? People have messed with the dats for more than just NNI do they get banned too?

Also what of the people who use ap radar which I hear displays the lamp in order as well, they can't be detected by SE so they escape the banhammer while the ones who dat swapped get it?

As has been mentioned far too many people would be lost if they banned the ones using dat swaps, maybe they won't care and value integrety above all but to do mass bannings could well go towards killing a dying game, especially after announcing a new expansion may not be the best move.

Salvage bans were actually trackable via logs though.

As far as dats go, we'd always discuss who did what lamp over Skype and never talked about it in the game itself, so if you backtracked, there'd be no evidence whatsoever.

Every single salvage ban was backed up by some sort of evidence.

To be truthful I'm not to knowledgable of the time around the Salvage bans, pretty sure I was very much a casual player at the time it happened.

Well it's up to SE if they want to cut their monthly income, they're a business before they're... Uhh something related to xi, if anything I'd say they'd most likely ban who they can to make an example to the rest.

Currently there are no way they can execute ban hammer fairly unless they can detect .dat swap some how. Chat log can't really be used as evidence, too many grey areas. Players can just argue that the numbers are just their code to determine the order for each players to click the lamp, who can prove that numbers showed in chat log are .dat swap? And skype/vent users will escape the ban hammer, causing the punishment not being fair. Another way is to write a script and ban any pt that guessed right order on 1st shot, that way nobody will escape, but some innocent players may get banned. And if punishment isn't executed fairly(let some cheaters escape or banned innocent ppl), nobody will happy and will just cause more problem.

Either way, the damage has already been done. It's easy to execute salvage ban fairly, since duped item/broken alliance all record on the server and it's hard evidence. But it's much, much harder to execute .dat swap ban correctly. SE's only option is to suck it up and fix the problem, either by change order lamp to server side or cancel order lamp floor completely, or make .dat swap somehow detectable next update. I'd say the chance of they really banning ppl for this is pretty small, not because they can't afford to lose that many player(SE doesn't care about losing money if they're determined), but because it's next to impossible to execute this fairly, and will just create more /rage on the forum if the punishment isn't fair.

This is what I keep trying to point out. You can ban for lots of things, fleehacking / wallhacking are obvious ones, though incredibly hard to legitimately detect server side (unless you abuse it to ungodly levels). Client side modifications are pretty much impossible to detect / log without introducing a new mechanism into the client. Something that would immediately be noticed by the more technically inclined of the user base.

Now for some more smoke and mirrors. Lets assume SE created a built in hashing mechanism on start-up, if it detected invalid hash's it sent a message to SE. Now we notice this and immediately work towards finding a fix. The infamous "Windower" that we all know and love does something known as hooking and interception. It intercepts FFXI's calls to the DX library and modifys those calls to change their effects. We can do the same thing to calls to file handlers, detect their hashing code, intercept the file read and report back that the file is A-OK and pass's hash. The file is of course modified, but we've been able to hide that from the game. You could then further implement this by checking the memory looking for what triggers the hash check and altering it such that it always reports "A-OK".

As long as the player base controls the client, there is nothing that can't be done. It's only the server side aspect that can't be seen or changed. So if there is not a server side difference then it's essentially undetectable to SE.

I wonder if you guys noticed how they changed the update process some years ago, to scan a larger number of files than what you actually need to download during an update.

If they are suspicious of .dat cheating, all they need to do is to add the original versions of the suspected .dat files to the update list and when POL Viewer check for files to update, it will download and overwrite any modded files.

They then only need to cross your login information (IPs the account usually logs with) against the logs of the update server with the IPs that downloaded the original files that replace the "infamous" modded files.

If you play with modded files and don't bother restoring the original files before updating you might be sending them a "I .dat mod" message since 2008 or 2009...

Except they also have a "check files" feature and legitimate corruption that happens.

As it stands every update I need to reapply the UI update (font / icons / maps) from Windower.net. That would be no different.

Nice try though.


Most IP's are dynamically assigned from ISP's, especially those on DSL. Also carrier grade NAT destroys that entire scheme you put in, as you now have 10+ clients connecting from the same external IP.

Track by IP is the absolute worst method you could ever attempt to use.

Ok finished reading through, Why not just get rid of ordered lamps? or lamps all together? Seems like SE is forcing people to cheat or just play the SE luck-game (which we all know is garbage). I have yet to do NNI, nice gear is cool but not worth cheating. I am just bowing out till SE figures it out.

I said they can easily watch any particular file they wish to.


Anyone with IT expertize knows that dynamic IP assignment is no problem to track this since you're actually LOGGED to the PlayOnline service while you're updating your game. They take YOUR current IP and the date/time you updated the game *FROM POL LOGIN HISTORY* and cross with the update server logs to check WHICH files YOUR IP downloaded. If you re-downloaded the LAMP dats out of 35 THOUSAND files the likeliness of unintended corruption of those specific files is very low IMHO.

My point is: They CAN tell people who cheat apart from people who don't if they really want to.

Edit: Oh and we have an update next week. I have no intention to help cheaters, but whatever. It is not intentional if that is the effect of this post.

Actually, quite a number of them were bans by association. I had many friends who went on random salvage runs with dupers, who didn't talk about duping, but then duped. I had friends who went on a single run with one such people, in some cases the only Salvage run they ever did. LM-17 baby~ LM-17.

Its always Asura..... Always......... *Sigh*

Yes but they had proof that they were in a run that things were being duped.

The bans were by association, but still backed up with the evidence of items being duped in the run

of course it was asura. go chroma?

edit: i forgot to say Lamps Lamps Lamps. IF they took out lamps and people STILL lost Nyzul, what would be the excuse then? Gear Floors? Custards?

OMG IVE BEEN BANNED

lol

remember even though the bug mentions 3rd party tools, we cannot discuss the tools here.


just an fyi in case someone does mention :)