Lemur Lad

Thanks for pointing that out Victor. We'll try to sort it out sometime this coming week.

Even the why is this back on page 1 is months old. This happens from time to time, it's kooky.

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Teldon does Behind the Mask not me!!!!

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Looks like you'll be getting his email this week...

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If I post everything I want to post, people will resume with calling me a brown noser.


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That is based on the premise that we ever stopped calling you a brownoser. We just do it in code, or in our private Make Fun of Marcian section of the forums.

On a serious note, Ex Libris, have fun at the reunion. Don't tap your feet in the restroom at the airport in Utah either... (ok I couldn't even stay serious for two sentences, this is getting bad)

Also if anyone wants to report on this for the Scoop, please contact me via PM. Would love to see a write-up and some pics.

He just said, that it will start when the feature starts. They don't give exact dates for things that are in the process of being debugged.

or that you just forgot what server they were on.

Characters are never deleted. The name may become unreserved, but the character still exists.

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There is also the MMORPG.com free trials right now.

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= Summary =

This week's spamming problem is, in my opinion, a direct result of a security breach at MMORPG.com. As GM efforts may not be enough, NCSoft should consider suspending the free trial promotion with MMORPG.com until the security situation is rectified.

= Observations =

* MMORPG.com is giving free trials away to anyone who simply registers on their site.

* MMORPG.com displays a CAPTCHA (anti-bot image of distorted letters) in an attempt to prevent automated registration.

* The CATPCHA is the weakest I've ever seen, consisting of non-distorted #000000 black characters on a non-black background. (Example: FP6ML) Although the background makes the characters difficult for humans to read, computers see numbers, not colors, and #000000 black is easily distinguished from numbers that are not #000000 black. I see no competent attempt to defeat automatic edge recognition or segmentation.

* As an exercise, I wrote a simple program to isolate the #000000 pixels, changing all other pixels to #FFFFFF white. (Result: FP6ML) This turned out to be unnecessary, as optical character recognition programs already do this themselves, by adjusting the binarization threshold to 0%.

* The crummy open-source OCR program I use reads the unedited CAPTCHA (the one with all the colors intact, not the one I edited to black and white) as "F.PbML". When I tweak the program's filter to recognize only numerals and capital letters, the CAPTCHA is toast: "FP6ML". In total, it took me twenty minutes to defeat MMORPG.com's CAPTCHA, using only an open-source general-purpose character recognition program.

* The spammers have two accounts, hero-sideand villain-side account, simultaneously on several (and quite possibly all) live servers. The spammers appear to be creating new accounts as fast as the old accounts get banned.

= Conclusion =

The spammers are likely to have cracked the weak security of mmorpg.com, as I have demonstrated it is easy to do. The spammers are likely to be generating automated free trial requests around the clock as fast as they can be banned, so additional efforts beyond the GMs' work are needed.

= Recommendations =

My recommendation for NCSoft is to vet the security of their promotional partners more carefully to prevent automated signups. Further, NCSoft should immediately suspend any promotion whose security has been compromised, as MMORPG.com's appears to have been.

My recommendation for MMORPG.com is to switch to reCAPTCHA. The reCAPTCHA project provides strong CAPTCHA images for free, as a public service. reCAPTCHA images are composed of two challenge words: one known word, to prevent automated registrations, and one unknown word, taken from a scanned book that automated character recognition failed to read. Thus, reCAPTCHA provides security and helps to digitize classic books at the same time. reCAPTCHA is also, in my human opinion, quite a bit easier on the eyes, and easier for a human to solve, than MMORPG's current CAPTCHA.

The reCAPTCHA project's website is at recaptcha.net.

EDIT: To reflect the spammer is reportedly affecting several servers, not just Virtue.

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Just want to reiterate this because it seems to have 100% brainpower behind it, and a healthy quotient of Win. Please listen to what Rigel is saying.

I love new players. I love free trials for real people. I don't want them to be a swinging door for abusers.

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Story here

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You totally should have submitted this to the Scoop.
Nicely done.

softballs?

The thing is Bob, you've gotten polite answers to your impolite questions. Teldon did it last week. He explained how he picks people lately, and why your server hasn't had anyone. It's not bias other than the fact that it's sticking to people who have demonstrated a desire to be interviewed.

I don't have to go out on a limb to say that when Teldon tried to play fair and cover every server the same, people on those servers ignored him. They were too busy playing, and that's their right. He felt a little guilty pestering people, and since he was getting a load of requests in his inbox each week, he's decided that's the best route to take, while he goes after interviews for special themed pieces.

You can't call him out for being discriminatory when he's being the ultimate in nondisciminatory. Sorry, it doesn't work like that.

He's pretty much within his rights to be a little frustrated with you, since you've chosen to ignore his polite answers and repeat yourself again, this time trying to imply there's something unfair going on.

I'm sorry you don't like the choices he's made. That doesn't mean he's unfit for the job though, or that you're more fit than he is. If you really want to do something for the Scoop, that's fine, however you're going to have to show the ability to work with people instead of trying to be adversarial. Listen when something is explained, and bring some ideas to the table.

If all you want is a BtM interview, or if there are some people on your server you'd like to see, well you're going to have to talk to Teldon, because until he says he doesn't want to do it, he's our guy. That is talk to him, not pick a fight with him.

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They'd place the heavy, and the *player* would go into the base and go AFK. Not the heavy. The *player* would be completely safe. The Heavy would be sitting out there blasting at whatever patrol went by, and the player would be pulling in INF, recipes, and the like.

Clearer?

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Then the simple solution should have been to eliminate the ability to be AFK for more than 15 minutes, even if on a Task or Strike Force.

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No, a better change would be to make the heavies leave your control once you're a certain distance away, rather like losing the benefits of sidekick/lackey. Then you wouldn't have afk farming anymore, if I understand the idea correctly. No?

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This is actually not a bad idea at all. Find some way to implement a solution similar to what happens when an SKd Mastermind is out of Mentor range too long. Pets all go poof.

If the problem is AFK farming from a distance, this deals with it pretty adequately.

The problem with these changes as they are is they hinder the usability of the Heavy on almost every level.

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I'm a bit confused. While the "major operations" seem to be over we've still been getting sporadic world events.

Are these uncommon world events something seperate, thats going to stay in the game, and this new invasions just a period of increased activity?

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When the event is online, the invasions happen on the regular schedule across all zones.

When the event is offline, a single attack wave is triggered in a random zone each time the LGTF is completed.

Watchman Accolade

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Any hope of this event being made interesting instead of the pitifully dull, repetitive, unoriginal, unimaginative thing it is currently?

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Just as soon as your own posts are.

<---- baby lemur steals the Invasion Switch thing from Lighthouse's desk and has it installed in the superbase.

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I don't win contests, ever!

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*points*
you just did
stop lyin

I once went to college with a girl, and as she was looking over the course catalog for second semester during dinner, she said:

"I didn't notice before, but this Professor TBA teaches a LOT of courses! Is that an abbreviation for the full name? I don't think I've had him, who is it?"

She wasn't kidding either...

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we are also learning a lot about this process.

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*breaks out the Ex to lemur translation guide*

Translation- "this has been a huge pain in the rear, but of the sort that will avoid future pains in the rear."

*nod*
Yes, I see...

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While I soundly agree with zero tolerance for spammers, I want to ask if anything is being done to track down and stop the people actually doing the farming in the first place?


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While your post brought up a legitimate point, it's going to be nearly impossible for them to find and punish people farming things to sell for RMT and actual players doing it for badges, salvage, inf, etc. I certainly don't want them punishing me because I was out farming for arcane salvage the other day and I don't want them to make getting a Hamidon Goo any harder than it already is. How do you propose they tell the difference? If they can do it without making things harder on legitimate players, that would be terrific and I'd fully support it.

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Close to impossible using using only ingame monitoring of activity yes I agree (I've said as much in the past). But they're not limited to that, are they? A bit of elbow grease and good old fashioned investigation using the information they have at their disposal could net results.

While I soundly agree with zero tolerance for spammers, I want to ask if anything is being done to track down and stop the people actually doing the farming in the first place?

It's plain that any advertising is done on throwaway accounts that they fully expect to get banned, however I'm curious as to how rigorous the investigations are in trying to track down the initiators, the people that are supplying the ingame money or items.

What really makes me sad is that in thinking about it all I realized, it's probably player money, not farmed money that is being sold. The Market is so potentially lucrative right now (this is a good thing) but it means someone sufficiently devious doesn't even need to Farm missions, they can just siphon off money from the marketplace and resell it to people who go for the RMT lure.

If you guys choose to elaborate on this side of the issue, I would appreciate it. Working to stop the spam is only treating the symptom, not the illness.

You're getting bent out of shape at them, because you can't remember any of the information they need to help you get back into the account? Coolness.

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Last time they freed up the names, I was lucky to recover a good name I lost by bad luck during the time it took to make a reroll. I'm doubting I would even find one "good" name if you restrict it to level 5 and under.

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Names on my account sitting at lvl 1-6 that I think are pretty good:

(off the top of my head)
the Whatsit
Goldfish Girl
Drifting Blossom
Mutant Bunny Foo Foo
Lemur Lad (on several other servers for visiting purposes)

I have quite a few others too. Even if your not one of those "name campers" people in this thread are trying to cast as the next great Evil, almost everyone ends up with lowbies they're not ever going to get the chance to play.

You can't judge the quality of a name by the level number.

... and ex libris before that.