Why does Tractor still zone us?

[Dazusu]

Since they feel the measures needed to address this are not realistic

Completely unrealistic to change the players XYZ. POS bots have been doing this since 2004. If a bedroom programmer can do it in two hours, an SE programmer should be able to do it, and make it look pretty in the same amount of time.

This isn't going to open up the door for exploits. If people want to POS hack across a zone and get themselves banned - changing the Tractor system isn't going to change this. The server will know where the client should end up, if they end up somewhere different than expected, ban 'em.

(If someone already posted this, sorry, didn't read past this response.)

[Byrth]

Completely unrealistic to change the players XYZ. POS bots have been doing this since 2004. If a bedroom programmer can do it in two hours, an SE programmer should be able to do it, and make it look pretty in the same amount of time.

This isn't going to open up the door for exploits. If people want to POS hack across a zone and get themselves banned - changing the Tractor system isn't going to change this. The server will know where the client should end up, if they end up somewhere different than expected, ban 'em.

This is exactly how I think about it.

If you're worried about it being abused:
1) They would have to be dead.
2) When you cast Tractor, the server obviously saves a location that the spell was cast from. People can only be moved to that point and they can't move while dead, so if they POS hack anywhere else it should definitely raise some eyebrows.

The reason that SE doesn't instantban for POS hacking basically comes down to bad internet connections. If you have a shitty internet connection, sometimes you lag and your position doesn't get reported to the server for a few seconds/up to a minute or two. You can still run around in game, though. So when your position gets updated, it looks (for all intents and purposes) to the server like you warped (or POS hacked) from one place to another.

Because people can't move while dead, even if they lag they shouldn't do anything that appears to be POS hacking. SE could change the way Tractor works and be much more strict with the way the server handles POS hacking dead characters with no ill effects on gameplay.

[Arcon]

The reason that SE doesn't instantban for POS hacking basically comes down to bad internet connections. If you have a shitty internet connection, sometimes you lag and your position doesn't get reported to the server for a few seconds/up to a minute or two. You can still run around in game, though. So when your position gets updated, it looks (for all intents and purposes) to the server like you warped (or POS hacked) from one place to another.

There are ways to work around that though, at least partially. You can check if the distance from the previous point to the current point is less than or equal to than the maximum distance you could have traveled in the time since the server last received an update. If it is, it's still possible that it was hacking, however if it's bigger it definitely is hacking.

[Byrth]

There are ways to work around that though, at least partially. You can check if the distance from the previous point to the current point is less than or equal to than the maximum distance you could have traveled in the time since the server last received an update. If it is, it's still possible that it was hacking, however if it's bigger it definitely is hacking.

Their autobanner checks for movement speed, iirc, which would also catch POS hacking. If you're going faster than flee, you can end up talking to GMs. Still, because movement speed is necessarily zero while dead, it should be easy to distinguish between legitimate Tractors and a dead character POS hacking. Basically, there's no reason that they couldn't implement this.

Just going to drop this here:
http://wiki.bluegartr.com/bg/%28_%29-side

[Arcon]

I think the problem is exactly that; they don't know which noodle in the spaghetti code because its so far back none of the current team would have worked on that sections, and so decided it would take to long.

I can understand that excuse in general, sometimes code is just really bad. I'm just having trouble to believe that it applies in this case. What does tractor actually do? It gives the dead player a "tractor effect'. It saves the location of the caster when the spell went off and makes a dialog pop up on the players screen. If the player accepts, it starts the zoning process.

They wouldn't even need to touch the spell. This zoning subroutine is completely unrelated to the spell itself, it's just one piece of code, that zones you and puts in a certain location after the zoning process. I could very well imagine, that any kind of zoning or moving could be done by one function that looks something like this:

setLocation(area, pos)

If area = current area, it's basically a draw in and puts a player on the appropriate position in the pos vector (may call a different subroutine for that). If area =/= current area, it iniates a zone. We do know that both mechanisms do already exist, SE wouldn't even need to know them or how they work. If the zone(area, pos) or drawIn(pos) functions are really extremely complicated and spaghettified, who cares? They don't have to change them or even understand how they work or even look at them. Just use them.

I just don't see how spaghetti code can be an excuse in this case. I'd love to get my hands on the source code. If it really was as bad as everyone says, I would at least be at peace with the way things are going, but hard to just take the same excuse time and again, when it doesn't seem to make any sense. As Daz put it:

POS bots have been doing this since 2004. If a bedroom programmer can do it in two hours, an SE programmer should be able to do it, and make it look pretty in the same amount of time.

[GlobalVariable]

I can understand that excuse in general, sometimes code is just really bad. I'm just having trouble to believe that it applies in this case.

Yeah well whatever the actually technical details are, they should darn well reconsider their decision here. The mechanic has been a problem in enough cases to make me think it can present future problems to. If it had been fixed back when besieges was new, or even when campaign was still going strong, we'd never have run into it as a problem in abyssea. I really don't want it to be there to screw people on whatever new thing they come up with next.