Why does Tractor still zone us?

[Juilan]

After checking with the development team in regards to this, they mentioned that they are not currently planning anything to make it so using tractor will not result in an area change. Since they feel the measures needed to address this are not realistic, they have no plans to make changes. We do understand that it is inconvenient that visitant status will be removed upon use and we apologize for this.

haven't read past this but i guess atleast people called bs, the reason it'd go out of the way for the devs is they'd have to rebuild the system for tractor, get apoc and just zombie out of a bad spot... but in regards to this, they dont want you skeeting across the ground when you're dead, that'd be too much fun

[Invader]

Actually this makes perfect sense.

With NPC teleporters and Confluxes, the player is initiating the teleportation effect themselves. Quick go-ahead from the server, the client updates the position, the server receives the confirmation that you're at the new position, verifies that you initiated the motion via NPC (without verification, you'd be hacking!) and presto! new position.

In other words, we're still working all client-side with client-server confirmation - there's no server "putting" your character at a new location.

Draw-in is similar in that it's a mob effect and thus the server itself knows the position of the mob at a given instant so the server can verify the draw-in command and send it to the player, thus sending the player to a specific point that is clear and functionally known to the server.

I think the problem lies in the way the server cross-verifies whether "boosted" transportation methods (aka anything that isn't running, especially anything that breaks Flee speed) are legit or not. They'd probably have to add a whole new layer of client-server communication and back-and-forth verification to ensure that your corpse's warping to another player's location was legit, since lag can affect so many variables. It wouldn't be totally out of the question for an intrepid hacker to abuse the newfound ability to perform an arbitrary corpse-port with clever use of falsified client-server verification ("oh, don't worry, I was just Tractored!") - and before you say "oh well the server can just verify Tractor was used"... well in the case of lag or even a d/c of the person casting Tractor, it would cause a serious conundrum because the client-server verification that Tractor was cast would no longer exist, which would set off a red flag the size of China and possibly cause a legit player to get banned for pos hacking. All because of a stupid asinine mishap of a failed client-server verification.

Simply put, for this to work and be in any way reliable, the server would be forced to trust the client too much - which could easily lead to abuse.

I'd rather see SE add a server-side special case to certain effects that allow the zoning to 'fudge' maintained status - in other words, add a special flag to Visitant status that can verify if you zone with the same entry and exit zones, your Visitant status is auto-restored by the server and position retained instead of being cleared as normal.

Given SE's penchant for poor programming practices, I'd hazard that the above would be significantly easier and safer to add to the code than changing the fundamentals of Tractor itself.

This makes zero sense, I'm sorry.

Here is how the mechanic should work:

1) Player A casts Tractor on Player B.
This would involve sending the information that "Hey, I just cast tractor on Player B!" to the server.

2)The server records the current position of the player casting tractor as well as the target (Player B) on whom it was cast.

3)The server tells Player B that Player A cast tractor on them, prompting the confirm/deny prompt for accepting Tractor on Player B's client.

4)Player B accepts tractor, at which point the server does whatever it would do for teleporters/draw in/confluxes/whatever to move Player B to the recorded coordinates.

In this scenario, which is the only way it would ever be done, Player B cannot "hack" a tractor, because the server will have no knowledge of the associated position to which they should be moved. In other words, regardless of however it is done now, Player B's client should have no prior knowledge, nor any control over the location to which they move. This would prevent hacking the Tractor system.

[Juilan]

So here is a question: do teleporters in other zones count as a zone change too? Why can't w/e server-side code used for the teleporters in, say, velugannon palace, be used for tractor as well? All the same information should be present... and if all it is is a hard-coded location, couldn't it be made to be variable with regards to the location of the player casting Tractor?

As a programmer, this sounds like a cop-out. More technical details please because I'm not buying this.

they don't count as zone changes, you just far surpass the monster's tracking range, watch out they'll make you need to re-tp every time you take a porter!

[Bumbeen]

You mean the old Byakko route people used to take when sky was popular?

Having a WHM and BLM (or WHM/BLM) go thru the zone by him/herself, and the other 17 people kill themselves to Groundskeepers just to get tractor-raised instead of going all the way around the zone in a group. That didn't help save time, unless the WHM and BLM (or WHM/BLM) was the first in the zone.

No. I mean perhaps someone could tractor you off the side of a cliff without the zoning and then it might require a GM to fix your position.

[Sagian]

No. I mean perhaps someone could tractor you off the side of a cliff without the zoning and then it might require a GM to fix your position.

Considering Tractor pulls a player to the caster's position, you can't tractor someone off the side of a cliff unless YOU are off the side of a cliff.

I'm still trying to imagine how it could be abused, but I really don't see any valid excuse for not re-working Tractor.

[Bumbeen]

Considering Tractor pulls a player to the caster's position, you can't tractor someone off the side of a cliff unless YOU are off the side of a cliff.

I'm still trying to imagine how it could be abused, but I really don't see any valid excuse for not re-working Tractor.

Right now it works that way, but maybe if it didn't zone there are some hurdles like that to overcome. I am not trying to make excuses for SE btw. Technical reasons be damned, they can figure it out if the order came down to do it.

[Maurauc]

I can see why the POS hacking idea comes up when dead, which may be why you zone, but an easy way around it could be to flag the player when they have tractor cast on them (Hooray, new status effect only available while dead!"), and that tractor can only be cast whenever you're 20' or less away from the corpse. The POS hack check can still be done. Just make sure they don't move huge distances and you're set.

[Aliron]

Wouldn't it be possible to make the visitant status work similar to signet/sigil/sanction which does NOT wear off when you change areas or get tractored. The duration of those is based on various factors, for instance Sigil duration is based on a key item, just like how long to make Visitant last is based on the Stone key items spent. Even the new hourglass key item in Dynamis works in a similar fashion to what we're looking for. It could be as simple as copy and pasting some of the coding for the Hourglass to Visitant status in some parts.

[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.)

[Dazusu]

How much you want to bet the code is obfuscated by whatever programmers they had back at the beginning

And can simply be unobfuscated using the same process by which it was obfuscated. I bet you it is well commented. Programmers worth their balls comment their code well. If there's a massive team working on a game, it HAS to be commented for obvious reasons. This is just speculation on your behalf, though (badly thought out speculation at that)

However, SE giving 'players' access to the source code - not bloody likely.

I've noticed though, everytime SE says something is 'too hard' or 'too long of a process' to do, you seem to swoop in and give 20 different reasons (none of which are substantiated or make much sense from a programmers point of view) as to why they can't do it. Do you work for SE?