Re: Regarding the Use of Third-Party Programs and Player Safety

[Exmo]

But since the blacklist functions also prevent characters from being displayed (to stop in game 'following', poses, emotes, etc) there would need to be more information sent (or omitted) from the servers responses, e.g. the server wouldn't send 'char abc is standing at x.y' type data for blocked chars. Someone could probably view the network traffic and compare that against network traffic when the blacklist is not enabled and use the difference to determine alts. More time consuming and possibly not as 100% as the existing stuff, but still possible. We also don't know the performance impact of all traffic having to be ran through that kind of filter. I'd like to say it wouldn't be much but this game and network perf ... Well, who knows

100% this. You're still communicating character ABC is the alt of someone on your blacklist, either through a isBlocked flag or through omission of that character. The only difference is you're now performing an additional N^N logical checks every 100ms.

[BigCheez]

100% this. You're still communicating character ABC is the alt of someone on your blacklist, either through a isBlocked flag or through omission of that character. The only difference is you're now performing an additional N^N logical checks every 100ms.

Not this.

You would essentially already need to know that character B was an alt for character A to be able to track them down and confirm that they're also blacklisted.

Again, it isn't O(n^n). I don't think you even know what that means. And again, you only need to run the check once and then cache the result for as long as you're receiving data for the player.

Posting "you're clearly not a developer and that's ok, but then keep your opinions on software architecture to yourself" and then this is wild. Zero self-awareness.