I have to stop and marvel that Becker is mentioned at all on these forums. We are all the children of Adam............................Smith.
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NEWS Transcript of Developer Meet & Greet 04June2014 - Atlantic Shard
It's a yes. That type of answer is always a yes.lol... I guess it's all about your perception. Ya know.. glass half full or half empty. I took it more of a definite "dang if I know, it's kinda Broadswords call to make and they ain't really gave an indication one way or the other yet"
Lol, yeah. Hell, Antivirus Programs function very similar to Punkbuster, and practically everyone has an antivirus program (and you gotta facepalm at the ones that don't). Punkbuster scans your harddrive for hacks/cheats, and monitors your program memory for hacks/cheats. An Antivirus program scans your harddrive for virus/trojans/malware/etc and monitors your memory for them as "Live Protection".The funny thing also is that most people whining about Punkbuster probably have a lot worse installed on their comps right now.
The reason Punkbuster does random screenshots of your game screen, is because of otherwise hard to prove wall/radar hacks like this.
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This i find disappointing. The whole idea of so heavily punishing reds for their PvP playstyle, is outdated as hell. I personally don't see why they can't allow reds into Trammel ruleset areas, just make them abide the Trammel ruleset (no non-consentual PvP). They still wouldn't be able to benefit from a guard zone or buy stuff from NPCs. Currently, you're heavily restricted in what you can do as a red, which basically boils down to just Champ Spawns.
Another headscratcher, is how the devs mentioned that Vice vs Virtue would give reds a buff, yet they also mentioned being able to attack other people in Tram with it (like guild wars). How the hell does that benefit reds if they can't go into Trammel ruleset areas?
The whole concept of "red" is silly these days. It existed in a time when they were attempting to make PKing undesirable due to the world being a free-for-all PvP area with limited safe zones. These days people make a conscious choice to PvP by entering Felucca and it's quite easy to go red if you're doing something like defending a spawn for your guild, thus penalizing you for essentially partaking in PvP in a PvP area.
Regardless of that, people who are "red" should be able to enter other facets and just appear as "blue" like everyone else. Their noto hue on Fel. has absolutely nothing to do with anything that would happen on the other facets. The restriction is just arbitrary and pointless.
Having said all of the above, I quite like the fact that there's a market for forged pardons. It's about the only thing my t-hunter is useful for these days until they fix loot.
Regardless of that, people who are "red" should be able to enter other facets and just appear as "blue" like everyone else. Their noto hue on Fel. has absolutely nothing to do with anything that would happen on the other facets. The restriction is just arbitrary and pointless.
Having said all of the above, I quite like the fact that there's a market for forged pardons.
It's about the only thing my t-hunter is useful for these days until they fix loot.
Being made to use the EC?
I'm loving the news about loot upgrades in the next publish. But I can't find the news of when this publish might be out? Is this a done deal ready to go, or one of those 'this year' deals?
I think my point was that people shouldn't be "punished" for initiating PvP on a PvP facet, aside from perhaps flagging aggressors as gray. The concept of "murder" doesn't really exist in the truest sense as everyone accepts that they may be subject to PvP combat when stepping through the Fel gate.
Asking me for "alternative punishments" also means you see being red as a "punishment" right now, which it isn't anyway. It's a minor inconvenience at best that can be fixed with pardons and/or using soulstones. I just see the travel restriction as arbitrary at this point as a player's Trammel/Felucca play are separate and banning a character from Trammel facets purely because they PvP in Fel is a bit silly in my eyes.
Why not just turn off the ability to give murder counts while on the Fel dungeon server. Dungeons are supposed to be dangerous places, especially in the Fel facet. This solves the issue of getting counts just defending a spawn, while leaving in place the restrictions for those who kill blues on the overland.The whole concept of "red" is silly these days. It existed in a time when they were attempting to make PKing undesirable due to the world being a free-for-all PvP area with limited safe zones. These days people make a conscious choice to PvP by entering Felucca and it's quite easy to go red if you're doing something like defending a spawn for your guild, thus penalizing you for essentially partaking in PvP in a PvP area.
Regardless of that, people who are "red" should be able to enter other facets and just appear as "blue" like everyone else. Their noto hue on Fel. has absolutely nothing to do with anything that would happen on the other facets. The restriction is just arbitrary and pointless.
Having said all of the above, I quite like the fact that there's a market for forged pardons.
Well I also accept the fact that I may be mugged or killed every time I go to the grocery store. But I go because I believe that most people refrain from doing harm to others because they may be caught and flagged as a criminal.
Now I'm sure consensual PvP'rs don't give each other murder counts since it's basically a "consensual duel".
So if your "red" it means you killed someone who was just mining or maybe going to or from their home and didn't want to be killed. PvP combat is not standing there with a pickaxe and a pack full of ore while someone kills you easily.. that's murder hence the murder count that turns you red.
Trammel and Felucca were split to separate those that just want to kill others from those that want to do other things.
So I personally think if your "Red" you should just stay in Fel and if you don't want to take the chance of running into a criminal you should stay in Tram.
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Now I'm sure consensual PvP'rs don't give each other murder counts since it's basically a "consensual duel".
So if your "red" it means you killed someone who was just mining or maybe going to or from their home and didn't want to be killed. PvP combat is not standing there with a pickaxe and a pack full of ore while someone kills you easily.. that's murder hence the murder count that turns you red.
Trammel and Felucca were split to separate those that just want to kill others from those that want to do other things.
So I personally think if your "Red" you should just stay in Fel and if you don't want to take the chance of running into a criminal you should stay in Tram.
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Why do reds need access to the other lands at all? Last time I looked, I had 7 char slots...If you made em all red, tough luck chuck lol
So that they could at least play the game, have a public house in tram for easy swapping of arties, do EM events. it really annoying to have to train up 2 full sets of skills just because you want one red character and one blue of the same template.
Im for PVP toggle switch in tram tho. thats a whole other discussion.
Actively engaging and killing people outside a guild war or organized war like Order vs. Chaos, Factions, or VvV, is PKing. Complaining about needing to go "red" in order to "partake in PvP" is a non-starter. It's almost as bad as the people who defend their personal use of third party programs as a way to "keep things even" since "everyone else uses them." It's toxic, and it's why UO is left for dead.
There is absolutely no reason why anyone who wants to PvP just to PvP should need to PK. Back when MyUO thrived there would be competition among the top guilds (all Order/Chaos) for how many individual wars they were waging, with the more savvy guilds warring over 60 guilds at a time. Telling the devs to make it so reds can do whatever they want is like telling the devs "I'm fine that you guys have failed to deliver a usable PvP system outside of Order vs. Chaos, please give up once and for all."
Unless they make some drastic changes to what looks like another item grind in VvV, maybe it's best people think short sighted and with apathy. I'm still holding on to the hope that UO can, once again, have worthwhile PvP that is not tied to use of exclusive items/content. Why they can't just bring back Order/Chaos is beyond me, and the thought of VvV combat centered around shrines makes me want to throw up, so I guess it is what it is.
Yeah I thought VvV was gonna be order/cchaos, but from little I've read on it, it wont. IT's gonna be more tourney based the way I get it...If so, what a waste, we already have arenas very few use
You speak as though there's thousands of innocent people in Fel going about their daily business and newbies trying to train on skeletons in Brit GY still whilst getting mercilessly slaughtered by the evil PKs. Newsflash: 15 years have passed since then and all facets since have been Trammel rules only. People who do not want to engage in non-con PvP stay in Trammel and are completely without risk.
People make a conscious choice to put themselves in danger by entering Fel. If you're putting yourself in PvP situations, i.e. by attempting to complete a spawn, and others show up then, regardless of their hue, they are fully anticipating and likely geared for PvP. If you are blue and are first to engage an invading blue at that point, you'll get a count. Is that "PKing?" Not really, you're kicking off some PvP against PvPers on a PvP facet while attempting to defend what you/your guild have worked for. I do not think you should be penalized long-term in any way for initiating PvP. Heck, we probably need more people initiating PvP these days as it happens much less than it did anyway.
I don't really care a whole lot about this topic because the "punishment" of being red is so trivial. It's a minor inconvenience at worst, particularly since they allowed reds into towns too. I just see the long-term flagging of people for "PKing" when the PKing "problem" was solved by making non-con PvP entirely optional as a bit of a legacy system. Times have changed. When most people speak about this topic or "reds" though their mindset seems perpetually stuck in pre-Ren times. Ho-hum.
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Before Champion Spawns people engaged in Order/Chaos and there was actual PvP going on, PvP that didn't require a PvM gimmick or item grind outside of getting an Order/Chaos shield (if that's even comparable to Faction horses, items, etc.). After Champion Spawns, select guilds changed the meta of what PvP should be. In order to simply control an area, everyone would have to be red, because the PvP objective was no longer tied to PvP but PvM. It's a player meta, a player construct. You're asking the devs to remove the penalty for being a murderer based on that player construct, which to me is a bandaid fix, while I'm asking the devs to create a worthwhile PvP system, one that doesn't require the exploitation of the murder system for an end result.
There have been tons of ideas as far as that goes, like anyone in the region appearing gray, etc. etc., but to me, the fact that people accepted that meta only served to drive this game into the ground, because they stopped demanding a better product/system and settled for an easy fix.
I asked a question (i guess 2 technically, although the pie thing was more of a comment) but those of us in the question line could not hear the devs, nor the person in there asking the questions. It took a good 30-40 minutes for them to turn on the com crystals so we could hear. Might want to get all your facts before you call us idiots...
The inability to use any virtues, which already exists.
They already said that VsvV is going to involve "Trammel PvP" Thus reds will not be able to participate in those fights, if its available in fel AND Tram, whats the point in doing it in Fel?
Going to fel is like signing up for combat now. I agree with spiritless. in original UO you didnt sign up for pvp, you lived in a world where there was always danger of attack whether you liked it or not. In that world the title "murderer" made sense.
The transition to a tram side fel side changed that to someone who didnt want pvp could easily avoid it.
I would compare it to combat in the military. killing a member of opposite "team" or "the enemy" is not murder. in uo we have 2 teams blue and red. blues just happen to have better perks in the current stat of uo.
The transition to a tram side fel side changed that to someone who didnt want pvp could easily avoid it.
I would compare it to combat in the military. killing a member of opposite "team" or "the enemy" is not murder. in uo we have 2 teams blue and red. blues just happen to have better perks in the current stat of uo.
I kinda agree with Spiritless myself Smoot.. but.. back then I could get several friends or guildies to do the boring duties of escorting my miner.. that's not really an option these days.. Course you can always mine in Tram and just be happy with half the resources..
And lets not forget that there are some things you can ONLY get in Fel.. there are still reasons to go there that don't involve agreeing to a ganking..
And lets not forget that there are some things you can ONLY get in Fel.. there are still reasons to go there that don't involve agreeing to a ganking..
On Siege I can mine worry free if I wear a jesters hat.. then they know I'm not looking for a fight just gathering resources which you might well be buying off me later.. but most regular shards don't have that kind of thing.
Too bad those dang Wisps don't recognize the jester hat!
Too bad those dang Wisps don't recognize the jester hat!
I'm inclined to agree as well. People who go to Fel know full well what they are doing.
Sadly Fel is still associated with Cheaters and Scammers as well, even though there are tons of cheats used in Tram as well... Cheats to script and bot are everywhere. It's the cheats used in PvP that most irritate folk though. Cheats that allow folk to "see" what should be seen..... cheats that allow them to bypass things that ought to block them ...... and cheats that allow them to move insanely fast.
But the latter one I mentioned it hard to prove. Now more than ever. How can you really tell if someone just doesn't have a far better PC and connection than you do. I play on a fiberoptic network with guarenteed speeds that are way beyond what many more rural folk can get but still..... I live rather rural myself.... and I know there are even better speeds available out there. But if you don't have the machine to take advantage of that it's not going to do you any good ...... and other folk will always "appear" to be using a speed hack to you.
The worst folk out there are the ones who are duping and hacking. But these people have gotten away with such things for so long the point it moot now in fixing it. They have already won. Most of us left know someone or many someones who've already quit UO permanently because of them.
And after them are the scammers who've driven off such a large playerbase we'll never have again. Sadly these folk are constantly protected by EA. It's not their policy to do anything with Scammers. If you "fall" for a scam then you are treated like an idiot and a cheater. Something that has NEVER once made sense to me. If I were running a game I'd treat the scammer like the criminal they are and they would be perma banned and all their ill gotten goods deleted or returned to their rightful owner. But that's just me I guess.
As for Fel reds... it's a lifestyle and I guess I agree. What's the point of knowing this char is a red in Tram. Because in Tram it really honestly doesn't matter. Not like they can PvP in Tram anyway.... unless they are RPers in an RP guild doing RP guild wars... or what have you and then their status as a red honestly doesn't make a hill of beans of difference in Tram anyway either.
Perhaps in Fel folk should just have a set of numbers. Kills.... vs Kills against the opposing faction..... or kills to your own faction... That would give you more of the information you need to regard that person correctly. Though you will still have folk "faking" kill counts.
Course then they would have to figure out a new way of earning and using Justice.
Becker was great. I was introduced to him very early in micro. What he contributed has helped our understanding of any world that deals with finite resources, like Earth and UO. It wasn't just what he wrote about specific areas, but a new way of thinking about things, that there tends to be logical explanations if we only look for them.
A couple of years ago, when I signed up to online banking, my bank recommended I install something called Trusteer Rapport as extra security - I did, not because I think it'll make everything secure, but because if I ever have a problem with online banking, I can show I did everything they wanted. Since then, it's given me weekly reports of it's activities, and almost every week, usually several times, there's one thing it picks up on. To quote the latest of it's reports :
The following processes tried to capture an image of a protected website. Trusteer Endpoint Protection blocked these screen capture attempts. These processes are not necessarily malicious. Some applications may take screen shots as part of their regular operation. There is no action you need to take. Trusteer Endpoint Protection will continue blocking screen capturing attempts as long as sensitive information is presented.
- Jun 07 2014 18:09: client.exe is permanently blocked from capturing sensitive data.
- Jun 07 2014 09:17: client.exe is permanently blocked from capturing sensitive data.
Better to ask Broadsword, not EA.
IF this is true, and we weren't explicitly informed about it (which I don't recall happening), that's a rather disturbing breach of trust.
Especially since they quite obviously aren't acting upon any illegal activities it may capture.
Well, @Mesanna?
When I first got these notifications, Broadsword didn't exist....
When UO was moved over to the account management system that also housed Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot, UO subscribers were required to agree to a series of new legal agreements that were updated several times over the first year or two we used that system. One of those agreements was a new Privacy Policy.
I remember a few years ago noticing that there was new language in the Privacy Policy regarding EA's possible collection of data to combating cheating and fraud.
The current Privacy Policy at http://www.ea.com/privacy-policy includes this language in Section IV.6:
"6. Anti-Cheat and Fraud Prevention Technologies
"EA strives to provide a safe and fair gaming environment to all players of its games. To prevent fraudulent activities and behaviors that may negatively affect the experiences of a player, EA is authorized to use "anti-cheating" software, or applications for the prevention of fraud for our internet presence, during the use of our online products and/or services (including online games), and mobile platforms.
"At login to EA online products and/or services, during the setup of an Origin account, and/or at the point of sale, EA may collect data about your device in order to create a hash of machine components. Information collected for this purpose shall not be stored in retrievable form. EA uses the collected information for the prevention of fraud, and for authentication purposes. EA may consolidate the machine hash created for this purpose with your Origin account; data consolidated this way will not be shared with any other third party, and will be used exclusively for security, fraud prevention and authentication purposes by EA."
And the first paragraph of Section IV.4 reads as follows:
"4. Analytic Metrics Tools and Other Technologies
"EA also uses its own proprietary analytic metrics tool and other third party analytics technologies to collect information when you use our online products and services and/or play our games on your PC, game system and/or mobile device. These tools and technologies use server log files, web beacons, cookies, tracking pixels and other technologies to collect and analyze certain types of information, including cookies, IP addresses (including for purposes of determining your approximate geographic location), mobile or other hardware device ID or other device identifiers, browser types, browser language, information passed from your browser (if any), referring and exit pages, and URLs, platform type, click information, information about your media, peripheral hardware, software and/or applications installed on your machine and/or device, domain names and types, landing pages, pages viewed and the order of those pages, advertising conversion rates, the date and amount of time spent on particular pages, other Internet and website usage information, game state and the date and time of activity on our websites or games, information about how your game is used, including game metrics and statistics, feature usage and purchase history, as well as unique hardware identifiers such as MAC Address, mobile unique device ID (if applicable) and other similar information. "
While it is indeed very disturbing to think that screen shots are being taken while we have the client running, I really wonder if EA would just fall back on these sections of their Privacy Policy if someone really wanted to get pushy about it.
Aurelius, does the program which you're using which has provided these notifications about the client.exe file's activities give you any other details of what information is being viewed and/or captured?
Nope, just what's in that log above - the time and date it was triggered by something, in this instance what it considered a screen capture attempt.
From what I've seen of Mesanna over the years when this question has come up, she has said over and over, resolutely NO WAY. So this was absolutely news to me.It was not a yes or a no....it was a definite maybe.
Can you say for sure what you were doing at the time of the screenshot attempts? Were you even playing UO?
Almost certainly was, but since I don't keep a diary, cannot be certain
kelmo
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So that's what I've been doing wrong!
Really. Would this work on other shards in fel too?
It's not about the information you want to keep private. It's simply a case of "this is none of your business, get outta here." Something as low priority as a computer game should never be given that sort of access to your system, regardless of what it can access or send to the software owners.
Wenchy
I wonder if you would be able to unblock client.exe in the software and try just loading up UO and watching to see if it got flagged again.
I think there might be some shortcut key for the EC to take a snapshot, which might legitimately trigger a block like that if you accidentally hit it while playing. But if it was happening just when the client happened to be loaded doing nothing that would be a concern.
Wenchy
I'm not at all certain if I 'unblock' client.exe for Rapport, it will EVER flag it again.... it's an incredibly unhelpful interface and very peculiar about what it lets you try. May give that a go on my laptop though, and see what happens, if I get chance.
99% of the time I use classic, and given the regularity that client.exe shows up on the Rapport logs, it seems incredibly unlikely it's only picking up something EC does.
I think it's just a Siege thing.. when I first started my Siege character many many years ago someone told me to do that.. So far I've never been PK'd while mining or chopping wood.. Could be the hat.. or could be I just never ran across someone that felt like killing me..lol
*nods* that does sound a bit odd if it's happening regularly under the classic client. If it's a pain to remove the block I'd just leave it in place, there might be another way to figure it out.
Wenchy
What has killed it for me has been all the "anti-recall, anti-ressing, anti-gating" crap that goes on in some of the Felucca zones sometimes. Especially the T2A zones. Like I don't get it.
Why can't we just revert Felucca to what it was without all the restrictions, turn on Order vs. Chaos, and let ANYONE that wants to opt into PvP choose a side? You think people need incentive to PvP? I don't think so! PvP'ers want to PvP more than anything else and they don't need a reward system to do so. Screw the point systems, the faction arties, the everything else, and just flip the ON switch for Order vs. Chaos. Turn Factions into a reward system, so folks can keep their stuff/mounts, that anyone can align to if they want and tie it to Felucca Champion kills rather than player kills.
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BRING BACK ORDER VS. CHAOS!
Best. PvP. System. Ever.
Yeah... welcome to WoW Arenas.
