TonyV

Explain that in the 21st century, we of the Y chromosome are also expected to help with these kinds of chores. If they protest, explain that if they want dinner, it's either that or else they should be preparing to watch Serendipity or Love, Actually instead.

...And then if the devs nuked the experience, influence, prestige, and/or other rewards that were gained from people going through the game simply brawling everything, not only would I not mind, but I'd cheer them on. Why? Because maybe next time when such an exploit is discovered and publicized, people would think twice about wasting their time and energy using it.

...And this is why they need to crack down hard on the people who are using--and especially propagating--this exploit. It sure would be nice if all players were mature enough for the devs to be able to post a message that says, "Hey all, we don't like it when you do this, it's obviously broken, so please don't do it." They've actually tried that many times before, and it's been repeatedly proven that some people think that "because I CAN" gives them the divine right to do whatever they want regardless of explicit weigh-in from the people who run the game.

If you accidentally left your front door unlocked one day when you left for work, does that mean that I have the right to come into your house/apartment/igloo/hovel and take all of your stuff? When you get home, would you just shake your head and say, "Well, I can't blame someone for coming in and robbing me, after all, it was my mistake" and go your merry way? Or would you call the police and want your stuff back and the person responsible punished? What if someone broke your car window while it was parked one day, and the glass guy told you that it would be next Tuesday before they could work you in and get it fixed? Does that give anyone who wants to the right to hop in, hotwire it, and take it for a spin just because they can? I mean, come on, you know that plastic isn't going to stop anyone with minimal effort from being able to get in.

It is a dev mistake, but unlike you, I most certainly DO blame people for using it. Those people are immature, they don't have the best interest of the game at heart, and as I've said before, if being able to exploit the game without consequence is a condition for someone to remain a subscriber, it makes good business sense to not have them around.

Whoo boy, you did get me.

*faith in humanity restored...

I'm sorry, I do try to be nice, but that's one of the most brainless things I think I've ever seen posted. You can't possibly think that if "balance improves"--whatever twisted thing you've convinced yourself to think that means--that when an exploit is found, a bunch of loser idiots won't milk it for all it's worth.

There are only two things that will keep people from using exploits as they're found: a carrot and a stick. The carrot we have now is the Bug Hunter badge. Personally, I think that they need to give it out a lot more often because right now due of its rarity, most people who don't have it already have resigned themselves to believing they'll never get it. The stick that they need to use far more often is to actively nuke the ill-gotten gains of players who use exploits, temp-ban the people who are creating these AE missions, and completely AE-ban people from creating missions who do it repeatedly.

Will there be outcry? Probably. Will there be ragequits? Yeah, also probably. But consider this. If the only condition under which a player will remain in the game is if they are allowed to exploit it with impunity, is this player good for the long-term health of the game? No. Ultimately, they will cause more damage than good, and they need to go. Meanwhile, the adults who aren't constantly looking for the next new way to screw the developers over, including the people who get slaps on the wrist and learn the concept of "don't do that," will be much happier.

I'd love to see GMs invisibly deployed to several of these zones and tuning into these global channel, and whenever anyone posts a message like, "LFMF" or "AE farm LFM," silence them for five or ten minutes. If they come back, give them a day or two temp-ban.

Personally, I'm a huge advocate of open source software. We pretty much operate all of the Titan Network off of either open source code (SMF, MediaWiki, CodeIgniter, Linux/Apache/MySQL/Php, etc.) or code that we've written ourselves. But here's the thing. Speaking only for TonyV and not the group as a whole (I have access to the repository but I didn't personally develop this), there's actually a really good reason I don't want the code open sourced.

There are a few things we do that, in the wrong hands, could--emphasis on potentially--be used to search for exploits. I will be up front in saying that we have not found any. If we had, we'd be contacting the developers and quietly letting them know about it. But it's probably also important to note that we're not looking for exploits. If we open-sourced the software, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that there would be people out there who snag it for the specific purpose of using the techniques we do to try to cheat.

At that point, even if we're not directly responsible in writing the code that degrades the game, I still feel like we'd have some moral culpability. That's just not something I'm willing to risk.

I am 100% committed to not doing evil or destructive things. We value people's privacy extremely highly. I will say that the application does not write anything to any running processes, and it only transmits to our servers information that is necessary to provide the services you see when you browse around our sites. It absolutely, positively never accesses your NCsoft or City of Heroes login information, and as long as I'm involved with the Titan Network, it never will. For what it's worth, even though the code isn't open source, there is a team of around ten developers that all have access to the Sentinel source code, and they are all fine, upstanding pillars of the community. I genuinely feel that if any of them saw any shenanigans going on, including GuyPerfect (the project owner and lead developer of Sentinel), they wouldn't keep quiet about it.

Having said all of that, you're right. There's no way I can 100% guarantee that that will be the case forever and ever. I may drop dead tomorrow and through some bizarre confluence of events, the site ends up in the ends of someone less scrupulous than the current team of developers. Honestly, I think if there were ever to be a breach of privacy at the Titan Network, it's much more likely to be because, in spite of our best efforts to keep the information safe and secure, someone gets past our security and manages to hack into the server.

However, as Fleeting Whisper pointed out, I really do feel that that is highly unlikely; or at least, on the order of magnitude of likeliness as the risk you run in interacting with any reputable service provider.

Incidentally, as (hopefully!) many people have noticed, we do not run ads on any of the Titan Network sites, not even to recoup the cost of hosting, which runs $90 per month, plus various other minor costs we incur now and then. That's all paid strictly out of pocket, with the help of some donations along the way, for which we're extremely grateful. There are several reasons we do this. One of them is that if we did run ads, it would almost certainly involve allowing third parties to place content over which we have no direct control on our pages. I'm not willing to do that, because that means that through no fault of our own, we could become a vector for things such as malware.

This isn't hypothetical. Around a year or so ago, one of Wikia's ad service companies was compromised, and people accessing the old copy of the Paragon Wiki that is still hosted there were subjected to potential infection if they didn't have some sort of virus protection or modern browser-based security. That's precisely the situation we want to avoid because when all is said and done, we're players just like you. We don't do what we do to make money, we do it because these are the kinds of services that enhance our own enjoyment of the game and we want to offer everyone the opportunity to share in the coolness.

There are some really nifty systems tools out there to verify what I've said in this post. Wireshark is an awesome packet sniffer, and Microsoft's Sysinternals suite of utilities will let you look at some nitty-gritty details about what network ports an application accesses, what reads/writes are happening with what files, and so on. Both are free, widely used, and extremely reputable. A full description of how to use these tools is beyond the scope of what I can describe here, but they are available.

Now, don't take this message as a rant or even an attempt to get you to run Sentinel against your better judgment. I understand where you're coming from because I'm moderately paranoid about apps I run on my own computer. If you don't want to use Titan Sentinel, I perfectly understand, and I stand behind your reluctance 100%. I wish everyone would make such a thoughtful evaluation of risk versus reward when running third party utilities like these before just clicking "YES!!!" to every button that pops up on their screen.

As always, if you have any questions or comments feel free to post a message over on our forums, or if you don't want to post to the world at large, PM me or drop me an e-mail (tonyv@cohtitan.com). I publish my address publicly because I want to make sure I'm as accessible as possible in case someone does have concerns like this. (Well, that and because e-mail via Google apps has a damn good spam filter.)

There are several reasons. First and foremost, there's a time issue. We're still ironing out some bugs that a few people are experiencing in the Sentinel application. Nothing major, but enough that we're not working on adding new features at this time. Once we're done, there are some other features that we want to add based on response and suggestions we've received that we'll be working on, and of course, we'll be needing to continually update it when new issues are released. Building in support for other web sites is something that we just feel would detract from other efforts we're engaged in.

Past that, there is a massive technical issue that will soon be coming along. One of the things we're working on is changing some fundamental aspects of how Sentinel and CIT interact with each other, such as what information is included, how the badges are reported, and the format of the actual messages between the client and the server.

If we were to build in support for Badge-Hunter, that means that we'd probably be expected to maintain support for the legacy communication methods and formats, something we really don't want to be tied down with. Plus, it would be unfair to Badge-Hunter, because if Beef Cake wanted to add any features to his site, it would depend on our willingness and ability to update the third-party communication within Sentinel. We do intend to provide API hooks into our data, so that if you want to, for example, have your supergroup information on your own site, you can query the site itself. That functionality would be part of the CIT back-end, though, not the workstation client.

Which brings me to...

This wasn't exactly what was presented.

With the Sentinel application able to capture information in a neat new way, one of the things we're finding is that the way CIT is currently handling badge information is insufficient. In short, it has a lot of quick-fixes and band-aids that have been applied over the years to keep up. With the release of Going Rogue in particular, a big chunk of the system that deals with the whole alignment issue needs to be rewritten.

There is currently an effort in the works to perform just such a rewrite, to bring the site up-to-speed so that the alignment system isn't just an afterthought, but part of its core functionality. The offer was more along the lines of this:

Keep Badge-Hunter running for now, but we'd like you to join us and help combine Badge-Hunter and CIT into a new site, one that has the features of both, plus a new back-end that can handle the additional features that are (and will be, going forward) provided by the Sentinel client. Beef Cake would also have administrative control over the new site's content. If he were a developer, he'd have administrative control over the code just like our other developers, but as it is, he would also be a sort of technical consult, since players like him are who the site is targeted towards. VidiotMaps would also be moved over to our server and kept up-to-date, with a possible rewrite of its front-end interface in the medium- to long-term future, and kept under his control.

I didn't really want to bother everyone with the nitty-gritty details, but when I read the above quote, I thought that it mischaracterized what we talked about. I wanted to make it clear that we didn't just say, "Shut down your site and give us VidiotMaps," because that would be a really crappy deal indeed, one that's grossly one-sided and unfair.

We have a lot going on over at the Titan Network, and not just around Sentinel and CIT. We don't feel like we can take on and indefinitely maintain another project as large as Badge-Hunter with the intention of maintaining it indefinitely.

There was no animosity in the conversation we had; in fact, I actually came away from it liking Beef Cake more than I did before. I don't blame him for wanting to keep the sites, he has put a lot of time, effort, and money into developing them, and I agree that they have their own flavor. I hope that the Badge-Hunter client project goes well and players have two good choices over what they want to use.

My point was not to try to make you think of ways around getting your information stolen. My point was that these people are crooks. Why the hell would you want to deal with them at all?

The flaw in your argument is that you're basically saying that if you're careful enough, you really can get a Rolex from that guy selling watches from under his coat on the street.

Let's say for the sake of argument that you're right, and you actually manage to make an RMT transaction without getting screwed over by the company you're buying from. Congratulations, you've just funded a criminal enterprise. (And trust me, it is a criminal enterprise. You don't think that RMT spamming is the only business they're in, do you?) In the process, you've also managed to support an increase in spam, screwed over your fellow players (most of whom aren't as wise as you and your extraordinarily careful self), and degraded the game experience for everyone including yourself.

Not to mention that you've also broken the EULA and, if found out by NCsoft, you will be perma-banned, and you've handed at least some personal information over to the hands of people who will do whatever it takes to make a quick buck at your expense, people who have raised scamming people to an art form.

Seriously folks, there's stupid, and then there's stupid. Dealing with RMTers falls squarely into "damn fool" territory.

There is a good mix of villain contacts and other people in there. Some people aren't even from inside the game. And yes, the former name of the Rikti War Zone is specifically mentioned inside the game, but again, my goal wasn't to limit myself to that.

Just in case anyone is curious...

(Now if I could just get a wristwatch that matched that, although I'd have to constantly be winding it. )

I suggest this. Pick one of those painfully obvious arcs and report it. A couple of days later, if it's not gone, PM TheOcho and raise it as a concern, that the GMs are not responding to reports of abuse. Personally, I haven't experienced this, someone blatantly abusing the system and not being dealt with at least someone quickly, within a day or two at most. I have seen people who were spamming disappear before my eyes, though.

I'm not saying it doesn't happen, just that if it's the rule and not the exception and the GMs are laying down on the job, there are avenues for escalation. If their bosses become aware that it's a legitimate concern, then it's likely that it will get higher priority.

Would it kill you just once to show some appreciation and eat the damn animal? Do you think it's easy to catch those things for you?

We would love to do something like this, but Adeon is right. There would have to be some sort of API to access the game database outside the game itself. If I worked for Paragon Studios, I'd make this a high priority, but... well...

We actually have zilch to do with the Facebook app, it was developed completely independently by someone else. Not that we mind, of course, it sounds really neat, but we have no idea what broke it, what it would take to fix it, and really, didn't even know it existed until around two weeks ago. You'll have to ask the devs of the Facebook app for more info.

Or to paraphrase...

"Whatever you do, do not buy any booster packs between now and November 29!"

Great story! Just a couple of nitpicky notes: it's "buenas noches" and "buenos dias." Noche = night is feminine, thus the A instead of O, and dia = day is masculine, thus the O instead of A.

Not complaining, and they'll still definitely know what you mean, but it's just something to file away for next time you run across a Spanish-speaking new friend. I've actually run missions with someone from Brazil (Portuguese) via Google Translate, it is an awesome utility.

We're not quite there yet, but Google is doing doing really neat things in the area of real time translation. Pretty soon, any Android phone will probably be similar to a Star Trek "universal translator."

<nitpick>

Actually, the level cap for heroes at launch was 40, and so was the level cap for villains when City of Villains was launched. It took each game one issue to increase the respective level caps to 50 (Issue 1 for heroes/Issue 7 for villains). For a while, it made non-arena PvP, a new feature of City of Villains, kind of harsh, since level 50 heroes almost always walloped the level 40 villains.

</nitpick>