Re: Your future on Alter Aeon: a Discussion of game trends
This is only the second time I've ever posted on these forums, so if my formatting or anything else is a bit off I apologize.
I want to start by stating that I have some pretty heavy bias against the player Teros as I do against all players who make it their purpose to cause problems on Alter Aeon, specifically people who cause problems to the detriment of other players and attempt to cause wide spread discontent. So take things I have to say about him personally with the appropriate measure of salt.
First I feel like while this post is well worded, and there are some reasonable concerns, that it is absolutely an attack against the administration of the game. It's full of clear bias, half truths and hyperbole.
I'm going to do my best to dissect the post and remain civil.
On the first point, Mush-z and computer tracking. To be clear, the code does not actually track your computer, it tracks your client. Two distinctly different things, two things that are very common in all sorts of bigger brand games. This is not a piece of code put in to the client to spy on peoples computers, but rather just to keep track of who is who better. I'd be willing to bet that there is similar in Dclient (the unofficial name for the client Dentin made specifically for AA). The intent behind this is not to spy on anyone, but rather to better manage the player base. Something that is important in any online game. I asked on my private channel if anyone was familiar with this code and what it can and can't do and got the following response from one of the people you acknowledge worked on mush-z (though he says he hasn't done very much himself)
[gate] Lokar: is anyone here familiar with this uuid stuff in the mushz code at all and know exactly what it can and can't do?
[gate] Slej: I"ve read the code.
[gate] Lokar: ugh I'm actually leaving now suddenly, but if you're familiar I'd like a description of what precisely it can do and how likely it is at all to be capable of what people seem to be paranoid it can do
[gate] Lokar: I'll replay when I can
[gate] Slej: when you first set up mush-z, it generates a random number for you. It's not based on machine ID or anything, it's just a totally random number that is long enough to be unique most of the time. Every time you log in to any character from that installation, that number gets sent to the mud.
[gate] Slej: so Dentin can't tell I'm using a specific machine. If I copy mush to another machine or a flash drive with all my settings intact, it uses the same ID. If I decide to multiplay Lokar's character and pass it off as Lokar, even if I go through a proxy, Dentin will know about it because the same ID gets sent when I log into Lokar.
[gate] Slej: Some people found out about this and really didn't like it, so they started modifying their code to send a stupid bogus string instead of the generated ID. Personally I'd just modify mine to send something random each time, but whatever floats their boat I guess. Teros sent Riddle his hacked XML, so when he lgoged in, it showed the same ID.
(As a quick aside, some people may be familiar with the rules I enforce on my private channel on the Alter Aeon, I did ask permission before quoting Slej.)
This code is not as malicious as you seem to imply, not even close in fact since it doesn't track your computer at all.
Its important to note that if tracking bothers you so much, this very website gives you tracking cookies. I think everyone would probably agree they are very likely harmless though.
As for the actual coding, who did it, and why they did it, the following conversation was had in bovine. (I edited this slightly, but only by removing irrelevant statements, including my own which honestly only displayed my clear bias I mentioned earlier)
(39 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: Just doing a replay
(39 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: for hte record, it was I specifically who put in the uid stuff
(39 minutes ago) [bovine] Mingo: what was the specific reason?
(39 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: no clue if athlon was around at that time or not, but Dentin and I talked about it, and it was me alone who put in the code, so if anyone wants to blame a mush-z dev, it is me, and I did not discuss it with any other dev.
(38 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: so honestly whether athlon was a dev at the time or not is not very relevant
(37 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: the reason for hte UID things?
(37 minutes ago) [bovine] Mingo: nod
(36 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: The reason was because we had situations where people would log on multiple chars from the same IP address and claim it was because it was another person who was at the same location behind a NAT, so getting the same IP
(36 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: So putting in a unique identifier per client install was a way of providing another datapoint as to whether or not these people may or may not be telling the truth.
(36 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: the idea was to crack down on multiplaying
(36 minutes ago) [bovine] Fighter: yeh, that's pretty much fine
(35 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: It had nothing to do with tracking people
(35 minutes ago) [bovine] Rhorae: but also help avoid false alarms
(35 minutes ago) [bovine] Slej: I do think doing that without informing the users was a tad bit shady though. Normally if a program tracks your machine id, you know about it.
(35 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: yeah that too
(35 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: perhaps, I did support it at the time, as I despise players who multiplay
(35 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: and the reason I didn't tell the user base was because then those people easily could have gotten around it
(34 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: and given we had some specific instances at that time Dentin was trying to identify and see if it was legit or not, telling everyone as soon as it was done kind of would have defeated the purpose.
(34 minutes ago) [bovine] Mingo: is it a tad ineffectual. i.e. if you create multiple copies of mush on your machine and have different ids then it is fooled. Or ifyou copy your copy of mush to someone else in your household will they get your id and therefore give false readings?
(34 minutes ago) [bovine] Lokar: of course he did, teros is out to damage AA while trying to look like hes being reasonable
(34 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: well yeah, if you copy yoru client and give it to someone else, then you and them will have the same id
(34 minutes ago) [bovine] Slej: I suppose. I haven't cared enough to do it, but there was one time when I sent my copy of mush to someone and it identified us as multiplaying, and I didn't figure out why until months later.
(33 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: but the idea was never to use it as the way to determine for sure if someone was multiplaying or not, it was jsut to serve as one additional datapoint when making the analysis to arrive at the conclusion as to whether the person was multiplaying or not
(33 minutes ago) [bovine] Mingo: because mush iis portable, you can just pick the whole thing up and put it on another machine, without an install process that makes it rather flawed
(33 minutes ago) [bovine] Runner: This all goes around the main point though. User tracking without consent is wrong.
(32 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: perhaps runner, but honestly, Dentin approached me about it, and I supported it, and quite frankly, I totally forgot about it later
(32 minutes ago) [bovine] Morpheus: then you best turn off your pc
(32 minutes ago) [bovine] Lexie: bull. almost every web site that is commercial uses it. almost every large electronics company is now using it.
(32 minutes ago) [bovine] Runner: Which is why I use a firewall
(32 minutes ago) [bovine] Rhorae: you guys are acting as though it lets dentin see the rest of your PC, or your physical location
(32 minutes ago) [bovine] Runner: It could, rhorae
(32 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: like I just viewed it as something so insignificant, it really didn't occur to me to make a big deal of it later or be like guys, we have this thing to now make public.
(32 minutes ago) [bovine] Rhorae: sure he can see your IP address, but he could do that with or without this code
(32 minutes ago) [bovine] Runner: remember, mush-z has access to lua, which can do a lot of stuff
(31 minutes ago) [bovine] Runner: including call other code, which can do more stuff
(31 minutes ago) [bovine] Runner: download a 500k c or c++ program as part of an update, run it, easy.
(31 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: I just wanted to set the record straihgt in that the idea was Dentin's yes, but it was not he who put the code in, it was I.
(30 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: Dentin has never written a line of mush-z code to my knowledge, he has always asked the devs
(30 minutes ago) [bovine] Runner: @weyoun: thanks for clarifying. I'd also like to say that I'm not bashing you or dentin personally. I'm bashing the practice of user tracking.
(30 minutes ago) [bovine] Weyoun: I will however say that I have no access to the data that is collected, that is 100% dentin who has access to it.
I understand the concern with tracking in this day and age, its a scary thought, but this literally only watches your client, not your computer. There is no indication that there will ever be an attempt to watch your computer, and frankly Dentin has nothing to gain from watching your computer.
As far as the riddle incident is concerned, Dentin attempted to seek information about riddle, asking if people knew if he was Teros (I was one of the people asked, but I was away at the time and didn't find out he asked til the freezing already happened. Once he found out he was incorrect he fixed the mistake. I don't recall him ever passing blame on Riddle, he simply explained why it happened and what he could better do if he wanted to mess with this uuid tracking. One might ask 'well why didn't he just ask publicly?' Thats actually a really simple answer, Teros despite your constant negative influence and rules breaking at the expense of other players you have managed to gain a rather large following of friends who look past it because you're somewhat charismatic. It's honestly hard to believe that asking publicly wouldn't be met with deflection or lies on your behalf by some people, and some people being honest and that picking apart those responses would be difficult and unhelpful.
As I like to point out to people pretty regularly, Dentin is only human. He makes mistakes just like anyone else. He made a mistake with riddle, he corrected that mistake.
The future of Mushz
Weyoun has outright said he doesn't currently plan to quit.
(3 hours ago) [bovine] Weyoun: The post says that I quit. That is not true. I have disbanded dominion, as many high level players have quit or are not active anymore, and I do disagree with a lot of what has happened on the game lately, and I do mostly log on to chat, and I am active over at chatmud now and do like the concept of it and what it is a lot, but I have not made any formal decisions on what my status with Alter is. I'm just seeing how things go.
I have also been informed Slej has no intent to quit ether, though it would not shock me to learn Dernan intends to quit after the last few weeks events.
Regarding Weyouns supposed outright turning down of Shadowfax and Draaks help on mushz are the following quotes from today as well.
(3 hours ago) [bovine] Weyoun: Also just to be clear on one point. I don't think Athlon was trying to mislead, but just in case this was open to misinterpretation, I never formally refused help from Fax or Draak. That is, it was not a conscious decision like, oh, these guys are bad coders, so I don't want it. Fax approached me and offered help at one point, I don't even recall how it happened exactly, but I politely told him thanks and that I welcome an open relationship where we discuss server changes, so I could implement the
(3 hours ago) [bovine] Weyoun: The idea being that it would be a better experience for the player base if we all syncrhonized the work, rather than mush-z trying to desperately catch up after a change on the server broke the client
(3 hours ago) [bovine] Weyoun: And I also am someone who likes to maintain a level of control, and I did think it was better for all concerned to keep the server developers and client developers separate to a point
I also think it was pretty childish to accuse Draak and Shadowfax of having sloppy code. Yes they sometimes release things that have bugs in them. So has literally everyone who has ever coded anything on a large scale though. If that's your metric then google, microsoft, apple and every other major company has nothing but sloppy coders. That's a useless metric.
Dentin and Change
AA has always been changing and evolving, huge sweeping mechanical changes have always been a part of it. Sometimes it drives players away (pretty much nobody who played back when I started plays anymore) That's just how it goes sometimes. It also doesn't mean the changes are bad. (Alter Aeons player base has grown dramatically, many quality of life changes have been implemented, etc). Generally speaking all the big sweeping mechanical changes have primarily hit high level players hardest, whether it be because they've grown used to play styles, or lost something due the changes, this isn't new to the recent changes.
I don't believe for a moment dentin trys to 'brush' players off, unless those players are behaving like unreasonable jerks. In that case generally speaking anyone would tend to ignore their input, yes even if its good input. 'reminding them that his knowledge of various systems in the game far exceeds theirs' is usually something like pointing out he has systems in place to track data. It's not nearly as smug or arrogant as you make it sound.
Regarding the money thing, it's actually not usually dentin that is quick to point out that he has banned people who have spent money on the mud, its usually other players. There have been tons of discussions that most players aren't in on regarding what is and isn't safe to implement as credit based rewards, and dentin has made plenty of changes that have outright pissed off players who have donated plenty to the mud. It's simply an unfair and unrealistic statement to say that Dentin has made changes to make these people happy.
Regarding the statements he makes about making more money at google than on AA, and how he'd rather focus on that, this is usually in the face of players being belligerent and 'screaming' at him about things instead of trying to open reasonable dialogue with him. I actually posted something on board 8 regarding this in the vain hope people would read it and try a new approach.
Here is a link to the post
https://alteraeon.com:8081/board/8/c264a29d4fa8008ba737
(fair side note here, I am more than a little biased regarding Dentin, I consider him a friend, but I believe these statements to be 100% true)
Community Opinion – You're actually not really wrong on most of your points here. This is where most of the player discontent comes from, specifically the level costs being increased a ton. A lot of players have openly spoken out against this, myself included. Currently it can be very hard (if not impossible) to level once you hit a certain point. Although I do feel it is fair to point out that I myself am not at that point and as of this writing only 24 people in the entire mud have more levels than I do.
That doesn't mean those levels don't become absurd, but it does mean that not very many people are actually currently impacted by this and its not nearly as horrible or wide spread an issue as people like to make it out to be.
I'd also like to point out that Dentin has been making constant tweaks to experience, focusing mostly on solo experience as its the baseline and will eventually lead to better group experience as well.
He is NOT ignoring the issue like some people like to pretend. If he doesn't acknowledge you it is more than likely because you approach him like a jerk. I've seen him engage Jonathon (another well known player) in discussion on this numerous times. The key difference being Jonathon is level headed and reasonable when he talks to Dentin and not making snarky sarcastic backhanded angry comments that literally nobody wants to listen to.
I would absolutely love to see the leveling issue addressed, and I for one hope that the removal of the more distracting negative elements on the mud will help increase that focus since they will no longer be around to be discouraging, which leads to the next section.
Dont complain to loudly
Dentin has literally never, ever, even once, in the history of the mud, removed people from the game simply for 'complaining' or 'disagreeing' If he had I personally would have been removed from the game a long, long time ago.
Dentin could always ban people for whatever reason he chose, but he never has. In fact he's always been excessively lenient towards people who like to cause problems such as yourself, vivi, Spectre, Boa and Tyrant to name a few. Usually letting people go on with their poor behavior so long that the rest of the player base is angry at him for not doing anything about it. Many people are happy to see this crackdown. It's nice to know that we can expect people who behave like jerks to be dealt with. You know you've been a bad influence, in fact most people agree you have. The person who got hit that has been up for debate is Ignotus. So let me cover that.
In the weeks leading up to Ignotus removal from the game Ignotus abused access to the avatar channel
to paste information that is to be strictly kept to that channel to you specifically. (for those who may not be familiar, this is a channel that moderators have access to only for moderators and avatars to talk amongst themselves, police themselves, and for dentin to pass us information )Ignotus had been well known for not enforcing rules properly, only doing it when it wasn't a personal friend, and sometimes enforcing rules that simply did not exist. Following the removal of his moderator powers he chose to take up a trolling campaign against the world builder Morpheus, attacking him literally every time he spoke on is mortal character. He was also very, VERY aggressive towards other world builders, and avatars, up to and including insulting them for actually enforcing rules. He is not the innocent person who got attacked for disagreeing that you and a few others keep trying to make him out to be.
Sure maybe some of Dentins other information posted wasn't exactly super relevant, but its all icing on the cake.
To be clear, you will never be banned from AA simply for talking about other games, or for disagreeing with Dentin. You have to do much much more to accomplish that.
Anyways I think that covers all the points made in your post. I did my best to remain unbiased, but its difficult as I obviously do have sides I favor here. Hopefully the chat logs help shine a light on some of it even if my own bias shows.
(I edited the location where I describe what the avatar channel is because I apparently pasted it in the wrong location while working on this post)
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
