Should OtLand Open New OtServerlist site?

[xKrazyx]

Big YES for otland, since otservlist is so corrupted, Xinn doesn't give a f*ck, he banned permanently alot of servers, since they may break the rule or they had problem between them so it would be fresh start for servers that permanently banned, besides i want to see something "new" this otservlist doesn't change over years, looks like someone take the money and doing nothing with the website, better to see someone new and give them donation and see the results than see this otservlist that not change over years so much waste of money.

someone should scrap through the archive data for otservlist.org and count up the amount of times mastercores/darkot/retrocores had yellow banner / launch timer. Im going to say its probably over at least 2-5 grand+ for the last 2-4 years?

Everyone around oldschool knew mastercores spoofed hellas yet it remained on that list for years.. xD same with insert many other 7.4 ots here

someone should interview Ironyt/Medivia and his experience with xinn and his service.. I would be interested to hear the story around that situation.

Xinn bans servers who leave proof they spoof, he doesnt care about anything else. If you eliminate the proof that you are spoofing, he will not ban you. Which is the environment we see in OTservlist today.. some people are better at it and some are lazier at it XD.

if you send actual legitimate connections with ip information to your server(with php, sql conn scripts simulating memory protocols) an external source(xinn) cannot prove the difference between spoofing and non spoofing at that point(xinn may say he can but its impossible).. He'll look at your playercounts / date the server was added/ weird player data that you give him access to... The reason he looks corrupt is because developers remove the ability for him to prove any spoof, which eliminates xinn's accountability and he can say he 'checked' a server.

I think if Xinn spent more time investigating servers things would be better, but I guess running an iptable command and nit picking graphs are enough to alleviate his liability.. xD

I think Xinns prices are absolutely ridiculous and he takes advantage of the monopoly he built years back but tbh you cant say xinn is corrupt because he does operate to a code and makes that public..
everyone has the freedom to use his service or not. And to make there own. I love free market.

Im not an otservlist fan but in Xinns defense you have to prove guilt. which will always be a better system than having to prove innocence. its frustrating but that's life.. some people know how to take advantage of that situation..

@xinn
I would like an explanation on the banning of marcus's servers.. why they were allowed to be online on otservlist for sooo long and why are they are now banned?
(I said Marcus darkot/mastercores spoofed and I was perma banned for calling it out years ago)

As to the OP

Since Otserverlist if full corrupted in my opinion and many other people thinking the same.
Should OtLand try open new full clear site where otservers could be listed and players can see clearly every single information of those Ot Servers?

What you think ?

There are good alternatives already.

Dedication to your players and ensuring a stable fun game environment will land you the most players imo.
facebook, word of mouth, paying influencers/guild leaders will get you way farther than otservlist ever will.

otland should not make a list because they would have to take a stance on spoofing and that would be complicated.

I think a good suggestion would be an up-vote system otland users could use(and not hopefully abuse) to upvote quality servers in the advertisement section, boosting them in some way?

Or maybe a managed OTLand facebook group? or a managed Otland Discord server.

We need some new sort of rating system separate from online count...fuck that has this been tried?
Its always been a frustration of mine to see quality servers be judged simply on their player count and not the content within. Is it on other lists?

This is why I like steam.. il pick up small indie games all the time not knowing online counts and still have a hell of a good time and leave a good review. I know this can be abused but its a hell of a better system than players choosing gameservers simply by online counts.

Im sure many quality developers here have heard the line 'you have the best server but you need people'.
Meanwhile OTS who can successfully incognito spoof reign supreme while a small time devs are left competing with those servers..

It sounds like the main idea would be to create a place where everyone could congregate better to share quality servers.. imo again thatd be a managed Discord or Facebook group? Theres a discord now but its not managed by otland / its hard to find for players(not devs) imo.

sry for the lengthy post
All the best.

 

[Beo]

Honestly, the amount of people in this thread making it seem like otservlist is @xinn full time job is unbelievable.

Xinn has provided a solid otservlist for the last X amount of years, for free and makes an extra bit of cash by adding advertisements. In my years of being around this otserver community (since 2005) I'm yet to see anyone provide the same amount of dedication as xinn to provide an otserver list. Who gives a fuck if its layout hasn't been changed or shit features like voting system hasn't been added?

The proposals people are asking for, like a voting system, is utter shit and has been proposed to xinn many, many times in the past, but this shit never works because of greedy server owners offering shop points to make their votes higher. Which then devalues the entire system.

Honestly, you're all blaming xinn for not preventing things rather than the otserver community.

If the otserver community didn't spoof online player count, then most of these problems would be solved. If you think it's a problem xinn needs to solve, then you're part of the problem.

Edit:
In regards to corruption, I can't / won't say anything on this since I don't know, nor have I seen solid proof (the "proof" on the front page is bullshit, since my team of 30 used to have similar names).

It isn't a new proposal, I've seen similar proposals in the past and it's highly likely that nothing will change.

 

[Adposatnr]

I had terrible experience with otserver list when it comes to dealing with spoofers like marcus (darkot/mastercores/retrocores) and wearetibia

First one got caught with ghost chars next to water (yea literally every 20 sqm next to coast u could find fresh 16lvl knight dropping 100 mana fluids and royal helmet) these chars come out of nowhere standing 3h then log out and another one randomly generated character login to stay there for 3h like 200 chars standing out of 300 online for few months xD even now they somehow manage to add multiple characters from 1 ip i've tested it on retrocores azera logged in like 20 characters myself and guess what... all of them added to online on site and otserverlist i did it with few ppl so noticed drop when we log out all of them at once

+ old times darkot hidden character list for players below 50lvl on h-rate speed server where u make runes on mf and lvl to 90 within 4h however 80% of online was below 50lvl week after start mhm such concidence right?


second one aka wearespoofing/weareshit multiple times banned he buy banners and countdown for every server and ofc he spoof them without getting banned for first few days i dont get why some servers get insta perma ban for first spoofing attempts and other servers could spoof every new server get banned and still keep their other servers on otserverlist xD double standards or money? dunno


however for every other server theres no problem with getting rid of em when they spoof also i got no problem looking for servers here i sort by lowest xp and check highest online scrolling few pages its fine for me

 

[HjugO]

So define minimum information needed for visitor a,b,c,d and z needed for them to take certain action . And obviously prove that (you can use math if you want to).


You find it ignorant, but what I find ignorant is trying to devaluate informations given by person who speaks from experience perspective.
Your opinions are based on your believes. My opinions (regarding otservlist) are based on experience and all the conversations which I had with people using my service.


You are short-sighted. Adding a review system and just leaving it to people would result in a total wild-west where people would write false info about others making such reviews basically worthless.
Reviews in systems where money is involved MUST BE moderated otherwise they bring zero value. Or even negative value when a group of people tries to destroy someone's server by writing negative comments about it.


Say that to all that multi-million companies fighting with cheaters. Clearly you have no idea what you are talking about.
If that was so easy we wouldn't have all that intrusive anti-cheating software, we wouldn't have multi-million demonstrative legal cases against people creating cheating software for games et cetera.
It's all about the source verification so obviously it has a lot to do with otservlist since it relies on info given by servers. Of course we try to verify infos (to some degree), otherwise there wouldn't be a single banned server, right?
And each such banishment moves a bar higher to a point where I need to be way more intrusive to prove cheating. This is a constant war-race which takes most of my time (related to otservlist).


Those 2 things doesn't even barely solve a problem of information verification. I'm sorry mate but you clearly fall into dunning-kruger effect.

Once again I value your opinion but I'm not going to change how otservlist works because a minority asks me to do that. I can however add features which benefits all the groups.
Henry Ford once said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Post automatically merged: Aug 15, 2020

Oh mr. Lima aka Titanico I'm SO GLAD that you have posted here.
Yepp, you fit well into one of the groups which I've been talking about. And here is the output of one of your servers (dragoglobal.servegame.com), where we can clearly see that the graph represents a constant growth which means that you counted xlogged characters.

Or maybe I should remind you how you thought that you can harm me by sending messages to KNF (polish money institution) regarding me?

Or maybe when you wrote "remember it was your choice" and started ddosing otservlist?

OR maybe you want to talk about your "drugovich-global.com" server where you counted xlogged characters (and even Mark messaged me about that and asked to check that?):

@Mr. Greyshade
That's the people which I've been talking about Here is the live example.

Leonek Kotas. I am devastated. It's like the movie Léon (young) is connected with a lil’ dangly. Leonek Kotas - you made my day!

 

[Merrok]

I wanted to stay out of this since xinn and I also talked about it a bit more privately and kinda came to a conclusion in some way.
But I saw some things, even though they are off-topic I wanna address now.

Valve por instance just doesn't care about CS enough to raise a challenge against anti bots in Kaggle, same for Riot.
They trust solutions from old engeerings when the vast majority of technology that could fight that are new.

You are right that there are many outdated solutions out there. But I wouldn't underestimate what companies like Valve do. This is a highly complex topic most likely none of us here have the expertise to fully judge or rate.

Sorry but you have no idea what you are talking about. In 2015 Valve tried to improve their anti-cheating software and started adding more intrusive ways of checking if you cheat or not. One of the methods they have started using was for example checking your dns-cache to find if you have tried to connect to the domains associated with cheating software. After one researcher found that out a huge drama in media started stating that steam/valve doesn't value your privacy (and claming other non-senses). That was the time when Valve shifted from intrusive mechanism to raising a bar for cheaters (prime status, confidence factor et cetera). The funny thing is that those people who cried the most are the ones who installed custom inhouse league clients which are way more intrusive than what valve tried to add.
There are always trade-offs. If you want a great anti-cheating software, you have to agree to intrusive options and losing a huge portion of your privacy.

That ^
I might add, that they actually do check if there are any false accusations as well and they do take it very seriously. They are confident that this doesn't happen, so of course they do. They also published some funny quotes where people cried about a low trust factor for example and then they manually checked their accounts and noticed that they got 3 other accounts all with VAC-Bans. Surprise: your trust is low.
A new account doesn't reset everything, just like an incognito-chrome-sessions or even a VPN isn't going to stop google from figuring out who is using their services right now. It is naive to think that such a simple measure would be enough.

About Valve/Valorant anti-cheaters, they both are intrusive as hell, doesn't work and were made by teams that simply doesn't keep up with latest findings in science. FPS is one of the simplest type of games to detect cheating, all you need to do is collect a few information and catalog if they are botters or not. Reaction time between someone appearing your screen and taking a hit would be enough for detecting 98% of the cases. While vanguard works at ring 0 and guarantee that no other program will be invading it, it simply ignores that I can make a hardware to read pixels of my monitor and adjust my keyboard and mouse accordingly.
Those are just lazy solutions for easy selling things: "The FPS that has no cheaters!!" it may be in competitive where people wouldn't be able to pull a move like this, but in regular ranked matches, they stand no chance against simple python scripts and motivated people...

Actually the valve anti cheat is way less intrusive than most others. Valve does not want that. Their Anti-Cheat gets criticized a lot for being bad, but actually they simply have a different approach. They do not want to be intrusive and most importantly: they do not want any false positives. I can respect that. Actually I support that. As someone who sees intrusive programs and the social-media today in general (referring to it now because of data) highly critical, I do not want people spying on me. Many people throw their data around like nothing and don't think about it. I'd rather have no false-positives and a less intrusive program.
This is extremely complicated stuff. It is not a simple "look at reaction time". It is so much more complicated than that. Just think about that single thing a bit longer. What if you shot by accident or just because at the exact time someone comes around the corner. Now is this cheating? Or just timing and luck? Or maybe a good feeling for the game? These things are not that simple. Those are not lazy solutions. And you need to remember that once valve or any other company for that matter, adds a component stopping most cheating, the cheat developers will also find ways around it. There is no 100% and those aren't just some idiots in their basement. The cheat developers are really intelligent people who know this stuff inside out. Both sides actually. Again: this is really complex stuff. Not simple. At all.
They did however not only use that but also use multiple additional approaches of solving the issue over the years. And it did become a lot better.
People always criticize and never compliment. This, now that I write it realizing, can also be said about @xinn and otservlist. I did criticize it, or his attitude, a lot. But we cannot ignore that he did host a list for a long time for the community and has a lot of stamina with it, even though taking his fair share, I respect that. Alot.

Sorry I know the biggest part of this is off-topic, but it bugs me...
Many people, including myself in some cases, judge things without really knowing anything about it. Most topics are way more complicated than they appear in the first place.

 

[xinn]

@Syntax:

Half of your homepage is bright yellow from paid sponsorship, that's fine, but I find it hard to believe changing the sort method and potentially losing revenue is "laughable".

Changing default sorting method doesn't change the main purpose of yellow highlight which is to have the server highlighted on the main list.

nearly all game server lists use a point system.
Yes people can be incentived to vote, but that's also the point, reciprocal traffic

I guess you meant vote/review system. You've already answered yourself WHY they use it. Reciprocal traffic.
Lists use that to gain traffic. Such system doesn't however benefit server owners. Imagine you ask your clients to go vote for something and check the page full of their competitors. Stupid? As hell!
If you run a business you don't send your clients to the places where they can change your system to other system. You don't advertise your competitors.
In otservlist's case, we don't really need that traffic since like 95% of the players who plays on EVERY server added to otservlist, in some point of time visited otservlist and already knows the website.

Yes, that's the point, stopping spoofed populations.

Let me emphrase that different way. It's way easier to write fake reviews or cast fake votes (despite all that measurements) than to login hundreds of fake characters and not get caught.

There are services that provide databases to block a lot of these virtual numbers.

Only the free ones, and not all of them. Not to mention that most of virtual number providers comes with for example 1 month of free access which is more than enough to manipulate such system

@Night Wolf:

Or do you just expect to rely only on manual checking all servers?

Like 95% of the bans are automatic. It's been always like that. That's also why few years ago a lot of topics were popping in about "unjustified banishments". And some of those people were a victims of false-positives. Lately, like I've mentioned, I've rewritten most parts of the detection tools to deal with that false positives.

Reaction time between someone appearing your screen and taking a hit would be enough for detecting 98% of the cases.

Of course I can't say that with 100% certaintly, since Valve rarely shares any info about the vac, but I guess that's what they started doing in 2018, when they started scanning all matches online (on vac secured servers) and used machine learning + info gathered from Overwatch to catch cheaters. What leads me to believing that this is true, is the fact that they were actively scanning EVERY match on vac secured servers (so kind of different approach than sending modules to clients to scan memory/processes and looking for cheat signatures).
The problem with such checking is that to be 100% certain that someone cheats (especially in environment where money is involved). Lets say that Valve checks your reaction time. What if you have a cheat which is activated manually and you use it only in some percent of the round-winning situations (like 1v1s or used to gain an advantage when taking a bombside)?
ML will not distinguish then between a person who can focus in the most crucial moments of the round and someone who uses cheat but keeps it low-profile (and random to some degree). Like I said earlier, this is always a cat and mouse game. If you know what is checked you can fool a system. Constant war game.

@xKrazyx:
Marcus was my biggest client, yet, he is no longer on otservlist. That SHOULD be some kind of eye-opener for those talking only about the money involved.

Everyone around oldschool knew mastercores spoofed hellas yet it remained on that list for years.. xD

Marcus in that time was intrusively checked dozens of time and always passed the test. The moment I had almost 100% certainty that he started to break our rules, I've asked for another round of checkings. That was the moment he started to ignore my messages and deleted his servers from the list. Obviously we all know what that means.

interview Ironyt/Medivia and his experience with xinn and his service

I described that already here in otland. We had no beef, we talked in a friendly manner. When I've introduced mc rule and knew that Medivia had an enormous ratio of MCs (rune makers) Iryont didn't want his servers to be checked "from inside" (because of the privacy). Unfortunately it lead to removing his servers from the list.
He is not banned and he can always come back if he wants to. I respect his decision.

There can always be a better detection system. The thing is how much privacy you are willing to give away. I don't want to go this way and start developing a program which scraps users privacy but there may be a time when the suspicious servers will be forced to download&run it in order to stay on the list.

Its always been a frustration of mine to see quality servers be judged simply on their player count and not the content within. Is it on other lists?

I've explained that earlier why steam's review system works to some degree.


@Three Magic:
<3

 

[xKrazyx]

@Syntax:


@xKrazyx:
Marcus was my biggest client, yet, he is no longer on otservlist. That SHOULD be some kind of eye-opener for those talking only about the money involved. its eye opening that someone could pass your tests 'dozens' of times and still in the end get caught cheating?

Marcus in that time was intrusively checked dozens of time and always passed the test. The moment I had almost 100% certainty that he started to break our rules, I've asked for another round of checkings. That was the moment he started to ignore my messages and deleted his servers from the list. Obviously we all know what that means.


There can always be a better detection system. The thing is how much privacy you are willing to give away. I don't want to go this way and start developing a program which scraps users privacy but there may be a time when the suspicious servers will be forced to download&run it in order to stay on the list.


I've explained that earlier why steam's review system works to some degree.


@Three Magic:
<3

Thank you for your response however it leaves a horrible taste in my mouth. You perma banned me for trying to explain Marcus was spoofing while pointing out he was paying you money... I made many reports over the years on how he was doing it and was always ignored. The delivery probably wasnt the best but still..
Dishonesty in the OTS community (starting off with the OTS Septera/Nostalria) (https://otland.net/threads/dishonesty-in-the-ots-community-starting-off-with-the-ots-septera-nostalria.257937/page-3)
ive used your system for years now.. I know how it works testing banishments and a lot of other guys prob do as well xD..
I dont think youre whitelisting anyone now. or that you are some super 'corrupt'. but I still think some grimey shits going down..

You yourself said Marcus was your biggest client and just finally admitted he WAS breaking the rules. Thats the biggest eye opening thing here.. your biggest client turned out to be cheating all a long..

I was banned for my 30 days and did my time but there are a ton of other servers ive seen spoof still on your list 'wearetibia', 'releasta' etc
all with banners, so the fact I was perma banned for trying to call this out is irritating....

I commend you for the time you do spend trying to alleviate the situation banning the lazy spoofers but I feel like most of the people here who you claim are 'mad kids' are moreover people who think you have been selectively nitpicking the rules due to the fact you dont want to spend over 50+ hours researching into a server if its spoofing or not after you run an iptables command and stop there. in Marcus case more research was needed but it was never done over the years. Could that be because he was your biggest client? Because you didnt want to log into his OTS and research the sheer amount of code he had designed to look like real players on his website and ingame logged into houses and depots?

He was on your list for YEARS and he was curated at the top for YEARS...

My only point here is something needs to be improved for smaller developers who are competing with servers that have the know how on how to spoof ip connections to a port and send memory protocols... if you cant agree with that then that says something

 

[Okke]

yes.

 

[Night Wolf]

This whole topic should be used as study case for logical fallacies, I don't see any plausible argument on why inserting new ways to sort servers (not removing or making them as default) could be a bad thing and why allowing votes/reviews would be more exploitable than opening dozens of MCs and building your whole game aiming for maximum player efficiency.

It's easier to just say "I don't have time" or "I don't want to have any work" than to try and be dishonest with yourself and your users.
As for the off-topic discussion about anti cheating, I don't know why everyone here in this community just assume that I'm saying things out of nowhere when I already proved that I have the background and I'm constantly monitoring big projects in Kaggle. Not like my 2008 account wouldn't mean I'm here long enough or that I'm old and experienced enough... but common, I'm a machine learning researcher...

I wouldn't be saying something without taking into consideration all constraints of the problem, including false positive rates and data privacy.
Just for the record, by default vast majority of IA/ML algorithms have a way to measure the probability of a given class. In the sklearn you can find this through method called classifier.proba() in the vast majority of cases. By default it says it's from a given class if the proba of this class is higher than all others, in a false/positive situation it would mean > 50% for a given class.

A simply if proba() > 80% before calling the predict() would be enough to raise the bar and cut the false positives. But for 99.9% of the cases you would just be aiming for a model that's more permissive (choosing the one of the highest precision for class "Bot").
There's also other options such as ensembles that would allow you to mix several models and get the best of them in a vote system.

 

[xinn]

@xKrazyx

I was perma banned for trying to call this out is irritating....

You were perma banned for saying idiotic things like:
"Xinn allowing servers to spoof while banning other servers who don't pay him"

or

"lets talk about the monopoly Xinn's been running with these spoof servers who keep throwing money at him, meanwhile anyone else who does not pay him gets banned..."

If you keep throwing such a stupid accusation toward people don't expect them to cooperate with you and treat you like a partner. You were one of the people who despite advertising on otservlist (throwing money at me) was banned for spoofing.
So how can you write such a nonsense that "I don't ban servers whos owners doesn't pay me". Like seriously. Do you realise how stupid it sounds?

You yourself said Marcus was your biggest client and just finally admitted he WAS breaking the rules. Thats the biggest eye opening thing here.. your biggest client turned out to be cheating all a long..

How did you come with such a nonsense? What about he thought that by being a best client (in terms of money spent) he can start cheating but I've proven him wrong?
What If he didn't cheat for 99% of the time and basically each time I've done any intrusive checking his servers were basically fine?
Or what if despite my tries I simply couldn't prove he spoofed?
Nah, better to say "money money money". This community has a huge fetish of money. It seems that some people can just accept an easy explanations. I was always wondering what role a personal experience plays in making such a stupid allegations.

Do you remember how I caught you spoofing? Of course at the beginning you started claiming that I was wrong, that I flagged you wrongly.
Than you started to claim that someone paid me to ban you (hilarious). Than when you had nothing to lose asked for a proof so when I offered you one, you restarted your machine basically destroying the proof which I was happy to show you.
Meanwhile you started to accuse me of not checking other servers (typical for people who got caught spoofing), accepting money for not banning etc.

I hope that one day this community will turn against people like you. That they will UNDERSTAND that spoofers like you devaluate their hard work and basically makes their work less profitable. Maybe one day.

@Night Wolf:

why allowing votes/reviews would be more exploitable than opening dozens of MCs and building your whole game aiming for maximum player efficiency.

I believe I've explained the root cause. It's bad by design and I don't want my users to be deceived by such reviews. You can't prevent with such system people being paid to destroy other servers and if they start doing that I will be flooded with requests to delete fake reviews. Since I wouldn't be able to verify all the reviews I would be forced to either delete them which makes a review system useless because server owners would be able to delete the bad reviews OR just leave them which makes 1) motivated group of people would be able to create a bad impression about a certain servers (leading to lose of reputation/destroying particular servers) 2) forums like this would be flooded with messages that I don't moderate it (at the same time people will not even try to understand a reasoning of that). Here comes another thing - people black-mailing server owners that if they don't do X or Y they will flood the list with fake reviews about their work.

Not like my 2008 account wouldn't mean I'm here long enough or that I'm old and experienced enough... but common, I'm a machine learning researcher...
I wouldn't be saying something without taking into consideration all constraints of the problem, including false positive rates and data privacy.

With all the respect but what are you doing here? It seems that you have all the answers needed to deal with cheating problem by using ML. There are millions of $ on a table, why not grab them and release people like me from playing with cheaters? What prevents you from creating your own anti-cheating software and entering a market? And please don't threat that as an attack on you, I'm just curious.

 

[Night Wolf]

With all the respect but what are you doing here? It seems that you have all the answers needed to deal with cheating problem by using ML. There are millions of $ on a table, why not grab them and release people like me from playing with cheaters? What prevents you from creating your own anti-cheating software and entering a market? And please don't threat that as an attack on you, I'm just curious.

Just because you know how to solve problems it doesn't mean the opportunity to do so will come to you, we have several phd's on crisis management and politics, but neither of them are presidents.
Also solving a problem doesn't make me the best in solving it, so even at kaggle my projects aren't the top tier but for the few I have participated I was able to come up with solutions that where 'Ok' but not optimal.

It's a matter of getting prepared and receiving the opportunity. The first in on you, the other is pure RNG...
I also don't have the aspiration of being an specialist, I find it bad to be to biased in a certain point of view. I usually tackle different problems to maintain myself thinking outside the box and being forced to try and come up with new solutions, that's what makes me so good in what I do in my line of work.

When I say "just with reaction time you would be able to catch 98% of bots" it's not a number I'm taking out of my imagination, I runned tests including for other kind of games such MMORPGs and this value persisted through my tests. Ofc It may deviate a little because I don't have the level of data that Valve does, but you get the point...

 

[Merrok]

Now I understand all the conspiracy theorists.
I WANT UNICORNS TOO!

Spoiler: Edit: Because I now actually read and didn't just look at pretty memes

When I say "just with reaction time you would be able to catch 98% of bots" it's not a number I'm taking out of my imagination, I runned tests including for other kind of games such MMORPGs and this value persisted through my tests. Ofc It may deviate a little because I don't have the level of data that Valve does, but you get the point...

I mean yeah, I get your point. But before believing it, since you did run tests, I'd actually like to see the data, the approach, the mathematical hypothesis, and exact numbers.
Bots in MMOs are a completely different topic than aimbots in shooters though. A predictable route like a bot in Tibia running after the same waypoints for hours is not the same thing. It is a recognizable pattern.
If it was that simple, don't you think companies would do it? ^^
Assuming it worked in your tests and everything you stated is correct and so is your test and hypothesis, and ignoring that there are so many more factors, it would mean that the bigger sample size does all the world, which it certainly can. Or maybe they do filter that amount out and what we see are those 2% left. We actually don't know.

 

[xKrazyx]

@xKrazyx

You were perma banned for saying idiotic things like:
"Xinn allowing servers to spoof while banning other servers who don't pay him"

or

"lets talk about the monopoly Xinn's been running with these spoof servers who keep throwing money at him, meanwhile anyone else who does not pay him gets banned..."

If you keep throwing such a stupid accusation toward people don't expect them to cooperate with you and threat you like a partner. You were one of the people who despite advertising on otservlist (throwing money at me) was banned for spoofing.
So how can you write such a nonsense that "I don't ban servers whos owners doesn't pay me". Like seriously. Do you realise how stupid it sounds?


How did you come with such a nonsense? What about he thought that by being a best client (in terms of money spent) he can start cheating but I've proven him wrong?
What If he didn't cheat for 99% of the time and basically each time I've done any intrusive checking his servers were basically fine?
Or what if despite my tries I simply couldn't prove he spoofed?
Nah, better to say "money money money". This community has a huge fetish of money. It seems that some people can just accept an easy explanations. I was always wondering what role a personal experience plays in making such a stupid allegations.

Do you remember how I caught you spoofing? Of course at the beginning you started claiming that I was wrong, that I flagged you wrongly.
Than you started to claim that someone paid me to ban you (hilarious). Than when you had nothing to lose asked for a proof so when I offered you one, you restarted your machine basically destroying the proof which I was happy to show you.
Meanwhile you started to accuse me of not checking other servers (typical for people who got caught spoofing), accepting money for not banning etc.

I hope that one day this community will turn against people like you. That they will UNDERSTAND that spoofers like you devaluate their hard work and basically makes their work less profitable. Maybe one day.

@Night Wolf:

I believe I've explained the root cause. It's bad by design and I don't want my users to be deceived by such reviews. You can't prevent with such system people being paid to destroy other servers and if they start doing that I will be flooded with requests to delete fake reviews. Since I wouldn't be able to verify all the reviews I would be forced to either delete them which makes a review system useless because server owners would be able to delete the bad reviews OR just leave them which makes 1) motivated group of people would be able to create a bad impression about a certain servers (leading to lose of reputation/destroying particular servers) 2) forums like this would be flooded with messages that I don't moderate it (at the same time people will not even try to understand a reasoning of that). Here comes another thing - people black-mailing server owners that if they don't do X or Y they will flood the list with fake reviews about their work.


With all the respect but what are you doing here? It seems that you have all the answers needed to deal with cheating problem by using ML. There are millions of $ on a table, why not grab them and release people like me from playing with cheaters? What prevents you from creating your own anti-cheating software and entering a market? And please don't threat that as an attack on you, I'm just curious.

I said those things because in my experience it did happen.. I definitely should have delivered my experience in a more thoughtful way at the time with less accusations. but what im saying now is the fact doesnt change that for weeks I paid yellow banner and was untouched.. then suddenly I added my server without a yellow banner and I was auto banned..

You banned Marcus because of the sheer amount of public proof that finally started to come out imo. Even though you didnt want to do the research initially.. enough players did and started to make it public then you had to take action.. Your response still doesn't change the fact he was on your list for years and the amount of money he sent you. you called him your 'biggest' customer... I would like to hear why you banned him when you did.. what was the 'check' you did and the reason his OTS were finally banned/'removed'. why were the reports ignored about his spoof for so long? I know of a few devs that put together detailed reports and sent them to you.. anyone could look at them and see what was going on, and they were ignored for 2+ years until players started revealing what was going on.

I would also like to know why you think he would cheat only now and never cheat before? Thats a bit ignorant if you ask me.

I have one of his datapacks from 9 years ago built from the cip npc files and he had a function called 'spoofMaster' XDDD

Im not even claiming any sort of conspiracy anymore, I defended your service actually in the text above...

If you read above I even said I dont think youre whitelisting anyone anymore and that you 'werent corrupt following your code'

you have every right to run your service how you do..

I really dont care if I was caught spoofing or not.. xD For YEARS I was against it and still am. if you want to convince 'the community' to 'turn against me' for the fact I logged in some players in trainers years ago to try and compete with spoof servers that were loggin in 600-1000+ players counts spoofing sql connections with fake ips, so be it, players with fake deaths and fake days of experience lmfao. wearetibia heavily spoofed in the past and they are on your list right now... so thats a bit of a logical fallacy calling me a bad person for spoofing when you have previous spoofers on your own list right now!?!

Many players who play my OTS can attest to the server experience I try and provide.

Ive always been against spoofing ... for years I tried to advertise no spoof servers but it was daunting launching a server.. then have another server set a launch date 1 week after and spoof 1000 players online with a yellow banner/count down on your list xD

2ndly you know nothing about me, I have been on OTLand for years, I have tried to support many people and give free help when I can.
The only time I see you on here is when you defend yourself when someone claims you grimey on a service thats remained unchanged for how many years?
IMO i'd say my OTS and services the reviews are a little better than the reviews you seem to have around your service.. I also charge 3$ for custom content premium ... run events give free premiums and free shop items on my OTS constantly.. what's the cost of your yellow banner again? whens the last time you did something for the 'community' here?

I think its also interesting Tibiantis chose not to even use otservlist service to begin with, props to them for building a community they did without it.

 

[BahamutxD]

Imagine Server List within OTClient, data would be fetched from OTLand where you can add server by posting in Advertisement forum.
Joining given server would download the client and files so you can join from Last Connceted/Favorite servers tab.
Each server could have quick description that will be visible in the client plus link to the server thread on OTLand where more details would be posted.

If only Cipsoft client could be dropped entirely

That should be the way to go. Add an API/method for account/character creation in-client and perfection becomes reality.

 

[kay]

I will tell you what is corrupted about otservlist. Basically there are a lot of kids here who wants to make an easy money. And I'm the gate keeper who stands behind their spoofing servers and money they want to get.

Excuse me now.

I think I might add my three cents, from a point of view of someone who runs a server but never has used any otservlist services. I'll try to explain why and also what I would expect from an alternative service.
First of all, where does the idea of spoofing come from? It is ofc based on "snowball effect" that xinn himself has mentioned. The more players you have, the easier it is to convince new players, and vice versa. So hosters started to use various tricks to create an impression that their server is way more populated than it really is. No problem in that, however, during the past years it had grown to an absurd level and - I think - it crossed the line where it began to get dangerously close to the definition of scam. But maybe that's just me. Not so long ago, there was a thread about spoof system: Feature - Spoof system (https://otland.net/threads/spoof-system.270445/) where some hosters spoke about it as if it was a normal thing and they called it marketing.

Whatever you think of it, fact remains a fact: nowadays counters and numbers are long not reliable at all. The "tricks" that I've mentioned go as following: allow MC (as many as possible), add trainers, lengthen time for idle-kick (or remove it completly), allow botting, etc. Those are considered the "legal" ways. That alone may enlarge your server's "population" several times. But it won't be too effective when today almost everyone does the same. Then there are further options such as putting fake chars in game (in some inaccessaible places or pretending to be afk all days) or directly spoofing the counter. I guess everyone here has experienced that in atleast several servers. How did you feel after having found out the server with allegedly hundreds of players turned out to be a single-player game? Well that's how I connect it to a word "scam".

Now, let's for a second think what otservlist actually is. By default it is a kind of ranking of the 'most populated' (by its counters) servers. There are other factors, but those are so minor, that in general it is a list with a rule of 'the biggest number the better position'. Sure, there are also other very useful sorting options... not. Sorting by uptime? Might have been useful 15 years ago... Sorting by IP or name? Come on.
It is not xinn's fault that people fake their numbers in many ways, but this is where he basicly favors, intensifies it. He creates an environment where hosters compete in that even more and he makes profit of it (isn't it a thing that servers with 500+ online have to pay to stay in the list?).
There is literally zero support for servers that forbid MC, botting and all of that. We're trying to keep Tibiantis as clean as possible, in a way that every character is played by a unique alive player. I won't say it's 100% clean, as people always try to cheat, but atleast we're putting our effort in it. So what would be the point - for us - of placing our server in one row with those who multiply their real population? Don't get me wrong, I understand that sorting by online numbers is the most intuitive and it makes sense. But there's nowhere to atleast put info about server's policy, or anything, you just add your server to the list and compete in numbers with the others, where those numbers are highly devaluated. Potential player who finds your server at otservlist will then judge it by otservlist standards. Knowing how server X with 500 players looks, he will relate yours to that and conclude it must be completly dead (when in reality it could be 200 unique active players, which is alot). That's how otservlist works nowadays. When years, years ago, servers with 200 players felt very active, today most of you - seeing only the number - would get the first impression of a "dedot". Why did that change so much?

The otservlist solution (partly) was said to be the "4 clients per IP" rule. I won't discuss whether it is a good one or not. I only want to ask: does it even work? Ofc it's beyond xinn if players use proxies and so on. But I often see the 'big' servers noting the exact same online numbers (1000+ or even 2000+), on both their site and otservlist. Even the record being the same. Is it really that they don't log any single case of when someone connects more clients from one IP? Even with it being fully allowed by their server rules? It is hard to believe, but maybe I am missing something here.
Another thing, which was already brought up, is how some servers used to stay in the list for so long, despite proven to have been spoofing (and even banned on the list multiple times before). I won't mention those cases again, and I also won't judge whether it was "corruption" or just poor enforcement. I only see the effect, and that discourages me from using otservlist services. I just find it not reliable and lacking any options supportive for projects like mine. Peronally, I think that otland advertisements work way better and are more adapted to current times. Otservlist idea made alot of sense 15 years ago, when most servers would be hosted on PCs and vanish on the next day. And all you had to do was to find an IP of something you could have fun on, paste it in IP-changer and voila. That's where ots-lists were very helpful. But now ots is a market, servers are professionalised (or atleast pretending to) and most often looking forward to stay for as long as possible, weeks, months, even years. That being said, I really don't see any use in otservlist the way it looks now (untouched for the past 15 years). I'd like to see something with more options to present your server, not just its IP and exp rate, where the only thing that's supposed to attract players is the counter. For the time being I rather stick to otland. By the way, somehow it's not flooded by "fake reviews", but it's only a matter of willingness (and otland moderators manage it for free).

Also two words about xinn, as a person. I only 'dealt' with him once, when at the start of Tibiantis, some 'joker' added it to otservlist (fake one, showing 0 online as it didn't exist). I politely informed xinn about that and asked to remove it. He did remove it, but he said he wouldn't ban the guy and he wouldn't remove it again if it's added again, because - as he said - I was not his customer. He basicly told me to become one or else there might be more fakes coming and he wouldn't give a shit.
To be honest, that discouraged me even more. He may have a right to say that, but that's not what I'd call a good support / human honesty. Not to mention that it also should be in his interest to keep his list reliable and clean, right? Well, apparently, it isn't.

 

[Night Wolf]

I mean yeah, I get your point. But before believing it, since you did run tests, I'd actually like to see the data, the approach, the mathematical hypothesis, and exact numbers.
Bots in MMOs are a completely different topic than aimbots in shooters though. A predictable route like a bot in Tibia running after the same waypoints for hours is not the same thing. It is a recognizable pattern.
If it was that simple, don't you think companies would do it? ^^
Assuming it worked in your tests and everything you stated is correct and so is your test and hypothesis, and ignoring that there are so many more factors, it would mean that the bigger sample size does all the world, which it certainly can. Or maybe they do filter that amount out and what we see are those 2% left. We actually don't know.

What you're asking is simply too much. I cannot provide you the mathematical hypothesis simply because data science is most of time pure astrology.
You may have a strong feeling about something and when doing tests finding out this is wrong, as it may be right. It's completely arbitrary for pretty much every case. Of course by the time you finish reading this article you will say "damn, just analyze why we get those outputs" but it isn't so simple, in fact there are some outliers that don't follow any specific rule and there are bases when you have this situation throughout all your data, it's what we call (internal and external inconsistency). It's still a very experimental area and sometimes we get VERY GOOD answers but we cannot understand the gap between the question and the answer mathematically (or even logically).

The thing is, as we advance more and more in ML the less we will be able to comprehend how things work, because we won't be able to analyze all layers of decisions that were taken to achieve the best and optimal result. If you take for instance CNN evolution, it learns to draw/recognize images, you can see the visual output and it matches what you have been trained to but we still have a lot of research to understand WHAT they learn and HOW they learn. The algorithm has a strong matemathical base but we do not have all the answers, specially about leveraging intelligence of models.

But yeah, I can give you some reason on why it makes sense, but it's much more related to logic of how bots works instead of fancy explanations on algorithms. It seems pretty reasonable that when you have information that you shouldn't and when you are being controlled by a robot, your actions will be more consistent. Analyzing the consistency between real and fake users is 100% your best shot for all kinds of bots. That alone should match 98% of current existing bots (bots that don't rely on neural networks).

Why 98%? There are very advanced bots that can insert enough noise to be borderline with top tier players. For those cases we risk 2% precision to maintain good legit players out of ban list.

The approach is quite simply, if you want to just use this metric I told alone all you need to do is collect time someone entered your screen and time you do the first shot, you do this for all the match and take the average and standard deviation. The average will be an indicator of how good you are while the standard deviation will tell how consistent you are in your reaction time.
You can improve this further analysing other dimensions, but that it's only if you are freaking out about the 2 remaining percent.

 

[Nemphis]

 

[Merrok]

@Nemphis for you:


@Night Wolf
Now we are drifting into completely different areas though. Machine Learning as what it is today in a scientific and modern definition, is a completely different thing than your example. And something I, from the technical side, don't know shit about. So I'm out there. I find it fascinating but never wanted to go into that area.
Though coming to proving stuff with data and hypothesis, yeah actually that's how things in science work. And of course there are inconsistencies, that's why there is a p-value. That's why you form a hypothesis. That's why you can't "just do tests". To specifically account for that.
To be exact in empirical research, we form a hypothesis and try to disprove it. Which is how it is done in most cases nowadays. A hypothesis is assumed to be true, until proven wrong. Also meaning that a hypothesis can never be proven correct. Which makes sense because there can be some factor, we don't know of, destroying everything.
Yeah yeah, you can run those tests, you will still find those things in the papers about it though...
But in the end, data does have to exist in the way you mean. I didn't expect you actually giving me anything when I asked. I hoped you would but certainly didn't think so.
As I said "just testing something" is not how this works. What would the world be if we said "an apple falls from a tree" and "everything falls to the ground" and that's it. No gravity, no anything. It's just that way. Who needs those definitions right? and 1+2=3 just because. (And yes you can actually prove that). It's weird imagining a world like that.
You are right though, the more we figure out, the more questions we got. And if there is no problem, we will find one, no worries.
Not questioning how the value came to place, ok. No one says you have to. In fact a lot today is based on theories we do not fully understand how they work. Doesn't change the fact though. With data I never meant give me every exact step. I never said that. Oh well whatever...

I am interested in your original point though. You specifically mentioned a company like valve. CipSoft with Tibia just does not have the necessary resources. Botting != Aim-hack.
But I ask again: if you think it's that easy, why don't companies like Valve do it?
Don't come at me with "they are lazy" or "they are dumb" or "they don't care". Come on...
Or do they in fact do it and what we see are those 2%? That would be scary, but would also mean that they are doing a fucking good job. But from what you said, you don't think they do.
Or is it because of the sample size? That would mean that you are wrong though and it is not that trivial.
Especially since they do not want false-positives. Let's see for example I had a match once with 41 kills. 38 of those were headshot kills. I barely missed a bullet. Would that algorithm already kick me out then? But I am a human. Of course this is very simplified, as you will point out. But you are doing the same with the whole topic...
And when it gets to consistent plays, what about pros? Of course that's not a lot of people but a lot take those competitive games seriously and can be very consistent. So also not a good approach. Way too many false-positives.
Yeah the time between you seeing someone and moving to his head. I asked myself countless times why they don't do it. But it's the same as with what I said before. Things are most of the time a lot more complicated than they appear at first. And this is most likely also the case here. As a consumer, even if knowing above average or even if having a background in the area, we simply don't know enough to be able to judge this.
I've seen first hand people questioning rules and why those dumb rules are there. And from their perspective I can understand that, but in most cases, they got a good reason. "Why can I not put my bike in this nice corridor?" Because it's the fire brigade access. It's that simple. Even though it doesn't look like it. And of course they cannot know that without having an eye for it, which you only gain by experience, or by simply knowing. But it's the same here.
I am by no means saying any system is perfect or that they couldn't do more. I am simply saying it's not that simple and there is for sure way more behind the scenes we simply don't know and cannot see.
I'm sure you know alot more about the whole topic than me. I am simply questioning why such a big company wouldn't do it if it was that simple.
And I'm sure your results can be correct. But there must be some reason behind it. Be it the sample size or simply factors you either didn't notice or didn't get with the amount of input or I don't know.

Edit: Actually since it's off-topic, let's carry that to private
Or go back to pretty unicorns

 

[xinn]

@Night Wolf:
Okey this is going to be off-top. But it's actually interesting.

Just because you know how to solve problems it doesn't mean the opportunity to do so will come to you

If you know how to solve problems and really know how staff works, you don't search for a work - work seeks for you. You are asked to be a part of the companies and projects. If you haven't achieved that level it means that free market doesn't value enough your skills and there is definitely something lacking.

It's a matter of getting prepared and receiving the opportunity. The first in on you, the other is pure RNG...

If you are good enough - you are the one creating the opportunities.

You don't have to agree with me but just see what you were writing in 2018 here: Servers this days (https://otland.net/threads/servers-this-days.257023/) when you were talking about your server (empireot) which failed.
People were trying to tell you where you had problems with your understanding but you simply argued with them instead of trying to understand them. You simply denied that you were responsible for your own server's failure.

Medivia already has all the players you could get

Trust me in this, custom servers are dead.

For my advertising I paid three days at otserverlist countdown,

That's actually a lie which suggests me that you have a tendency to exaggerate things. You bought 2 days. Some can say it's a small lie but still. Why would you lie on such irrelevant topic?

we invested almost 4 years of the best in each area to create
My programmer is currently working at Facebook in the silicon valley,
he received an invitation to work there after winning the programming marathon in the first place of Latin-America and in the world finals his team reached the 8th place if i'm not mistaken.

Our mapper did things so attentionally and precisely he became a doctor

the server was flawless and it was well advertise both on facebook

yes, was inexperience, ofc.
11 years in otserver with one of my servers having over 700 players, 5 years developing in unity, made over 10 games;

And the most sad part when you started accusing your own players of your own failure.

My server didn't worked because of the public, they were spoiled, trolls, always wanted to take advantage of everything

My server would work if it wasn't for a few trolls that kept killing everyone around until they gave up.

But then, players started to show they true nature. They no longer cared for teaming up and doing quests nor exploring. It became a total war and many noob players were killed and gave up from the server.

It's my fault that I didn't foreseen such retardness, including yours trying to talk what you clearly know nothing about.

People from open tibia are so closed mind. I'm truly sorry for you guys.

You seem to know the answers to all problems but despite 11 years of experience, and creating 10 games you couldn't understand the needs of your clients and your server wasn't sucessful. Think about that.

@xKrazyx:
Once again. I've never said that otservlist is spoof-free. I've never claimed that there are no servers which fools me (because it's certaintly possible). I will not talk about the methods I use (because of the reasons I've mentioned earlier). If you want to help community you can always prepare detailed REPORT about spoofers which you've found and send it to me.

@kay:

But maybe that's just me. Not so long ago, there was a thread about spoof system: Feature - Spoof system where some owners spoke about it as if it was a normal thing and they called it marketing.

Yepp, that's just sad.

I do agree with you on a lot of things. I've even mentioned what counter-measurements will be added to otservlist (like the ability to filter out non-botting servers or introducing something like "mc ratio factor").

But now ots is a market, servers are professionalised (or atleast pretending to) and most often looking forward to stay for as long as possible, weeks, months, even years.

That was the reason why I've reworked a point-system (to favor long-standing otses) and made it a default sorting mechanism.

But I often see the 'big' servers noticing the exact same online numbers (1000+ or even 2000+), on both their site and otservlist. Even the record being the same. Is it really that they don't log any single case of when someone connects more clients from one IP

Generally speaking, some servers simply blocks connections above 4/IP so you are not able to connect 5th mc.

By the way, somehow it's not flooded by "fake reviews", but it's only a matter of willingness (and otland moderators manage it for free).

If it would become the main source of advertisement, server owners would adapt to it and start doing it. Or maybe they already did but you haven't realised that? You come from Poland, you must have heard about znanylekarz or gowork and their problems regarding reviews.

I will not change people's nature. Most of them will always evaluate things based on pure numbers (and not the underlying factors). If I try to fight their nature, they will change the info provider to the one which doesn't do that. The only thing I can do is to try create the environment where servers can be measured and compared and ban those who try to break the rules. Obiously WHATEVER measurement mechanism I will choose, server owners will adapt to it and start exploiting it. This is always the case everywhere where money is involved - not only in gaming world. For example financial markets and wash trading. Or our governments when they calculate GDP, unemployment rate etc. Or banks with annual percentage rate and hidden costs.

He did remove it, but he said he wouldn't ban the guy and he wouldn't remove it again if it's added again, because - as he said - I was not his customer. He basicly told me to become one or else there might be more fakes coming and he wouldn't give a shit.

I don't remember the case but from what you wrote that makes a perfect sense. Try to understand my point of view. I don't ban accounts because someone added someone's else server. If you didn't want your server to be added to the list, you could have asked me to simply ban it (not just delete it) and If you've verified yourself I would do that since this is the same work for me. There are also ways to delete servers without even emailing me (FAQ). But the most important thing is, if you didn't want your server to be added to the list, you could just block the status protocol communication.

Oh right, this was fun. I wish you all the best with your servers. I will just try to answer here on otland two most important things to me: spoofing reports and suggestions.

 

[kay]

Generally speaking, some servers simply blocks connections above 4/IP so you are not able to connect 5th mc.

Which ones? I don't want to start witch hunting here, but it seems I've got to input some examples, so excuse me everyone.
Is it one of those with blocked connections? It doesn't seem so.

How is it then possible otservlist and server's site note the exact same record despite the 4/IP rule? And on a different day? Am I missing something? Online record on otservlist is not based on received data? I really don't get it. It is impossible that among 1200 characters online you would not find 5 with the same IP, when MC is allowed by the rules. Unless - connections are blocked, as you said, but we know it is not the case here.

Maybe I don't understand how the record on otservlist side is set, but I thought it would be the max counted, which is, well, logical.

It's just one example, there are way more cases like that, just look up on the list and compare otservlist records to official site records.
I've many times seen that not only with records, but current - at a time - counters, that showed the exact numbers (and connections not being blocked). Quite unrealistic scenario, if you ask me.

I don't remember the case but from what you wrote that makes a perfect sense. Try to understand my point of view. I don't ban accounts because someone added someone's else server. If you didn't want your server to be added to the list, you could have asked me to simply ban it (not just delete it) and If you've verified yourself I would do that since this is the same work for me. There are also ways to delete servers without even emailing me (FAQ). But the most important thing is, if you didn't want your server to be added to the list, you could just block the status protocol communication.

And no, don't ask me to understand that. You basicly told me, that you didn't care about fake servers on your list, and - as a solution - advised me to add mine so it would appear "first" (which means the fake one would still be there). I'll not try not understand that, as - to me - it is poor service and it kinda shows you don't care about your list's reliability too much.